Goodbys Never Get Any Easier : Military: Families and friends gather to wish a Channel Island Reserve unit well as it leaves for the Persian Gulf.

Children still clad in pajamas and adults blotting tears said goodby to 50 active reservists headed for the Persian Gulf early Saturday.

Two C-130 Hercules cargo planes roared past the Channel Islands Air National Guard Base and a crowd of more than 200 family members and friends, who were waving flags and tissues.

“Off we go into the wild blue yonder” lingered in the air as a band played “The Air Force Song.”

“I wish they’d play a polka or something,” said Marianne Gunther, parting from the second youngest of her 17 children, the third man in her family she has sent off to war.

Her husband served in World War II, then a son went to Vietnam, and now Senior Airman Bob Gunther joined his squadron for a one-year deployment in the Middle East.

“I hope I don’t live long enough to see my grandsons go to war,” she said. “It’s a sad time.”

Others echoed similar thoughts as the California Air National Guard’s 146th Mobile Aerial Port Squadron boarded planes to Dover, Del., and then to the Gulf.

The squadron, 48 men and two women who specialize in loading and unloading air cargo and passengers, is the third unit of the 146th Tactical Airlift Wing to be activated for Operation Desert Storm. About 170 active reservists from the wing are now serving in the Gulf, and another 130 have been deployed to Europe as a result of the war.

Bob Gunther, clad in green army fatigues, embraced more than 30 family members and friends in the base parking lot with several children hanging on his back and around his legs.

“Who’s next? Who’s next,” he asked after each one. “Keep in touch, will you?”

He seemed jovial, but his mother wasn’t convinced.

“He is scared,” she said. “It was very hard for him on the telephone with his twin.” His brother is stationed with the Air Force in Louisiana and may be deployed within weeks, Marianne Gunther said.

Wives of several of the men, some who had met for the first time, comforted one another.

“I said goodby to him 25 years ago to go to Vietnam,” Claudia Bruns of Newhall said of her husband of 23 years, Tech. Sgt. Sam Bruns. “He’ll come back again. He’ll be back.”

Despite their sadness Saturday, many of the troops and their families supported their assignment overseas.

“The President called us to duty,” said Senior Master Sgt. Al Darby, 45, of Simi Valley. “I feel comfortable with that.”

His wife, Pauline Darby, said she supports him. “We both thought it was the right thing from the very beginning,”

Some of the children, however, were less understanding. Sobbing into her mother’s sweater, 7-year-old Angela Pellecese cried, “I don’t want my Daddy to go.”