In Remembrance : Memorial Day: Some residents listen to speeches. Others visit the graves of friends and loved ones.

Using a knife as a makeshift gardening tool, Gary L. Parker cut a clean edge in the grass around the tombstone of a friend and fellow Vietnam War veteran.

His wife Maryellen stood at his side clutching a small American flag to be planted next to the grave in Ventura’s Ivy Lawn Cemetery.

Parker of Ventura spent two nights in the cemetery during the Memorial Day weekend to guard the 617 flags that lined the graveyard lawns. But he did not care to watch the official Memorial Day services held Monday.

“Our ceremony is here with Vondell and Chuck,” Parker said, motioning to the gravestones of two buddies who served in the Vietnam War.

Some Vietnam vets, he confessed, have grown bitter watching the warm welcome home for Gulf War veterans compared with their own hostile reception two decades ago.

The feeling of isolation runs deep--enough to make him and others observe Memorial Day in their own quiet way. “I don’t think we felt it was necessary to see the other stuff,” Parker said.

While about 400 people attended Memorial Day ceremonies at Ivy Lawn on Monday, hundreds of others skipped the public flag-waving and speechmaking to make personal visits to the graves of family and friends who had served their country.

Hunched over alone or huddled in small groups, people fanned out across the expansive cemetery to trim plots of grass, wash gravestones, plant flowers.

“We ducked out of the services to tend to these graves,” said Keni Hays, 53, of Oxnard as he worked with a friend on a cousin’s grave. “As kids, we did this every Memorial Day to take care of friends who died in the war. We still do. It is an obligation of love and respect.”

Hays, a Korean War veteran and fifth-generation Ventura County resident, said he now tends 60 graves of family and friends in cemeteries across the county.

It’s a process that takes him the entire three-day weekend, beginning with the plot where his father was laid to rest after he was killed in World War II. “As long as we keep contact with them, they really aren’t gone,” he said.

Meanwhile, veterans groups held memorial services at locations across the county.

At the Moorpark War Memorial, the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 502 saluted several returning soldiers from the Gulf War and veterans of past military conflicts. At the Veterans Memorial next to the Ventura County Government Center, veterans laid wreaths and raised flags in a tradition that dates back more than a century.

“As a Navy veteran of World War II, I can’t tell you how much this means to me,” said Rep. Robert J. Lagomarsino (R-Ventura), the keynote speaker at the Ivy Lawn ceremony.

Lagomarsino credited the success of the Gulf War for Monday’s record attendance. He said the country owes its appreciation to Gulf War veterans for helping create a new world order and end this nation’s turmoil over the Vietnam War. “Now is a time to heal those wounds,” he said.

Sprucing up his friends’ grave markers, Parker did not hear Lagomarsino’s speech.

Dressed in camouflage shirts and decorated in Vietnam service ribbons, each of these vets had volunteered to prevent the theft of the flags that were once draped over caskets of veterans. Yet, for the most part, those returning from the Gulf grabbed most of the attention this weekend.

“There is a little bitterness among the Vietnam vets,” said Parker, who was in Vietnam in the late 1960s as a Navy Seabee. “We feel strongly that they should be recognized. But at some point, Vietnam vets need to be recognized. We left 59,000 people over there as opposed to 120 in the Persian Gulf.”