SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA AND THE GULF CRISIS : Home Guards : El Toro: Brig. Gen. Harry Blot says he’s proud of the reservists helping him keep the helicopter base flying while its regular forces are in the Middle East.

From his office overlooking the Tarmac near the old control tower at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, Brig. Gen. Harry W. Blot had a short answer to a ponderous question about being left behind while the 3rd Aircraft Wing went to Saudi Arabia--and possibly to war.

“It is terrible,” he said.

Blot, 52, is scheduled to be promoted to major general this spring and possibly get his own air wing. He has been assistant commander of the 3rd Aircraft Wing at El Toro since February.

With much of the aircraft wing in the Persian Gulf for Operation Desert Shield, Blot has remained behind, keeping the base running.

“That’s the problem of being No. 2,” he said in a recent interview. “Once you get over the shock of watching all your friends sail off and wishing them well, then you turn around and say, ‘OK, now my job is to make sure if they need help I can give it to them.’ ”

Blot’s immediate superior, Maj. Gen. Royal N. Moore Jr., left with the wing in August when it shipped out for the gulf. The men and women from El Toro and Tustin are now part of the array of allied forces lined up against the armies of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

The aviators are among the 36,000 Marines and Army reservists from Orange County and nearby Camp Pendleton who are stationed in the gulf.

Since the military buildup began in August, reservists have been arriving at El Toro and Tustin to replace Marines who have shipped out. Recently, 500 Marine reservists from such places as Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Memphis and Dallas arrived to fill in for those who have left. Their duties range from aircraft repair to cooking.

“This is anything but a ghost town,” Blot said of the El Toro base.

“The response of the reservists has been absolutely eye-watering,” the general said. “I have read some things about reservists not being ready. They are absolutely ready to go. No arguments.”

He also praised the regular Marines remaining at El Toro, Tustin, Camp Pendleton and Yuma.

“You have people standing in doing jobs that they were not required to do before. You have lance corporals doing things that staff sergeants used to do. You have gunnery sergeants in charge of whole outfits, where we had commissioned officers before.”

Blot, however, said he is not used to sitting on the sidelines. He flew Marine fighter jets in Vietnam and after the war became a test pilot for the Navy. In 1967 he was selected to attend the Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California, a precursor to going into space in an orbital laboratory.

Later, he spent years testing, evaluating and engineering the revolutionary AV-8 Harrier, an attack jet capable of vertical takeoffs and landings. The Marines have nearly 60 of them in the gulf poised for action.

How are the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing’s planes and helicopters holding up in the Saudi desert sand?

“It is doing real well,” Blot said. “In fact, it is doing surprisingly well. We build military equipment so it can fight anywhere in the world, because we don’t know where our next battle will be. . . . We have specifications that are applied to most of our military equipment.”

But he added that “equipment will work, but its life will be reduced” because of the harsh conditions.

In the desert environment, he said, equipment is tested to its limits: “It is probably right at the very edge of what we build the equipment to stand.”

Marines are finding some innovative ways to protect their Sea Stallion, Sea Knight, Cobra and Huey helicopters and the Hornet and Harrier fighter planes that they brought to the desert.

“They are putting filters in front of filters. They’re covering up holes that they never covered up before when the aircraft are parked overnight,” Blot said.

But he warned that these new procedures could produce new problems if crew members forget to remove the protective coverings before flying: “If you don’t remove it, now you have something on the airplane that doesn’t work.”

Blot said the troops are holding up well in the sand and heat, noting that the Marines on the West Coast have trained in the desert at Twentynine Palms north of Palm Springs and at Yuma on the California-Arizona border.

“That’s probably as close to the environment as we can get,” he said. “Most of the Marines were climatized--if that is a word--before they went.”

The military brass hopes that if war comes, it can be fought at night, a time when officers believe that the allied forces would have the upper hand over the Iraqis.

But a series of nighttime accidents involving Army and Marine helicopters in Saudi Arabia has raised concerns about U.S. night-fighting capabilities and the use of night-vision goggles--sophisticated instruments that use available light from the moon and stars and under the right conditions can turn dark terrain into detailed, surreal, lemon-colored pictures that allow pilots to see almost as well at night as during the day.

For two years, Congress has been debating the safety of the goggles.

Since their use in aviation began in the late 1970s, more than 150 servicemen have been killed in goggle-related training accidents.

Blot said there has never been a controversy over the goggles in the Marine Corps, because pilots realize that they can see better at night with the goggles than without them.

During wartime, he said, Marines assume that they will fly night missions.

“With night-vision goggles we are safer under any circumstance than we would be without them,” he said. “You have the other choice of saying, ‘I can’t help you.’ Then the troops on the ground take the casualties.

“If our troops need to be pulled out, if they are in a hot spot, and we need to get them out and helicopter drivers have to go in lower, . . . then that is what they are going to do. It is a conscious decision you make--there are Marines dying out there, and we increase the risk of crashing, . . . but we are willing to take that risk.”

Recalling his days in Vietnam, Blot said the “basic quality” of Marines today is higher: “We don’t have the draft, so the motivation of the Marines we have today is higher than those people drafted and sent to Vietnam.

“There were groups of people who indicated the Marine Corps couldn’t do what we said we could do,” Blot said about criticism of the corps after Vietnam. “I think when this is all over with--we didn’t do anything we didn’t claim--but we did do what we said we could do. We are pretty proud of that.”