National Guard Air Unit Activated for Gulf Duty

For the first time since the Berlin Wall went up 29 years ago, a unit of the Air National Guard’s 146th Tactical Airlift Wing has been activated, this time for Persian Gulf duty.

Maj. Michael Ritz, a spokesman for the Channel Islands Air National Guard base at Point Mugu, said the wing’s aeromedical evacuation squadron was activated late Thursday.

The squadron has about 160 members, reservists who normally serve one weekend a month. Only about 60 will be sent to the gulf initially. The activation will be in effect for 180 days, and more members may be sent later, Ritz said.

“A good number of these folks have already served over there voluntarily,” Ritz said. “They’ve gone and come back and now will be going over again.”

The newly activated reservists will get “mobilization processing” at the base Wednesday, Ritz said, and probably will leave for the gulf in early January.

Ritz said the squadron members have known for about three weeks that they might be called up. The squadron, which is trained to transport casualties from the front lines to hospitals, includes a large number of women, he said.

No unit of the 146th Tactical Airlift Wing has been activated since 1961, when the entire wing was activated to fly missions in Europe during the crisis surrounding construction of the Berlin Wall, Ritz said.

At that time, the wing was based at the Van Nuys Airport. It moved to a new $80-million facility at Point Mugu early this year, but many of the wing’s 1,400 members still live in the San Fernando Valley.

About 20 volunteers from the Channel Islands base are now in the Persian Gulf area, Ritz said. Last week, about 95 volunteers who had performed support missions for Operation Desert Shield returned home after serving 33 days in Germany and England.

Also, about 1,200 personnel from the Naval Construction Battalion Center at Port Hueneme are serving in the gulf, as well as several hundred Navy and Marine reserve personnel from Ventura County.