O.C. Warriors Could Be in the Thick of It : Gulf crisis: Marines from El Toro, Tustin and nearby Pendleton are poised for battle against Saddam Hussein.

From makeshift tent cities in the deserts of Saudi Arabia to the cramped quarters of warships in the Persian Gulf, thousands of Marines and Army troops from Orange County wait for war.

The desert is hot and dry by day and cold at night; the food monotonous and numbing. But the most powerful image that Maj. Joseph Goodrow of El Toro took with him when he left the region in November was that of the peaceful desert moonlight and the tricks it played off the powdery sand surrounding the small helicopter base that he and fellow Marines from Tustin guarded.

The scene was “tranquil, almost romantic,” he recalls now.

But in two weeks, the mood may be anything but tranquil for these and some 36,000 other troops from Orange County and Camp Pendleton now stationed in the Persian Gulf. They are among 430,000 U.S. personnel expected to be in the Gulf within the next five weeks.

Marines from Camp Pendleton, helicopter and jet fighter pilots from El Toro and Tustin, cargo haulers and water carriers from Santa Ana, and medics and mechanics from Los Alamitos--all may be put in harm’s way if the United States goes on the offensive against Iraq.

“There’s no doubt if war breaks out, they will be right in the middle of it,” said Kenneth Bruner, a retired lieutenant colonel who until last year was an assistant chief of staff for the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, which is headquartered at El Toro and includes Marines from Tustin, Camp Pendleton and Yuma, Ariz. “I know they will perform well if they have to. They are the best we’ve got.”

At a desert airfield less than 100 miles from the helicopter station where Maj. Goodrow was based now sit a dozen fully armed F/A-18 Hornets from El Toro, part of a fleet of sleek fighter planes and large, troop-carrying choppers from Orange County. Of the total of nearly 300 Marine aircraft in the Persian Gulf, Orange County’s 3rd Aircraft Wing supplied 140. If Saddam Hussein fails to pull out of Kuwait by Jan. 15 and the allied forces decide to strike against him, these Hornets may get the first call to “go north” into Kuwait.

To the east in the Gulf on amphibious assault ships, Marines from Tustin and Camp Pendleton prep their CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters, AV-8B Harrier jump jets and deadly little AH-1T Sea Cobra helicopter gunships for an invasion from sea.

For these troops, the future rests with the decisions of others, made thousands of miles away.

Two possible battle scenarios are most often discussed by Pentagon officials and military analysts. These are:

* An assault mainly by air into Kuwait, aimed at hitting major military centers with a massive U.S. air strike, cutting off communications and travel lines and waiting out an Iraqi surrender.

* Or a broader, more balanced attack by air, land and sea, using tens of thousands of infantry troops from the United States and its allies to augment the aerial bombings. This could mean a quicker victory; but it also poses a greater risk of heavy bloodshed--some have estimated as high as 45,000 casualties in a 6- to 12-week war, including 10,000 dead--by going head-to-head with a numerically superior Iraqi force said to number up to a million.

The first approach, military analysts say, might put to use the F/A-18 Hornet jets from El Toro to support the Air Force but would generally mean only a sideline role for the Orange County units; the second, however, would demand that local troops help lead an offensive to take and secure Kuwait by ground from the south and by water from the east.

The Marine Legend

The World War II images of “Flying Leathernecks” in propeller-driven fighter planes battling Japanese fighters over the Pacific, of infantrymen raising the American flag at Iwo Jima and of John Wayne immortalizing the service on screen are the stuff of Marine legend.

And it is mostly the Marines who carry the banner of Orange County in the Persian Gulf.

The local numbers are impressive.

Of the 80,000 Marines expected to be in place in Saudi Arabia by mid-January, almost half are thought to come from bases in Orange County--El Toro and Tustin--or from nearby Camp Pendleton.

The Pendleton corps includes thousands of troops who affectionately call themselves “grunts”--a badge of honor for their role as front-line infantry. They are considered an elite fighting force, and their mission is as straightforward as it is fraught with peril: confront the enemy on the ground, seize the objective and hold it until Army units arrive.

The Marine air wing, with its jet fighters and helicopter gunships, moves forward with the ground troops, providing important cover fire. Of the 10,000 Marines making up the air wing, approximately 5,000 are from El Toro and Tustin.

If war comes, these troops will swoop down with weaponry that runs from the new and largely untested to the battle-tested and trusted.

Atop the weapons arsenal for Orange County’s airmen is the $30-million F/A-18 Hornet jet fighter, about two dozen of which have left El Toro for the Middle East. The newest, sleekest, most electronically sophisticated jet fighter in the U.S. fleet, the 1,200-m.p.h. plane saw brief action in the U.S. bombing of Libya in 1986 but could face its first real military test now in the Persian Gulf.

“It’s absolutely one of the best fighter and attack planes around,” said Lt. Col. Terry Martin, 42, an F/A-18 pilot and executive officer of the entire fighter group (MAG 11) at El Toro. “It’s a pilot’s airplane. It is designed so the pilot can concentrate on flying. . . . It is the best airplane to be in this situation.”

Also emptied from Orange County hangars and put into the conflict is the CH-53E Super Stallion, the largest military helicopter outside the Soviet Union, able to haul almost every piece of equipment known to the Marines; the AV-8B Harrier, a vertically landing fighter plane that shadows U.S. ground troops and bombs the enemy, and the Vietnam-vintage CH-46 Sea Knight, an oft-troubled helicopter grounded several times in recent months because of questions over its reliability in ferrying troops and cargo.

The 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing is headed by Maj. Gen. Royal N. Moore Jr.

Moore’s duties are normally limited to the El Toro-based command of his wing, but the Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait thrust him into the more prominent role of heading up the entire Marine air power contingent in the Persian Gulf.

Moore’s image is that of a no-nonsense, tough-talking Marine, and he has done little to change that reputation since moving across the globe into a crisis flash point.

“Saddam Hussein’s just got to look around and say to himself, ‘I’m over my head,’ ” the general recently told reporters in Dhahran. He added:

“We want about three to five minutes and we’re going to give them the most violent three to five minutes they’ve ever seen. That’s all we want.”

The Marines from El Toro, Tustin and Pendleton clearly account for Orange County’s most important contribution to the Gulf buildup. But reserves have also been called as part of the the biggest mobilization of the non-active military in Orange County history.

It is the reservists who have left behind jobs as doctors and nurses, computer consultants and short-order cooks, often at a substantial pay cut, to perform a mission that few envisioned when they signed up as “weekend warriors.” They now find themselves preparing for at least six months of active duty--and the prospect of war--in the Persian Gulf.

There have been up to 2,000 reservists called to active duty from the 63rd Army Reserve Command headquarters at Los Alamitos since the Gulf crisis began, perhaps 500 to 1,000 of them from Orange County.

On the prospects of combat for his reservists, Gen. Theodore W. Paulson, who heads the 63rd Army command, stretching from Southern California through Nevada and Arizona, said bluntly: “The battlefield there is a very expansive area and the situation because of the heat a very difficult one, so the units I have--though probably not on the front lines--would see combat situations.”

The point that Paulson and military analysts such as Greg Grant at Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies make repeatedly in discussing the reservists’ role is that for the mobilized troops, the distinction between active and reserve becomes meaningless--all will face the same bullets.

“I think (the Pentagon) will use everything they’ve got until it breaks down,” Grant said. “They don’t have the luxury of picking and choosing.”

A Feint Maneuver

According to a formal war appraisal developed by the Center for Defense Information think-tank, a U.S. offensive could begin with shipboard Marines from Camp Pendleton, backed by El Toro fighters and helicopters, faking or threatening a land invasion of Kuwait, thus tying up Iraqi troops to the east.

At the same time, analysts say, the United States might strike Iraq and Iraqi positions in Kuwait by air, bombing chemical and nuclear facilities, other military installations, communications centers, fuel depots, ammunition dumps, roads, railways and port facilities, among other targets.

Some military insiders and analysts suggest that the F/A-18 Hornets from El Toro, each piloted by a single Marine, might take part in the bombings, but more likely the Air Force will assume the bulk of this task--if not claiming exclusive domain.

But if the lessons of past wars are any harbinger, military strategists warn, the all-air option may well fail.

“You can destroy Saddam Hussein’s air force, but that’s not decisive if what you want to do is forcibly eject him from Kuwait and make it hard for him to return. That takes troops on the ground,” said Col. Harry Summers, a retired Army officer and former Army War College professor in suburban Washington.

Echoing that theme, Professor Tom Grant, head of UC Irvine’s Global Peace and Conflict Studies Center, said in an interview: “What happens is they’ll use the air option first (for several days), and if it doesn’t work, try the ground option.”

“The ground option,” should it come to that, would mean the real beginning of a front-and-center role for the thousands of troops from Camp Pendleton, backed by the El Toro and Tustin-based fighters and helicopters.

“The Marines would probably be used to slug it out along the coast road, with the Arabs leading the way,” said Georgetown’s Grant.

“If there is fighting, the Marines are going to be involved in some of the heaviest fighting there because of the area where they are deployed and because of their mobility--that makes them likely to assault those offensive lines,” he added.

For thousands of local infantry troops--in the 1st Marine Division and the 7th Marine Expeditionary Brigade--a full ground assault could take them north by foot, light armored vehicles or tanks from their current positions scattered in the allied-dotted desert, near the top of a 100-mile strip of land just south of the Kuwaiti border.

These troops make up the east flank of the allied ground forces, designed to smash through the Iraqi fortifications at the southeast border of Kuwait and hold the area until the Army arrives to replace them. While the Marines may be the first in, they will be followed by Army mechanized armored divisions--units boasting many of the newer tanks and heavy armor not available to the smaller, more mobile Marine expeditionary forces.

Meanwhile, other Marines from Orange County-area bases may be readying an assault by sea. They wait aboard some of the dozens of Navy amphibious-assault ships in the Persian Gulf, each carrying up to 1,200 Marines and a contingent of about six CH-53D Sea Stallions and CH-46 Sea Knights from Tustin and smaller AH-1 Cobra and Huey helicopters from Pendleton.

After the AV-8B Harriers lift from the deck, the Sea Stallions and Sea Knights are likely to take off with Marines and equipment toward the beaches. They may be escorted by the Cobras, providing protection for the larger helicopters. Once the invasion is under way, the sky would then be filled with helicopters, the sea dotted with landing craft and boats.

“You don’t give them time to think,” said John Trotti, a Vietnam-era Marine fighter pilot and author of two books on the Marines Corps air wings. “You overwhelm them. Sure you’re going to lose aircraft. Some might even run into each other, but it is much better than doing it piecemeal.”

If the Pentagon does decide on a broad-based, land-air-sea option, the prospects of action for the kinds of units which have come from Orange County are as diverse as they are sobering, extending down to the smallest unit:

* The Huey choppers from Pendleton, the whop of their blades stirring images of Vietnam, ferrying the expected thousands of injured infantrymen out of combat.

* Local Army reservist nurses and doctors from a Santa Ana unit helping stitch together the many injured U.S. servicemen miles back of the front lines.

* A small detachment of other Orange County reservists, mostly law enforcement officers by day, serving as military police grappling to detain the Iraqi prisoners of war captured in the battle over Kuwaiti sovereignty.

Even for the highest warriors, insulated from harm’s way by $30-million worth of steel and electronics, the images are troubling.

“I don’t think anyone is anxious for war,” said Lt. Col. Martin, the F/A-18 pilot in El Toro who has seen pilots under him head off for the Persian Gulf since August. “Of course, we are ready to go fight because that is our job, but I think if anyone had the choice between war and no war, they would take no war.”

Times Orange County librarian Dan Crump contributed to this report.