County’s Vets Tend to the Memories

Keeping the memory of the fallen alive, veterans marked Memorial Day all over Ventura County on Monday with ceremonies great and small.

They laid wreaths in Simi Valley amid a crowd of 100, piling bright blooms high against the lush greenery of the El Rancho Simi Community Cemetery.

In Santa Paula, they presented 200 attendees with the example of living veterans and tales of valor from the Korean War, honoring the casualties of a less-heralded conflict that has come to be known--sandwiched between World War II and the Vietnam War--as “The Forgotten War.”

And Ventura and Oxnard’s dead were remembered against a brilliant backdrop of fluttering flags before nearly 300 people at Ivy Lawn Memorial Park, with a warplane’s thunder and a bugler’s call.

Attendees wore midshipman’s dress whites and camouflage, Air Force dress blues and Marine Corps fatigues.

Here, as across the county, the true spirit of Memorial Day shone not so much in the bright trappings of military honor as in the memories and words of those men and women who made it out alive.

With a sharp salute, former Navy Petty Officer Raymond Orozco of Ventura stood at the symbolic grave of an unknown soldier set up at Ivy Lawn and laid a wreath to honor all prisoners of war.

But he said later that his mind was dwelling on one former fellow POW in particular, a Korean War medic named Lt. Jameson.

On patrol off the Korean coast, Orozco and his crew mates were flung into shark-infested waters when their ship struck a floating mine near Inchon.

He managed to save himself and two buddies--an act that later won him the Navy Cross--only to be captured and imprisoned by the North Koreans.

Orozco and his fellow prisoners kept each other alive with stories, songs, jokes--anything they could think of to keep their spirits up.

And Orozco remembers of Lt. Jameson, “We went in there and got tortured, and when we came back, he helped us with our wounds. The last time I saw him was in ’52.”

Orozco and his fellow prisoners were not released until 1955, when word of the war’s end in 1953 finally reached his captors.

Orozco says he shows his medals and newspaper clippings to his sons and others so they might understand what he endured for his country. But he adds, “I think that more people should come to these events and know the history of the wars . . . and understand the feelings of what we went through.”

Former Army Sgt. Lorenzo Chavez of Oxnard also strode to the symbolic grave, the black and yellow shield of the U.S. Army 1st Cavalry Airborne emblazoned on his camouflage jacket and on the white cross he cradled in his arms.

Chavez laid the cross among the flowers, snapped a salute, and returned to stand amid the billowing flags of the color guard.

“It’s a must that we participate,” he said of his fellow Vietnam Veterans of Ventura County. “We have to honor all those before us, lest they be forgotten.”

Chavez visited the traveling Vietnam War Memorial when it came through the county recently.

“There’s quite a few friends I have on the wall from my duty [in Vietnam], and friends from our town that I went to school with that never came back,” he said. “For them and their families, I chose to be here today instead of home barbecuing like everybody else.”

Author David Chagall, the keynote speaker, reminded the crowd of the origins of Memorial Day. In 1868, Army Gen. John Logan--then head of the American Veterans Organization--decreed that annual remembrance be paid with ceremony and a tribute of flowers, “Lest the ravages of time testify to coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.”

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The time-honored gifts of paper poppies and floral wreaths were augmented Monday with some modern touches. The Channel Islands Clippers--23 singing men strong--sang a medley of patriotic tunes.

Just as the last wreaths were laid, a jet from the U.S. Naval Warfare Center at Point Mugu blasted past barely 100 feet overhead and startled the crowd. Its pilot wrenched the powerful plane skyward in salute and set its roaring afterburners ablaze.

Bearing a rod tipped in oil-soaked rags, former Army Sgt. Alan Mitose marched solemnly, carrying a flame before the hushed audience. He touched it to the plume of propane boiling up from an unlighted torchier, igniting an “eternal flame,” and stood back to salute.

Two buglers sounded taps, a sweet call-and-response version of the day’s-end ritual that rang over the cemetery in the warm breeze.

And an honor guard fired gunshots into the air from antique bolt-action M-1 rifles.

Former U.S. Marine reconnaissance sniper Shannon “Irish” Curtis was among the riflemen.

On his mind were memories of a buddy--one of four friends he grew up with in a small town in Maine who were called away to war, one of two who did not make it out of Vietnam alive.

“He was always saying, ‘Hey, Irish, I’m first cause I’m older than you,’ and I’d always let him go first at things,” Curtis recalled.

And the rule held true, Curtis said. His friend was first to die.

But when Curtis visited the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington and looked up his friend’s name on a master list, he noticed that he was the elder--and his buddy had been kidding him all along.

“He was born March 30 and I was born March 26,” Curtis recalled. “I’ll never forget when I read that, I thought, ‘Damn, all these years.’ And here he goes first again.”

Former Army Sgt. Ron Palfrey of Simi Valley, who led the rifle guard, summed up simply why so many soldiers from so many wars had turned out for ceremonies on Memorial Day:

“It’s really important to remember our brothers,” he said. “It’s just a very reverent day.”