No Longer One of the Homeboys : Compton: As a guardsman returns to his old neighborhood, this time in fatigues, he uneasily watches the faces as they watch him.

Joe Sanders Jr. returned to the old neighborhood this week, but the homeboys treated him more like the member of an occupying army than a returning hero.

“What are you doing on their side?” one man had asked him, incredulous. “Don’t you know you’re black?” asked another.

During the past few days, the National Guardsman has stood watch in front of the Ralphs grocery store where he used to shop. On Friday night, he slept in the canned goods section of the ABC Market, an aisle he has walked many times. When officers were puzzling over Los Angeles maps, Sanders showed them exactly where they needed to go.

A native of Compton, Sanders perhaps has closer ties to the ravaged riot area than any other guardsman. For 10 years he lived in a house at 70th Street and Broadway and navigated the area’s roads as an RTD bus driver. Many of the faces he has seen over the last few days are much older, but still familiar.

And the gang members and former acquaintances recognize him, too, camouflage or not. Sanders, a sergeant and assistant chaplain for a number of National Guard companies out of San Bernardino, was shocked at what he has found and how he has been received.

“The same gangbangers I saw back then I’m seeing today,” the 37-year-old youth counselor said. “There’s a lot of hostility towards me.”

They view him as part of a white man’s army, channeling his energies into quelling an uprising that some blacks said was a product of systemic racism. With dog tags strung loosely around his neck and a .45-caliber handgun tucked into his belt, he is seen as one of them.

Not that Sanders does not empathize. In 1970, Los Angeles police shattered his brother’s jaw and claimed self-defense. A decade later, Sanders had his own harrowing encounter with the Police Department. On his way to his 4 a.m. bus shift, the police pulled him over and ordered him out of the car. They checked his orange juice for alcohol before dumping it and told him he had been weaving, he said.

One officer took a particular dislike to him. “ ‘I don’t like the way you look,’ ” Sanders recalled the officer saying. “ ‘You make me nervous. When I get nervous, I get trigger-happy.’ ” The officer pulled a baton out and drew it back. Sanders remembers saying: “I don’t know what you’re about to do, but I am not going to let you hit me.”

As the stick started to swing, a second officer grabbed it.

Sanders spent four hours in County Jail that night. He was never charged, although one of the officers said it was for “GP,” or general principles.

With that memory still strong, Sanders has stood for four days with men who knew nothing about South-Central, who had their own opinions about Rodney G. King and the neighborhood they have to keep safe. The hometown sergeant ended many a debate with: “You can’t relate until you’ve lived it” and then changed the subject.

Out on the streets, Sanders watched the faces watch him. Studying and dissecting him.

“There was a lot of name-calling that I didn’t expect,” he said. “They said: ‘You’re a black man, a brother. Put that weapon down and come with us.’ One of them stared straight at me and said: ‘You’re playing with your life being with them.’ ”

Sunday night, someone drove by singing the lyric of a popular rap song, altering the line, “What you gonna do when they come for you?” to “What you gonna do when the sun goes down?” Sanders took it as a threat but walked away.

As the National Guard has walked the charred and broken neighborhoods, Sanders pointed out the rock houses to his colleagues. Years in the area had taught him that some of the young kids were really serving as lookouts for drug houses, not just playing on the streets.

“He told us that he knew some of these guys, and we thought: ‘Sure he knows what they’re like,’ ” said Robert Field, the company’s chaplain. “Then I realized, he really does know them. Personally.”

Despite all the taunting, Sanders usually remains affable and gregarious, serving as a spiritual adviser to the troops and an ambassador to the passers-by who stop and talk.

Standing on the corner of Vernon and Figueroa with other members of his armored unit, Sanders imagines himself on the other side of the chaos.

At Centennial High School in Compton, his pals were in gangs. His future wife knew him then and was warned away by her friends, who believed he was up to no good. But she brought him to church, he found God and redirected his life.

From 1978 to 1988, he and his wife lived in a small house at Broadway and 70th Street, one block east of the Harbor Freeway.

In the next few weeks, Sanders, an ordained minister, hopes to work with churches to help rebuild the neighborhood. And one day, he hopes to establish a business in South-Central. For right now, though, he is busy running into people he has not seen in years, like the woman he met for coffee Monday morning.

“I’ll see you soon,” he told her as she drove off. “But next time, I don’t want to be in uniform.”