SAN DIEGO AND THE PERSIAN GULF WAR : Coping at Home Tests Their Mettle

The Oceanside third-grader had always been one of Brenda Cinque’s brightest students. But, after both the girl’s parents were deployed to Saudi Arabia, Cinque, a teacher at Palmquist Elementary School, noticed a change. The 8-year-old became apathetic, turning her homework in late, or not at all. Once a joy, she became a terror.

So, as so many others have lately, Cinque turned to Karyl Ketchum.

“Nobody else could have gotten to her,” Cinque said of Ketchum, a physical education teacher, soccer coach and mother of two whose own husband has been in the gulf since August. Cinque reports her star pupil is “doing 100% better” after a few pep talks from the 35-year-old woman the kids call “Coach Ketchup.”

“Kids go to her,” Cinque said. “She is inspirational. She really can motivate. She’s like a drill sergeant, (but) the kids love her. They know that she really cares about them.”

Five months since U.S. troops started deploying to the Persian Gulf, the adversity of war is bringing out the best in some military spouses like Ketchum. As her husband, Marine Staff Sgt. Dwight (Ike) Ketchum, prepares for possible conflict in the Saudi Arabian desert, she fights a daily battle for normalcy on the home front, answering her children’s tearful questions and wrestling with her own fears.

But that’s only the beginning. Convinced that keeping kids busy helps them cope, Ketchum has organized huge volleyball tournaments that pits her students against their archrivals: teachers. Before war began, she sent body-building equipment and canned tuna to Saudi Arabia to combat the troops’ boredom. She has urged her neighbors to display American flags, and, when the wives of other enlisted men call for advice, she tells them: “Don’t worry until you have to.”

And everyone who knows Karyl Ketchum knows she doesn’t stop there.

Neither does Arlene Pitchford, wife of Marine Staff Sgt. Lavantes Pitchford, who responded to the outbreak of war last week by arranging a daily prayer meeting for military families at her church. Or Kaye Hunter, the ombudsman for the destroyer tender Acadia, who fielded 175 telephone calls from frantic Navy wives during the first 24 hours of war.

Shaken by what their own families stand to lose, these women have stood strong. They, and others like them, have become vital pillars of support for thousands of others. Far from selfless, they say that by helping others they are sustaining themselves.

Sharron Dattilo, a marriage and family counselor who works for the Family Services Center at the 32nd St. Naval Station, said that, especially for the families of soldiers deploying for the first time, reaching out can build strength.

“Many of the feelings they have are those of separation, loneliness, isolation. But you get them into groups, and they realize they’re all the same,” said Dattilo, who counsels callers on the nationwide call-in service and at the base. “They bond and connect and hug, and suddenly, the pain just isn’t so bad.”

Since Arlene Pitchford’s husband left for Saudi Arabia five months ago, she has expanded her world to embrace dozens of others. In September, she coordinated a gospel benefit in support of the troops and sent a videotape of the nine-choir event to Saudi Arabia. Then last week, when the fighting broke out, she knew she needed to do something more.

The military has sent Pitchford’s husband away before--he didn’t see their 2-year-old daughter, Praise, until she was 8 months old. And this is not the first time Pitchford’s faith has been tested--at 22, she had cervical cancer. Then three years ago, her first baby, Lavantes Jr., was born premature, weighing less than 3 pounds.

Life has toughened Arlene Pitchford, whose brilliant smile took her from her childhood home in Watts into the glamorous world of runway modeling before she married a Marine six years ago. Still, this latest deployment has touched her deepest fears.

“All my life in these ghettos I saw women raising kids all by themselves, and I said, ‘I will never be like that,’ ” she said. When she was pregnant with her son, her hands swelled so much that her wedding ring cut into her finger. But she wore it anyway, just so people wouldn’t think she was an unwed mother.

Now, she feels those pangs again.

“It’s like the thing I feared the most came upon me,” she said. “So I’m not giving up on this good-looking man of mine.”

Among other things, for Pitchford that means going to the Oceanside Gospel Lighthouse church every day at noon to meet with the support group she has started. There, she and a handful of other wives, mothers and friends of enlisted men gather to chat, sing and pray.

One day this week, Shirley Nicholas--whose only child, 18-year-old Marlon Demetrius Nicholas, is an auxiliary medic in the Army--sat in one of the pews. She said the videotapes of the prisoners of war had left her shaken.

Other women joked that when the late-night phone calls come from the gulf, at first they are too sleepy to appreciate them.

Then they prayed for the men and women in Saudi Arabia, consulting a list of names Arlene has compiled. They prayed for Marlon and for Lavantes. They prayed for the families of the POWs and for all the military wives. Finally they prayed for Saddam Hussein.

“Let him come to know you,” they said. “Help him, Lord, to release Kuwait.”

The group is open to everyone, military and civilian--and you don’t have to be religious to belong.

“Sometimes people just need a hug,” Pitchford said. “People don’t know that right now I am so weak. I get upset. When the war first broke out, my whole body shook. I get burnt out. I want to get in my car and just drive around in circles.”

But Carol Riggins, the pastor at the Oceanside Gospel Lighthouse, says it is hard to feel depressed around Pitchford now.

“When (her husband) first left, it hit her with such force. But all of a sudden she got ahold of it,” said Riggins, who says she encourages her congregation to do what Pitchford has done--to “get out of their own little worlds.”

“Those that are trying to encourage others are finding their own answers,” said Riggins. “It’s great to watch.”

During the first 24 hours of the war, Kaye Hunter got 175 calls. Her son, John, timed it--there was never more than a 30-second lapse between rings. When the mother and son wanted to sleep, they turned the phone bell off and the phone machine on.

For a number of Navy families, Kaye Hunter is their lifeline of hope. When they despair of ever again seeing their husbands or wives, they call her. When they cannot control their teen-agers, they call. Anxious about when they might next receive mail from the deployed ship or how to obtain a tax form, they call.

As ombudsman--a volunteer position--for the destroyer tender Acadia, Hunter is responsible for updating family members and giving them whatever information she can. She tries to act as a clearinghouse, putting people in touch with agencies that can help them with specific problems. In the days before the war, she would receive no more than 10 calls daily--today, the number has increased fourfold.

The dust has begun to gather in her home. Every morning as she hustles out to her job as a school receptionist, she eyes the film of dust collecting on her coffee table. She pauses, reminds herself that she ought to clean up, and keeps walking out the door.

These days, Kaye Hunter just has no time. Either she is attending meetings or she is on the phone. Either she is watching television for news of her husband, Chief Petty Officer John Timothy Hunter, 37, or she is playing back her phone machine messages.

Hot dogs used to be an occasional treat at the Hunter household. Now, John Hunter, 13, eats them several times a week. Kaye Hunter no longer has time to cook. She works from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and then returns home to answer the messages--mostly from anxious wives--that have piled up on her phone machine.

She doesn’t know most of the people who call and usually never meets them face to face. When they call with a problem, she never knows how--and whether--it was solved, unless they phone back. And usually, the callers don’t thank her for her assistance--her gratification comes from believing she has helped, that they have hung up feeling comforted.

It doesn’t always happen that way. A number of callers get angry, feeling thwarted that she will not tell them what to do in a particular situation. Others get mad, believing she must know more than she is releasing.

“They are seeing the war on TV, seeing what is happening half a world away, and they cannot believe I cannot answer their questions. They are convinced that I know everything and won’t tell,” Hunter said. “I am just a person listening; I can’t give advice.”

Other times, she knows she has had an impact. This past fall, one despairing wife called threatening to kill herself. As Kaye Hunter talked to her, she dialed the police on another line, dispatching them to the woman’s house before any harm was done.

“I like to think I am making a difference,” Hunter said.

In fact, Hunter has become so committed to her volunteer job that she is considering quiting her paying one. Though it would mean a loss of $12,000 yearly, she believes it would be worth it.

“I am getting tired,” she explained. “I really feel that the military community and families of those on the ship are more like family than a job. There are so many you want to reach out and hug because they need that. You can see you are helping people.”

Not long ago, Karyl Ketchum’s husband of 11 years sent her a letter from the front. When he shipped out five months ago, he wrote, he never realized how much work he was leaving her to do at home.

Ketchum smiles and rolls her eyes when she describes the letter.

“Now, I’m mother, father, coach, teacher, counselor,” said Karyl, who has been known to go grocery shopping at 4 a.m. With Ike gone, she sometimes does the yard work after dark, with the help of huge fluorescent bulbs.

“They don’t give me enough daylight to do everything,” she said. “People say, when are you you ? But I don’t give myself time for that. For self-preservation and perseverance, you have got to find where you fit in and just drive. Because, if you don’t, you sink.”

Ketchum feels she fits in best with the kids she teaches and coaches in Oceanside--many of whom have parents in the gulf.

“I don’t have time to play those games--the teas,” she said, referring to some of the formal support groups organized by the military. “I don’t get off on that stuff. . . . Kids make me tick. I spend most of my day trying to be whatever I need to be for the students I teach.”

She’s demanding with them, a loudmouth who teases her way into youngsters’ hearts and wins their loyalty by pushing them hard. Ketchum believes that, particularly as war disrupts their lives, children need consistency. So at school, in Ketchum’s physical education classes, it’s business as usual.

And that applies to her own two children as well--Kimberly, 9, and Dwight, 7. Last weekend, just days after the fighting started in the gulf, Ketchum took her son and daughter to a karate competition they’d spent weeks preparing for.

“The people that are left here have to keep things as normal as possible,” she said. “When we watch TV, it’s normal TV. I watch news between 1 and 4 a.m. I don’t want them to see it. Maybe that’s wrong. But they don’t need to see the shooting, because their parent is there.”

A woman who spends most of her life talking with children, Ketchum admits her own kids are the hardest to soothe.

“A lot of times I look at their problems, and I don’t know how to deal with it,” Ketchum said. “I think, ‘Am I doing enough for them?’ But on the other hand, I think I do too much.”

Several weeks ago, for example, Ketchum relieved the doldrums by buying the family a second Great Dane to accompany Teufelhunden, their horse-sized dog whose German name means “Devil Dogs”--a nickname German troops gave to the Marines during World War I.

To explain how far away their daddy is, Ketchum has turned to the night-time sky.

“I tell them, ‘Even though we are far apart, we share the same sky and same stars. If you can look for the brightest one, daddy will see that one too,’ ” she said. “I don’t know how else to tie it in.”

Few people know it, but the anxiety of the past few months has taken its toll on Ketchum. Around Christmas, she developed TMJ syndrome--a stiffening of the temporomandibular joint in the jaw, often associated with stress--and had to be operated upon. But she said that, oddly, the news that the conflict had begun was something of a relief.

“Now I know there will be an end,” she said. “Before, there wasn’t a beginning.”

“If they came to my door and said there was a casualty, I would be extremely affected,” she said. “But it’s not something I dwell on. I try to keep myself so busy that I can’t think about it.”

And that, of course, is where the kids of Oceanside come in.

Last week, one of her students asked about the yellow ribbon Ketchum wears on her collar. Ketchum explained where her husband was.

“She looks at me with real big eyes and then gives me the biggest hug,” Ketchum recalled with a smile. “She said, ‘Everything will be all right, Mrs. Ketchum.’ ”

Times staff writer Michael Granberry contributed to this report.