Serving Marines keeps Mission Viejo vets young

Put six old warriors in a room and the jokes start flying like artillery fire. But, to twist a phrase, you’d have to call it friendly fire.

“The first Marines were recruited in a tavern in Philadelphia, and Fred was there,” Bill Shewman says, nodding to Fred Saiza a few feet away. Records show the recruitment occurred in 1775. Saiza, 77, doesn’t bother to dispute it.

A few minutes later, Snuffy Brown begins a story with, “During the Civil War -- “ only to have Paul Rubenstein, 80, interject, “Were you in that?”

No, Snuffy didn’t make the Civil War, but he did show up as a Marine pilot for World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Now, at 84, everything is a bit slower but his wit and his speech. When one of the others describes a “pizza and beer party” the group had sponsored, Brown assigns him a demerit for mentioning the pizza before the beer.

If these old war horses in Mission Viejo just sat around and swapped stories, it might make for entertaining reading, but that’s not why I listened in for a while this week.

What drew me as Veterans Day approaches is that, while no one would fault them for forming the “Marines of Casta Del Sol” club just to shoot the breeze, they haven’t settled for that.

Not content with past glories, they’re adding some new ones.

Of course, they don’t see it that way. Try as I might to get any of the six (which includes George Locke and Army man Bill Moynihan) to admit it, none would say their efforts on behalf of current Marines and involvement with Camp Pendleton glorify them.

But that’s what I’d call it, considering they have delivered furniture and household items to Camp Pendleton, provided moral support for Marines arriving and returning to the base and raised $2,615 this year alone for the Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund. As the Iraq war has dragged on, the group found itself making more and more trips to Pendleton.

“Did you know that a buck sergeant with a wife and one child is eligible for food stamps?” Brown says. On-base housing is empty housing unless the family has its own furniture, and not all do.

Saiza says he feels sheepish when someone, especially a young Marine, thanks him or the group. “You see a Marine out there and he’s got one arm gone or a leg gone and he thanks me for taking a bassinet over to him, I say, ‘Don’t do that. Don’t do that to me, thanking me for the little bit we’re doing.’ ”

Saiza doesn’t have to spell it out: The Marine’s sacrifice outweighs anything the club is doing for him.

The club formed in 1999 and now has 25 to 30 members. It began as a social thing, where the guys could relive their wartime experiences with people who really understood what it meant. After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, however, the club shifted its emphasis to helping active Marines.

It’s as if the stories from long-ago battlefields now would be reenacted in different places and for different reasons -- but with one unshakable commonality: those fighting would be risking their lives, fighting their fears and wanting to be supported.

That’s where the old Marines decided they could help. They knew what the young guys would be going through.

Shewman, 77, says, “More than any of the other services, the Marines in boot camp or officer training indoctrinate, if you will, or propagandize you. . . . “

Brown interrupts: “No, the word is brainwashing. They flat-ass brainwash you, and then you are a Marine.”

Everyone laughs at that, because they know that the bonds aren’t phony. And that they often become once-in-a-lifetime experiences.

“Maybe for two years, they’re your buddies and you’re with them night and day,” says Locke, 77.

“And then you come home and you’re discharged and you go to civilian life, and it’s never the same. Most of us, when we came home, we had to earn a living and I never talked at work about my service, unless another Marine was there and we could share.”

Saiza was the first of 18 members of his extended family to join the Corps. When he went to Camp Pendleton in recent years and saw a Burger King, his heart sunk. “I said, ‘Oh, man, we’re going down.’ ”

Then, as he met more and more young Marines and watched them graduate, he says he told himself, “It’s still there.” In fact, he says, in an observation that seems to be shared by the others in the room: The current generation has all the dedication they had and maybe some other, better attributes.

This is a big weekend for the group. Tonight they’ll celebrate the Marines’ 232nd birthday in the Casta Del Sol clubhouse. Other fundraisers are planned for early in 2008. Sunday, of course, is Veterans Day.

There no doubt will be a somber moment or two tonight, as they pay tribute to the Corps.

Then the same stories they’ve heard a million times will be told again, perhaps with embellished details and, almost certainly, with some Jack Daniel’s in the house.

And, as long as these old comrades are there, the jokes won’t be far behind.

“You know what a reunion is, don’t you?” Snuffy Brown asks.

I await the punch line: “It’s three or four Marines getting together and telling lies and the other one swearing to it.”

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Dana Parsons can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.