Geography Hits Home for Pupils

Six-year-old Jimmy Welsh was upset that his father couldn’t take him to his first day of first grade at El Toro Marine School on Thursday. But he said his dad wrote him a good excuse.

“He said he had to fight this guy named Hussein Saddam,” Jimmy said.

Like about half of the nearly 800 children at El Toro Marine, Jimmy’s father, Marine Sgt. James Welsh, missed the traditional first-day-of-school excitement, apprehension and controlled chaos because he has been sent to the Saudi Arabian desert.

For Marine families, rapid deployments and long separations are an accepted but unpleasant fact of military life. And while Jimmy and his friends are vaguely aware of why their moms and dads are gone--even to the point of knowing who the Iraqi leader is, albeit with his name reversed--they are keenly aware of one aspect of the crisis in Persian Gulf.

“He said he’d be gone a long, long time,” Jimmy said, recalling the letter from his father read to him by his mother, Connie Welsh.

Like other children, the students at El Toro Marine--an elementary school run by the Irvine Unified School District next to El Toro Marine Air Station--started the school year with the typical concerns of any youngster: making new friends, meeting new teachers and getting used to doing homework again. But unlike most other children, they have the added concern of wondering if mom or dad is safe and when--or perhaps if--they are coming home.

Principal Dan Graham said the school is trying to maintain a careful balance between addressing the concerns of the children and keeping them from becoming overly concerned. In his first address of the year to the students, Graham made only brief mention of the Persian Gulf crisis.

“I realize many of you have one or both of your parents away,” Graham told the boys and girls after they lined up by class to flawlessly recite the Pledge of Allegiance. “The challenge for you this year is going to be to do the best you can for your parents.”

While there are few overt signs at the school that anything is out of the ordinary, there are a few subtle messages to remind the children that their campus is different from others. Trees on the grounds were bedecked with yellow ribbons, and the Parent-Teacher Assn. is planning an additional ribbon-tying ceremony for the entire school.

PTA President Karen Baker, a mother of three who has two sons attending the school, said that while parents and teachers are encouraged to discuss the ongoing crisis with the children, parents remained concerned that overexposure to news of the situation in the Middle East might leave students too preoccupied to concentrate on their studies.

“I used to have CNN on all the time,” said Baker, who wore a small yellow ribbon pinned to her blouse in commemoration of her husband, a staff sergeant for whom she requested anonymity. “Now I only turn it on after they go to bed.”

Parent Connie Welsh said she first noticed that constant news reports on television were having an effect on Jimmy and his friends when they started playing war after their fathers were shipped out this summer.

“As moms, we’ve been watching the news nonstop, and (the children) have been absorbing it more than we want them to,” she said. “Jimmy heard about body bags on the news, and he asked, ‘What’s a body bag?’ I said they were bags for bodies. He said, ‘You mean dead bodies?’ He also heard about long-range missiles, and he asks if they can reach our state or our city.”

While the fear of war may be in the back of their minds, Baker said the hardest problem to cope with for both children and parents is the uncertainty of when their soldiers will be sent home. “It would be better for (the children) if they knew what date to shoot for,” she said.

Baker said she and her sons--Howard, 8, Justin, 5, and Alan, 4, all of whom also wore yellow ribbons--saw her husband for only 36 days after he finished a yearlong tour of duty in Okinawa before he left for the Mideast. Howard said he missed accompanying his father to the base and eagerly awaits letters and phone calls from him.

“I was pretty sad that he had to go overseas again,” Howard said. “I’m mostly sad that he’s gone. I’m writing a letter to him. I’m going to say, ‘I miss you.’ ”

Similar stories were common around the school on Thursday. A 7-year-old girl missed her father’s departure and has only heard from him since in a five-minute phone call.

“I didn’t feel that good when my mom told me,” said the girl, Angela Overton, daughter of Sheryl Kaiser and Marine Staff Sgt. Dennis Kaiser. “I didn’t get to say goodby to him when he left. He said (in his phone call) that he wanted to come home.”