Golfers at the neighboring links weren’t expecting the Doolittle Raiders to play through.

It was probably the last ceremony of this kind that anyone will ever see at Van Nuys Airport, which has housed a military base of some kind since the day of Pearl Harbor.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon, the 146th Tactical Airlift Wing of the California Air National Guard, 1,200 of them, drew up in sky-blue ranks to receive a new commander.

Three of their hulking, green, cargo planes loomed behind the troops. The band played, the bass drum boomed, and the troops marched, many skirted legs twinkling among the trousers. Retired members turned out, including a World War II fighter ace, his face still a pink mask of scar tissue from long-ago flames.

Three rows of colonels and generals filled the reviewing stand, some from Alaska and Wyoming, where the Van Nuys wing has units under its command.

The soon-to-be-ex-Van Nuys unit, that is. After years of arguments from the Senate to the Palmdale City Council, the wing is moving to a Navy base near Oxnard. It will be gone by 1990, ending a military presence that began when the Army Air Corps commandeered the airstrip on Dec. 7, 1941, reacting to the news from Pearl Harbor.

It was here the National Guard returned from World War II, here that the men and women of the wing and their predecessors gathered, in formations that looked much like this one, to leave for the Korean War in 1951 and the Berlin crisis in 1961. From here in the 1960s, the wing dispatched planes to bring the wounded home from Vietnam.

It was at the gate on Balboa Boulevard that protesters gathered during the Vietnam War and returned recently, looking much the same, over use of the National Guard in Central America.

This ceremony was to honor Brig. Gen. Emiel (Mick) Bouckaert, who was retiring, and Col. Tandy K. Bozeman, who was taking over.

Three C-130s, loitering over Magic Mountain for this moment, went into a shallow dive toward Van Nuys. Wingtip to wingtip, 12 propjet engines roaring, they boomed over the ceremony at 800 feet. It was military theater, designed to stir the heart, and probably did a fine job of that on the golfers at the neighboring links, who weren’t expecting the Doolittle Raiders to play through.

The commanding officer of the 146th is traditionally a part-timer, with a full-time staff. So, as Bozeman stepped up from No. 2 to the top job, he was going back to part-time status and returning to being an airline pilot and archeologist.

Bozeman, an ex-news photographer and a TWA pilot before becoming a full-time Air Guard officer seven years ago, has a doctorate in archeology from UC Santa Barbara. As recently as 1981 he was a field archeologist with the National Science Foundation.

Bozeman’s sense of humor is such a part of his image that the wing’s chaplain offered a prayer during the ceremony, asking God not to allow “the stresses of leadership” to dull it.

It was not his sense of humor, however, that led to this moment, but experiences such as this:

Bozeman was in charge of a controversial training mission in 1986, in which part of the wing was assigned by the Pentagon to haul freight and passengers between Central American capitals and U. S. bases there. Taking off from Guatemala City one day, he was surprised to find that the station manager there had placed aboard a steel drum containing 900 pounds of tear gas, with a label warning that it was not to be carried on passenger planes. The label said nothing about cargo planes with passengers aboard, which is what Bozeman had.

In San Jose, Costa Rica, the station manager wheeled out a retired U. S. Army officer in his 70s to be taken to the American military hospital in Panama. He was too feeble to walk or sit and could barely speak.

Bozeman’s plane had no medical attendants. He was already burdened with the tear gas. On the other hand, the old man clearly needed medical help. There would not be another U. S. military plane through San Jose for two weeks.

The plane carried several reporters and a TV crew. If anything went wrong, there would be headlines and film at 11. It was Bozeman’s head the wrath of Sacramento and the Pentagon would come crashing down on.

Clearly, the safe career move was to abandon the old man. Some regulation would surely have justified that later.

Bozeman decided otherwise. He had the tear gas placed on the rear ramp, where a loadmaster could push it out over the ocean if it gave any trouble. The old soldier was strapped upright in a seat and flown to an Air Force hospital in Panama City.

Commenting later on the argument over whether the National Guard should be flying foreign missions, Bozeman observed that this was the kind of experience “you do not get flying between Bakersfield and Fresno.” It was not a momentous decision, in the historical scale of things. But it had to be made on-the-spot, with serious consequences in the real world, which is what colonels need experience doing.