EL TORO : School Remembers Marines in Mideast

In a quick but somber ceremony Thursday, 600 children from El Toro Marine School tied ribbons to the fence in front of their campus in tribute to fathers and mothers who have been sent to Saudi Arabia.

“My dad will be gone a year, maybe six months,” said Nicole, a second-grader whose last name was withheld for security reasons. “I’m sad for myself and all the other kids.”

Another student, Lynell Crosby, 8, helped her younger brother tie his yellow ribbon on the fence below the sign reading, “We Miss and Love Our Marines and Sailors.” The youngster said she dreads the day when her father, who is on 24-hour call, is sent to the Middle East.

“I think it’s going to be hard to help my mom take care of five kids. I’ll be stuck in the house all day,” said Crosby, the oldest child in her family.

“I’m afraid he’s going to be killed. I have a picture of him in my room, and if he leaves I’ll take it down or I’ll be crying every day.”

The ribbon-tying ceremony is the first in a series of schoolwide activities to help students deal with their families’ role in the Persian Gulf crisis. Two-thirds of the children who attend the school just east of the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station have had either one or both parents called to action, said head counselor David Prince.

The gulf crisis has turned the close-knit school into a support center for both parents and children of departed Marines, Prince said. Single-handedly coping with children is the unofficial topic of the next Parent-Teacher Assn. meeting. And the school’s Overseas Club for children with parents abroad, which had only a handful of members last year, must serve 400 children this year.

“I used to take snapshots of them, say, carving a pumpkin. . . . We’d send the pictures to their dads and help them write notes,” said Prince, who heads the club.

“That was when it was just the club, now it’s the whole school. That’s a lot of postage.”

The club’s world atlas has been redesigned to show an enlarged map of the Middle East and its distance from the United States.

The greatest sense of comfort Thursday seemed to come from the students themselves. At a snack break after the ceremony, several 8-year-olds discussed phone calls and letters from their fathers and bantered about desert heat, bad water and overcrowding of Saudi Arabia as if they were at the front lines themselves.

And although most of the children do not fully understand the complicated Arab conflict, they said they knew their parents were doing the right thing--or as second-grader Nicole put it, “We’d better be.”