Duty of the Heart : Volunteers: Marine Corps League serves up a holiday dinner and a dog demonstration for children from Camarillo State Hospital.

The crowd of about 60 children and a dozen adults watching the demonstration of military police dogs at Point Mugu on Tuesday were mostly silent, except for one boy.

“You guys are going to make them attack?” the 15-year-old boy called out to Point Mugu kennel master Theron Merrell as he led the two dogs through the routine.

Within a few minutes the two dogs were tearing viciously at the canvas-and-leather gloves on the arms of a young petty officer.

Afterward, the same boy walked up to the 21-year-old petty officer and asked, “Did they have to bribe you to do it?”

The inquisitive boy was one of 57 children between 8 and 16 years old from the Camarillo State Hospital children’s unit who got a base tour and an early Thanksgiving dinner Tuesday at Point Mugu Naval Air Weapons Station.

The outing was sponsored and arranged by the Ventura County detachment of the Marine Corps League, a nonprofit volunteer group of current and former U.S. Marines who regularly visit and arrange special events for the hospital’s children’s unit.

Children from all over Southern California come to Camarillo State Hospital, one of only two hospitals statewide that has a children’s unit.

Children are not admitted unless they are diagnosed as mentally ill, said Joann O’Connor, director of the children’s unit. But the range of diagnoses is extremely wide, and about the only thing the children have in common is a history of problems getting along with others, a teacher said.

However, hospital social worker Tom Goddard said, “It’s not easy to come to us. (For) most of our kids, this is their last stop.”

Goddard said many of the children “have been in foster homes, group homes, residential treatment centers, private psychiatric hospitals. Some of our kids have been in as many as 15 places.”

Before coming to “Camarillo,” as the children call their current home, many of them had either run away from home, attempted suicide, been kicked out of school for fighting or had suffered physical or sexual abuse from family members, he said.

A high number of the children are wards of the state, removed from families whose parents are in jail, mentally ill or alcoholic, hospital officials said.

Fewer than half of the children at the hospital will be going home for Thanksgiving, O’Connor said.

Because of their histories, the children truly appreciate the steady attention of the Marine Corps League, whose members visit the hospital every other Saturday, hospital officials said.

League members are teaching the children to march and do cadence, in addition to playing sports, games and other civilian activities with the hospital inmates.

For the League members, their devotion to the children is bittersweet, they said.

Former Marine Patrick Schell said he initially didn’t want to join the round of hospital visits. “I can’t stand to see kids suffering.”

But during a sports event two years ago, he sensed the children gradually warming up to him, he said, and he’s visited them regularly ever since.

Goddard said the children “like the solidness that these Marines represent. They look up to these guys because they’ve lived life and they’ve been successful.”

But the children don’t open their hearts easily to people, he said.

“They don’t want to become vulnerable,” Goddard said. “It can put them in touch with deprivation. It puts them in touch with what they didn’t get from their own parents. They don’t want to feel that again.”

Instead, the children struggle with their feelings of anger and aggression.

But neither of these problems were on display Tuesday. Instead, the mood was mirthful and many of the children showed a surprisingly sharp wit.

During the Thanksgiving meal at a base cafeteria, hospital workers led the children in chanting “Thank you” to Marine Corps League members, who were mainly seated at their own table.

The same boy who had earlier questioned the petty officer in the dog demonstration stood up, looked squarely around the room and said loudly with humor, “I’d like you to know it was my idea.”