In Search of a Consensus on Patriotism and Leadership : Thousand Oaks: Veterans relay views to an audience of teen-agers.

Retired U.S. Navy Capt. James Hickerson had a gruesome story to share.

Standing ramrod straight at the front of the Cal Lutheran University auditorium Monday, the Camarillo veteran told the assembled teen-agers about his five years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, describing in graphic detail the physical torture and mental anguish he endured at the hands of his captors.

The 40 high school juniors and seniors--gathered from across California and Nevada for a leadership conference sponsored by a veterans group called the Military Order of the World Wars--regarded him with studiously blank looks cultivated during endless classroom expositions.

After he finished, a boy near the back of the room wanted to know something.

“When you were in there for about a year,” he asked, “weren’t you mad at America for not going in and getting you?”

“No, I never gave up on my country,” the 59-year-old Hickerson answered. “I got mad at some individuals, but never the country itself.”

Hickerson and the teen-agers sat in the same room, but in some ways they were miles apart.

It is a conference where the leaders of yesterday hope to instruct the leaders of tomorrow. The hosts are members of the congressionally chartered veterans organization, most in their 50s, 60s, and 70s. They believe, they say, in patriotism, free enterprise and the American way.

The attendees are students designated by their high school faculty as leaders and sponsored at the conference by their local chapter of the veterans group. Many say they do not know what or whom they believe in.

What does this patriotism stuff have to do with ending gang warfare, they ask, or healing racial wounds on campus? And how can they lead, they want to know, when they don’t know where to go?

The conference began Monday and will end Thursday. During this time, the students will hear many lectures on patriotism and leadership and work on specific, topical problems, such as the environment, in short workshops and seminars.

The youths’ hosts said they want to challenge the students into crafting new visions of leadership. But the students said they perceive a generation gap between definitions of leadership and divergent perspectives on the world.

Dana Ziegart, 17, came to the conference from nearby Newbury Park High School, where she will be student body secretary this fall. She has thought about being a senator or congressional representative, but has settled on teaching or working as a juvenile probation officer instead.

“I’d like to have a job where I could make a difference,” she explained.

Barely into her senior year of high school, Dana already looks askance at politicians, whom she dismisses as “dishonest people.” She said she respected Hickerson for maintaining his faith in his country, but doubts that under similar circumstances her patriotism would have survived intact.

During a break Monday afternoon, she and her conference dorm mates wondered how they would apply the lessons of the conference to life back at their high schools.

“I think they have a different definition of leadership than we do, a more military sense,” said Allyson Cooley, 17, also a senior at Newbury Park High School.

Allyson will be student body president next year. She wants to boost school spirit, she says, and break down the invisible racial barriers that keep Latino students on one side of the lunchroom and Anglos on another. She concedes, however, that she’s not sure if even good leaders can achieve such a goal in one term as school president.

Conference roommate Anna Atherton, 16, a junior at Simi Valley High, said the main problem with students at her school, and with today’s youth in general, is that they don’t listen to their leaders enough, so “they don’t really know what direction they are headed in.”

But Anna, who plans to be a dental hygienist, said she doesn’t much believe in her country’s leaders who, she said, make decisions that only benefit themselves.

Around the corner from Allyson and Anna’s room, another trio of designated future leaders sunned themselves on a park bench.

One student, Marissa Swanson, a senior at Seaside High School near Monterey, has a long wish list of problems she would solve. She wants to show elementary and middle school kids some direction in life, so young girls will not do what her 12-year-old cousin did and drop out of school.

She wants to get more parents involved in the school--her 1,600-student campus has a 12-member Parent Teacher Assn. She would like to get gangs off the school grounds.

Marissa and her friends, Jason Ling, 16, and Nate Olsen, 17, also of Monterey, reflected on what they had heard so far from their conference organizers.

“I think they want leaders to be how they were,” Jason said. “They don’t understand. You go back to school and say, ‘Be patriotic.’ It’s not going to make a difference.”

Retired Army Col. Fred Sheridan, 71, of Thousand Oaks said the students don’t yet understand the importance of patriotism.

“A lot of youngsters think everything just happens,” Sheridan, a 35-year veteran, said. “But a lot of people died for this country to be where it is. And they have to know how they got here.”

And 18-year-old James Higgerson, a senior at Santa Barbara’s San Marcos High School, said he liked the patriotic aspect of the conference. “I think it will really help me in the military,” he said. “Of course, we have different ideas now.”