From Desert to Daughter’s Side : Family: The Army, moving with quickness and compassion, speeds a father from the frontlines of Saudi Arabia to be with his 4-year-old daughter, just diagnosed with leukemia.

Army medic Gary Engle was hunkered down in the sands of Saudi Arabia withhis unit when a message arrived from the Red Cross: His daughter had been diagnosed with leukemia and he was needed by her side.

Amid a war in the Persian Gulf, the private first class figured he would have to battle the Army to get to 4-year-old Brittany.

But thanks to a compassionate and decisive commander and an available seat on a military transport plane, Engle--still dressed in desert combat fatigues and sandy boots, his helmet under his arm--strode into Brittany’s room at Children’s Hospital of Orange County on Thursday evening to help her take her medicine, barely 48 hours after leaving his outpost near the Saudi front lines.

“She kept telling all the nurses that her daddy was a doctor and that he would come and take care of her and give her her medicine,” 22-year-old Lori Engle said Friday outside Brittany’s room in the children’s oncology unit at the hospital.

“She talks a lot more now that he’s here,” the young mother said. “Before, she just laid there. They’ve always been real close.”

The wan little girl with dark brown eyes and chin-length, sandy brown hair was asleep when her father first entered her room. He said he was stunned at how weak she seemed. “She lost 10 pounds and she only weighs 40,” the 23-year-old Engle said.

When she did awaken, “I told him that I missed him,” Brittany said Friday, her tiny voice barely a whisper. But she couldn’t jump from her bed and run to him as she might have last October before he shipped out to the Gulf.

“I couldn’t because I was hooked up to that thing,” she said, pointing to a bedside monitoring machine that tracks her vital signs.

It all began with a sore throat and a headache on the morning of Jan. 23, the day Brittany was to start preschool. She soon developed a raging fever, so her mother and grandmother trundled her to a clinic in Tustin.

“It just hit her all of sudden,” Lori Engle said.

Doctors, suspecting something serious almost immediately, ran a battery of blood tests. They discovered that she had only one-tenth the white blood cells that she should have had, and she was rushed to CHOC for an immediate blood transfusion.

Overwhelmed, with a 17-month-old son to care for too, Lori Engle decided she needed to reach Gary. She contacted the local Red Cross and a message was sent. But it never reached him.

“They kept telling me there is no communication out there,” Lori Engle recalled. “I said I don’t believe that. They are in a war over there; they have to be able to communicate!”

A second message sent Jan. 26 reached him three days later at 9 p.m. Gulf time, in a location that Gary Engle described as “the middle of nowhere--in northern Saudi Arabia.”

“It hit me really hard. . . . I told my sergeant, ‘I want to go home.’ ”

With uncharacteristic speed, Engle’s request raced up the chain of command, and before long, he was talking to his commanding officer, Col. John Castunguay.

“He just looked up at me and said he was sorry, that I would probably need an extension on my leave. Then he told them to expedite the paperwork. He was very understanding.”

At 7:30 the next morning, Engle was on a military transport plane winging back to the United States. He hopped a commercial jet in North Carolina, and by 7 p.m. Thursday, he was with his daughter.

“All I could think of is how could I help her?” he said. “That’s when I decided I’d have to give her a firm belief in positive thought--that she is going to be all right and that I would help her visualize getting better.”

The young couple learned Friday afternoon that Brittany will need at least two years of intensive chemotherapy to battle the disease, at a cost that could soar to $100,000 in the first year alone.

The military benefits will help a lot--paying 80% of the costs, he said. As for the rest, they haven’t had time to think about that now. The main issue is trying to get an extension on Gary’s two-week leave from the battlefront.

“I’m looking for a compassionate reassignment,” he said. With no Army bases in Orange County, Engle is hoping he can be assigned to a local recruiting office so he can stay with his wife at her mother’s Costa Mesa duplex. Otherwise, Barstow may be the nearest Army base.

In the meantime, they’re trying to prepare Brittany for what lies ahead.

“She understands she is sick and that she’s going to lose her hair,” Lori Engle said. “We tell her that there are good guys and bad guys in her blood and that right now, the bad guys are winning. That she’s got to take her pills to help the good guys fight the bad guys.”

Oral medication has proven a big obstacle. It upsets Brittany’s stomach, making it hard for her to keep solid food down.

Family members have tried hiding the crushed medication in ice cream to disguise the flavor. Often, the nurses have had to take over.

“I’m going to call 911!” they heard the little girl wail once when her nurses tried to give her the medication.

In fact, Brittany, who will turn 5 next month, was getting pretty fed up with the whole hospital routine. One evening, Lori Engle said, the little girl stood on her bed and announced: “I’ve had it. I’ve had enough. I’m going home.”

Home may well be in the cards soon, her parents said. But she will have to return three times a week for medication and tests. That’s the main reason they have decided to send their 17-month-old son, Erik, to stay with relatives in Utah.