Remembering Comrades and Lost Loved Ones : Memorial: Families and veterans gather at cemeteries to pay homage to service members who fell in the nation’s wars.

For Robert D. (Bud) Salisbury, Monday’s holiday brought to mind a day 27 years ago, when he and his vastly outnumbered paratrooper company took on two full battalions of North Vietnamese soldiers.

At the end of what had seemed a hopeless mission, he recalled, thousands of North Vietnamese lay dead or wounded, and only 10 Americans had died. Then a U.S. Army private first class, he remembers discovering the body of a revered lieutenant, shot through the head, and watching as another comrade, a Jeep driver, was cut down in a volley of gunfire just 10 days before he was set to return home.

Salisbury, 48, who himself emerged from Vietnam full of shrapnel “from the top of my head to the tip of my ankle,” said it is memories like these that give meaning to Memorial Day. They are the courageous sacrifices that merit public recognition, lest they be forgotten, he said.

“Memorial Day, to me, when I was younger, didn’t have a lot of meaning,” said Salisbury, former state commander of Disabled American Veterans and keynote speaker at ceremonies Monday at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Cypress. “When I came back from Vietnam, it had more. And with every year, it seems to increase in significance.”

At ceremonies throughout Orange County, veterans, families of fallen soldiers and others gathered in large numbers Monday to pay their respects to those who died in battle. The commemoration at Forest Lawn drew a standing-room-only crowd of more than 500, while thousands more attended memorials in Lake Forest, Brea, Orange, Fullerton, Huntington Beach, Santa Ana, Costa Mesa, Newport Beach and Westminster.

At Forest Lawn, red, white and blue wreaths were laid on a bed of carnations to commemorate lives lost in wars stretching from the Spanish-American conflict to Desert Storm. Mothers of young men and women killed in action from World War II onward received flowers in honor of their sacrifices. Even the Civil War was not forgotten, as one speaker read Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Though veterans came with still-searing personal recollections of combat, they and their families brought as well an appreciation for the pain of soldiers across the generations, no matter what the war or its outcome.

“Everybody here comes in memory of someone,” said Erlene Tebbetts, 65, of Long Beach, whose 19-year-old son, Terry Lee, was killed in Vietnam in 1968 as he tried to save a wounded comrade. “[It’s] really for all the boys that were lost.”

After Salisbury finished his address, and the 21-gun salute was over, Leonard Bell, 68, of Buena Park stood in line to shake the speaker’s hand. Bell said Salisbury’s recollections of Vietnam stirred his own memories of that horrifying day in April, 1945, when a kamikaze plane hit his ship, the Zellars, off Okinawa.

“Forty-one of my friends were killed,” Bell recalled. “Thirty-eight of us were wounded.”

Bell, a gunner at the time, narrowly escaped death when a piece of the front of the ship landed between him and a shipmate, who was killed.

Each year, Bell said, he and other Zellars survivors hold a reunion to “remember our fallen shipmates.” But that, he said, is not enough.

Young people need to be reminded as well, he said, not just of the Zellars and World War II, but of all the sacrifices during the nation’s 219-year history that have guaranteed their security and freedom.

“Our children of today are not taught what we did to preserve our nation,” he said. “There’s so little being taught in our schools to our children, what World War II, Vietnam and the Korean War [meant] to our American history.”

Garden Grove resident Ann Fleet, 62, who attended the Cypress ceremony with her husband, Fred, a Marine veteran, agreed.

“We’re losing so much of our tradition. I personally think families should teach their children this is one time during the year when you come to say, ‘Thank God our country is free because of all the lives that were given [to make it so].’ ”

At least some of the youngsters who attended Monday’s ceremonies were clearly impressed--and saddened--by what they witnessed.

“So many people get killed,” said 9-year-old Stephanie Belcher of Lakewood, as she left the Cypress ceremony with her mother and brother. “I don’t really like wars [but] I don’t know how we can stop wars.”