The Waiting Game : Military: A thousand Ventura County members of the Navy Reserve and Air National Guard suddenly face the prospect of leaving family and career.

Chuck Denison’s studies at the Cal State Northridge Ventura campus will be put on hold if his Air National Guard unit is called up.

Dr. Robert Aarstad may have to shut down his Ventura medical practice and fire six employees if the Navy activates his reserve unit.

And Dr. Constante Abaya of Oxnard, with two sons in college, faces a drastic pay cut if his reserve unit gets a call.

The three reservists are among the more than 1,000 military part-timers in Ventura County who are waiting to hear whether President Bush’s decision Wednesday to activate the reserves will affect them.

“I’ve got my bag packed,” said Denison, a member of the 146th Tactical Airlift Wing of the California Air National Guard. “All I have to do is get some of my uniforms sewn up.”

Denison--29, single and working part time at the Ventura campus--said he is prepared mentally as well.

“When you sign the papers, that’s the commitment, whether it’s at home or overseas,” he said.

Other reservists, however, who joined primarily for camaraderie, extra income or job training, say the prospect of abruptly leaving their families and careers is jarring.

“I never even considered being called up,” said Aarstad, a commander who has been in the Navy Reserve for about 15 years. “Especially when things backed off with the Russians. Things sneak up on you.”

Officials said many reservists didn’t worry much about going to war when they signed an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States . . . against all enemies, foreign and domestic . . . “ After all, it has been more than 22 years since reservists were last called up for combat duty.

“It’s not what they’re thinking on that nice spring day when they hold up their hands and swear,” said Col. Daniel H. Pemberton, air base commander at the Channel Islands Air National Guard facility.

A big sign next to the base gate invites recruits to learn a trade, not go to war. Master Sgt. Al Epp, head recruiter at Channel Islands, said recruits are told of the possibility of combat but tend not to worry about it. They want to know about education aid and job training, he said. “It’s their parents who worry about combat,” Epp said.

Help with college was only one of the reasons that Denison enlisted in the Guard shortly after completing six years of active duty in the Air Force. “I missed the camaraderie and all,” he said.

“Once the military gets in your blood, even if you hate it, you miss it,” Denison said. He has been in the reserves for four years and works in security at the Channel Islands base. His monthly gross pay is $156 for spending one weekend per month and two weeks during the summer on duty. In addition, he makes $120 a month for tuition.

Denison acknowledges that patriotism played a part in his enlistment in the Guard. “I don’t put up the flag on holidays--that’s mostly out of laziness,” he said. “But I consider myself a patriot.”

Aarstad said he believes in what the United States is doing in the Persian Gulf. “You only have to look back at World War II and see what happened there,” he said.

But if his Navy Reserve unit at Point Mugu is activated, the campaign against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein will disrupt more than Aarstad’s career. Six part-time employees in his Ventura office will lose their jobs if he has to shut down his practice, which specializes in head and neck treatment. His patients will have to find another doctor, and those with surgery scheduled already have been calling to see if he will be available.

“It happened to my father during the Korean War,” Aarstad said. “He had just established his practice. He came back and got going again. You survive.”

Aarstad, 44, said his unit consists of about 60 physicians, nurses, pharmacists and other medical personnel. He considers himself luckier than the other physicians, who for the most part are older. “I have time to make a new start,” he said.

Abaya also has mixed feelings about the possibility of being called up. Abaya, a captain in a Navy Reserve medical unit at Port Hueneme, would have to shut down his practice and fire two employees and would take a huge pay cut if he is activated. He said his current annual income reaches six figures, while a Navy physician can expect to make in the $30,000 to $40,000 range.

“I just signed a lease for my boy’s apartment at USC,” Abaya said.

“But if I did not have these responsibilities, I would probably be the first to volunteer,” said Abaya, who has been in the reserves for seven years. His father, a second lieutenant in the Army, always wanted him to be in the military, he said.

“We migrated here--I’m Filipino. I have to say thank you, America, for taking me in. Other doctors say I’m foolish, that it’s not financially lucrative. But that’s beside the point.”

The Air National Guard and the Navy Reserve make up the largest reserve presence in Ventura County, but the Marines and the Army also have small units here. In addition, some residents belong to reserve units based in other counties.

“It’s going to have to be more than a couple-of-month-long war for us to be called,” said John Dearinger, a member of the California National Guard’s 240th Support Battalion based in Long Beach. His unit’s tanks and other heavy equipment are geared toward fighting in the Pacific Rim and could not be moved to the Persian Gulf quickly.

“Heavy divisions don’t start a war,” said Dearinger, who manages a print shop in Oxnard. “They come up after the lighter divisions become weak.”

Dearinger admitted that he has considered the possibility of being called up. “Of course I gave it a thought,” he said. “But my opinion is that anything that happens over there is going to happen too fast to use our services.”

George Todd, a sergeant in a Marines reserve weapons company at Port Hueneme, said he expects to be called up “if a shooting war breaks out.”

Todd, 40, entered the Marines in 1968, right after graduation from Nordhoff High School in Ojai. He saw combat in Vietnam, got out of the service in 1972 and waited 16 years before joining the reserves.

“I started thinking about the military, the camaraderie, the confidence it instills in you,” said Todd, who is a captain in the Oxnard Fire Department.

If he is called up, his job would be kept open, but he would have to leave his wife and their two sons, ages 2 and 15.

“My wife doesn’t want me to go,” he said. “I try to tell her I may be able to save some lives.

“My goal would not be to go over there and kill everybody I could kill,” Todd said. “It would be to see how many Americans I could help bring back home with my experience. I’d instill in them how serious combat is.”