A Day to Remember : Veterans: Pearl Harbor is recalled in Burbank, and ‘Hollywood Canteen’ is re-created in Studio City.

Art Ocampo remembers a lot of things about World War II. He remembers Guam--what it looked like, what it smelled like, who was around. But mostly, he remembers Don Jones. And he remembers Jones’ family in Texas, when he went to see them afterward. How they cried.

“He died right in front of us,” said Ocampo, caught in an ambush when a group of soldiers went out looking for souvenirs.

Ocampo, who spent Friday morning at a memorial service for vets at Forest Lawn Memorial-Park, Hollywood Hills, dedicates each Veterans Day to Jones’ memory.

Throughout Southern California, thousands of veterans and their families commemorated the holiday, honoring African American units in Pasadena and planting a tree in West Los Angeles. They forgave wobbly teen-age renditions of taps and indoor rifle salutes. They came to remember.

Sarah Mounsey stared at the memorial plaque at her feet and began to cry.

“That’s my son’s name there, but I still don’t understand why,” she said. “If he were here right now he’d say, ‘Why all this for me?’ And then he’d laugh. He always laughed.”

Bill Auppelee, who attended a Veterans Day event at McCambridge Park in Burbank, cried also, remembering the December day in 1941 that Japanese warplanes attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the Second World War. At first, he said, the Americans on Navy ships docked in Hawaii assumed that the bombers assembling high in the sky above them were friendly.

Then, when one plane flew low enough that they could see the rising sun insignia on its fuselage, they knew they were under attack.

“It was like every Japanese submarine was out there, waiting for us,” Auppelee said.

At the Sportsmen’s Lodge in Studio City, about 300 people crowded into a re-creation of the famous “Hollywood Canteen,” where during World War II servicemen and women were sometimes entertained by big names of the movies’ golden era. The hotel’s rooms were filled with memorabilia, including uniforms and replicas of cockpits from World War II planes.

The event drew a host of celebrities who served in that war, said retired Lt. Col. Calvin Beauregard, who was a private in the Army Air Corps and organized the event. Among those whom the organizers said they invited to attend were Gene Autry, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Victor Mature and Glenn Ford, who was a Navy officer in the war.

Beauregard praised the performers he said “gave up their careers to do their duty.”

But actor Charlton Heston, who was a radioman-gunner in a B-25 bomber as a staff sergeant with the 11th Air Force, said the war “didn’t hurt my career a bit.”

It “just slowed it down a little,” he said.

Asked if he used his military experience in his acting career, which includes notable World War II films such as “Midway,” Heston replied that he did--but never was offered a part as a gunner on a bomber, the role he lived.

At Culver City Park, more than 100 people honored Erik Scott Mounsey, pilot of a Blackhawk helicopter shot down last April 14 over Iraq. They included Rep. Julian C. Dixon (D-Los Angeles), representatives of the United States military and French veterans.

He was one of 26 people, 11 of them foreign, who died when an American F-15 fighter shot down two U.S. Army helicopters in the mistaken belief that the choppers were Russian-built Hind helicopters flown by the Iraqi military.

Among those especially remembered in other ceremonies were two distinguished groups of African Americans--the Buffalo Soldier cavalrymen of the Frontier Indian Wars and the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II.

The Pasadena Chamber of Commerce and Civil Assn. paid homage to both groups with a color-guard military ceremony, complete with a cavalry demonstration and a missing-man formation fly-over.

The 19th-Century black cavalrymen are long gone, but many of the World War II fighter pilots survive. Former fighter pilot Carl Fountain, 72, remembered the racial segregation that kept him and his fellows from serving in white units:

“At that time, people did not think a black man had the ability to power an aircraft,” he said.

The Tuskegee Airmen--whose escort squadrons never lost a single bomber to German fighters--”proved that the black man is just as capable as any other person,” Fountain said.

In Buena Park, somber veterans found the names of lost comrades on a replica of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington.

“I miss them a lot,” said Daniel Valesquez, fighting back tears as he read the names of five of his friends. “It just hits me. I’m here, and they’re not.”

“It’s hard for an old vet,” said Charlotte Best, who served in the Korean War, as she gazed at the movable replica parked outside Knotts Berry Farm. “Everybody who comes here has somebody here.”

Clarence Betler, who attended the Forest Lawn event, was born 100 years ago last May, into a nation just beginning to heal from from the nightmare of Civil War.

By the time he was called to serve in World War I, the United States already had won Puerto Rico from Spain in the Spanish-American War, and his century of life has included four wars more.

“All these wars don’t do any good,” the Glendale resident said Friday. “They still have wars, and I don’t know why.”

Times staff writers Mary Moore and Ching-Ching Ni and correspondents Steve Ryfle and Jeff Schnaufer contributed to this story.