COLUMN ONE : The Call to Arms That Jolts : When reservists are activated, their worlds can be turned upside down. They often must abruptly leave jobs, families, homes and financial obligations.

A happy Dan Chrastil was beginning a new life. The former U.S. Air Force man uprooted his wife and daughter from California, drove them along with three Labrador retrievers, two cats and 9,000 pounds of furniture across the country to his in-laws’ home in Greenville, S.C., and went on alone to Virginia to start a new computer job.

For a week in late January he shopped for the family’s next address--and he got lucky, really lucky. The place he found was a beautiful ranch house on three acres of forested mountainside. Chrastil signed the lease--$650 a month--and strolled out on the redwood deck, overlooking a snowy ski run below.

“This is fabulous!” he nearly shouted.

Then, while telephoning his wife with the great news, he got the word: His U.S. Air Force reserve unit, stationed at Norton Air Force base in San Bernardino County, was being called to action. The summons turned Chrastil’s world upside down, just as it has for about 190,000 American armed forces reserves assigned to active duty.

All of a sudden, Chrastil, 37, is living in a sparse military apartment on the smoggy outskirts of Barstow while his distraught wife and daughter wait on the East Coast, fearing for his future. At the same air base, reservist Greg Darty frets over how he will make the payments on his Gardena home now that he can no longer report to work at the Los Angeles County Probation Department. As a full-time sergeant, he makes less than half what he is accustomed to as a county employee.

Lt. Col. Branden Morad, a soft-spoken dentist who invested $70,000 to open a private practice six weeks ago, fears the venture will be lost. He has laid off his two employees. He also wonders how he will continue to pay for that new $300,000 Mission Viejo home he bought a year ago.

Maj. Jeff Brann, a test pilot for McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach, is expecting to fly out this week in a C-141 cargo plane bound for the Persian Gulf. He has written a will and arranged with a bank to pay the mortgage on his Lakewood home with automatic withdrawals. The concerns of mowing the lawn and putting out the trash each week have given way to fears of Iraqi missiles and chemical weapons and the likelihood of having to transport the dead back to the United States.

Like reservists elsewhere, these members of the 445th Military Airlift Wing are paying a high price in personal hardship for serving in the allied forces in the Persian Gulf conflict. Reservists called up in the biggest American military activation since the rise of the Berlin Wall face all the dangers of war side by side with full-time enlisted men in the armed services.

Yet, the call to arms often touches reservists on a more personal level as they must abruptly leave behind civilian jobs, families, homes and financial obligations. In only days, sometimes hours, they must tie up the loose ends of their lives and report to duty. That means juggling child-care duties, arranging transportation to assigned military bases and revamping household budgets.

Full-time military pay--about $1,370 to $4,000 a month for most 10-year armed forces veterans--is often just a fraction of what some professionals make in the civilian world. Yet, the bills keep coming. There are sometimes last-minute bank loans to secure or personal possessions to sell.

Owners of businesses discover they must hurriedly reorganize--or fold. Reservists with children must answer the troubling question: How do you tell a 7-year-old that daddy is suddenly going off to war?

Darty, one of 3,300 men assigned to the 445th, got news of being called up on a Thursday night, Jan. 24, a time when scores of reserves in the airlift wing were being activated. He had just arrived home from work. He knew immediately that something was up when his wife rushed to meet him at the door.

“They called,” she said urgently, watching his reaction.

“What do you mean? Who called?” Darty answered.

At first he did not believe the answer; his wife insisted she was serious. Darty, 38, signed up as a reservist 14 years ago and never expected to see action. He joined the Air Force’s weekend training program to receive the small military stipend it offered and to learn to be an X-ray technician.

Typically, reservists are former military men with an average of 10 years of active duty. Many sign up to add to their pensions, devoting a weekend each month and one full week during the year to training. A few reservists, such as Darty, fulfill the minimal active duty requirements by going through a few weeks of basic training or completing courses in a military technical school. Their activation and deployment--at the discretion of the President and the Pentagon--occurs as they are needed; in the Gulf War, many of the first reservists to be deployed were medical specialists, and some airlift squadrons were flying soon afterward.

Other units--including a substantial number in the 445th Airlift Wing--are awaiting possible orders to report.

During earlier U.S. military excursions in Grenada and Panama, Darty had been concerned enough to update his will and to get required medical immunizations, but those were false alarms.

Now, Darty called the base and was told to be there in 24 hours. He tried to break the news to his 5-year-old son, who was not listening--”The Simpsons” TV show was on.

Darty reported to work an hour early the next morning to handle paperwork and to get to the bank. He adjusted two accounts to ensure that his wife would have access to the money. He also explored county policy on salaries for activated reserves and discovered--to his chagrin--that after 30 days he would have to augment his military pay by using accrued vacation time. Once that was gone, he was not sure what his income would be.

Los Angeles city employees, by comparison, have been voted pay subsidies for up to six months to bring their military salaries up to the level of their city income. Darty brooded over the discrepancy. “After 30 days, that’s when I’ll really be in the dark,” he said.

By evening, Darty was due to report. There was no time for a send-off party or elegant dinner. He had to pack. He was to show up in full battle uniform--the green and black camouflage so familiar among servicemen.

His son, who had seen television coverage of the war, saw the outfit and now was filled with questions. “Daddy, where are you going? Where are you going?”

“I’m just going to work,” Darty answered. His wife began to cry as she accompanied him to the car, but Darty hushed her. He did not want their son to see it.

“I try not to hype the war with the child,” he said later. “I told them just to pray it was over soon.”

Like many who were activated, Darty has yet to learn when--or where--he will be deployed. For the time being, he works at Norton’s medical and dental clinic, taking X-rays for some of the 11,000 military personnel stationed there.

On the same night that Darty was activated, panic was sweeping through the Morad household in Mission Viejo. Morad’s wife, Mariam, was upset, as were his three children, ages 14, 12 and 9.

They feared for his safety and they wondered how, in his absence, they could keep the household running. The house payment was $2,500 a month. The lease for the new dental office--Morad’s longtime dream--was $2,000 a month, not counting other expenses. Patients were scheduled throughout the next week.

On top of that, Morad, 44, also played the doting father--the chauffeur who drove the children to school each morning while his wife went off to work as a financial analyst. He was the kids’ cheerleader at after-school sporting events, regularly helped them with homework and took them on weekend hikes.

“Hopefully, it’s going to be a short war,” Morad told them as he packed. He called his dental assistant and asked her to help him cancel appointments. That work took much of the following day. He referred most of his patients to other dentists and rescheduled a few for an upcoming Saturday when he expected, or hoped, to have a day free of duty.

A week later, Morad reluctantly laid off his two assistants; his military salary, a relatively substantial $4,000 a month, was not enough to pay them plus the office rent while the practice sat in limbo.

“If the war drags on, I may have to dismantle the office or bring in (a partner),” he said. “I accept that.”

Of greater concern, he said, is hanging onto the house. He now works at the air base dental clinic and calls home nearly every night, assessing the bills and reassuring the children. So far, his war news is the same: He has yet to be deployed.

Darty and Morad were already packed to report by the time word reached Chrastil on Friday evening in Virginia. “The timing,” Chrastil said later, “couldn’t have been more perfect . . . to disrupt everything.”

The computer specialist--who had served 13 years on active duty before becoming a reserve--got the news of his activation just two hours after signing the lease for the hillside ranch house.

Chrastil’s wife, daughter and all of the furniture were still at his in-laws’ home in South Carolina. A frustrated Chrastil spent one night on an air mattress in the otherwise empty new dream house before driving all day Saturday to rejoin his family. He picked up his uniform and other possessions and left again Monday, driving four hours to the nearest air base to fly west.

He could not fly out without a copy of his orders, Chrastil was told. He tried vainly to have the orders faxed to him. After a day of delay, he was able to arrange for Norton Air Force Base to book the flight on his behalf. He traveled west with $30 in his pocket, arriving Tuesday night at Norton--where he was told the base was full.

“I’ve only got $30 with me,” he said. “I don’t have any wheels.”

A scramble for accommodations began; eventually, a room was found at the base.

Meanwhile, Chrastil is having to break the lease on the ranch house. He is forfeiting a month’s rent and is almost certain that he will never see the place again. He called his new employers to research the small computer company’s policy on paying activated reservists and was told there is no policy. He is the company’s first. His new bosses are none too thrilled about it; they need him in Virginia, not at some air base. Chrastil hung up the phone not knowing if he would have a job.

There were other problems, too. The legal will that Chrastil had written some years ago could not be found in the moving van full of furniture; he had to draft a new one. By coincidence, his in-laws are moving to Georgia. Chrastil believes that his wife and daughter, Jaime, 11, will wind up there, although for how long he cannot say. It depends on where he is sent, how long the war lasts, whether he gets his job back--and, of course, on whether he returns at all.

In signing up for service, reservists agree to be ready at 24 to 72 hours’ notice and to report where the military needs them, no matter what the hardship. Each is aware of what the commitment means, but sometimes the reminder is a shock after years of predictable peacetime training routines.

“You just come to realize that you can’t make plans,” Chrastil said philosophically.

Brann, 43, was one of the last activated members of the 445th to receive word of the call to duty--because he was already there. He happened to be serving his yearly two-week reserve stint soon after Iraq’s takeover of Kuwait and flew a 10-day cargo mission into the Gulf region. He did the same in late January and heard a rumor while at an Eastern air base that his unit was being activated.

A call to Norton confirmed it.

Brann traveled all night to report, catching two hours of sleep, and promptly came down with the flu. Now, temporarily grounded by medics’ orders, he nonetheless expects to see duty this week aboard his C-141 cargo plane. In the meantime, he has had to arrange for the maintenance of his home, to get his will together and to show his brother where his personal records were kept. He also had to pass the news to his mother, who had fearfully watched him go to war in Vietnam, and to his teen-age daughter.

During Vietnam, Brann flew dozens of C-141 missions; he has transported money, satellites, rocket motors, bombs, troops, corpses, food and even whole jet aircraft--fighters with the wings removed. As a reservist, his missions to the Persian Gulf have been limited to 10 days; as an active-duty pilot, he can expect them to average 25 days--and in some cases, much longer than that.

Asked about fear, he concedes that he will feel it. “Only at night,” Brann said, “when it’s raining metal. I’ve talked to some of the guys who have been through Scud (missile) attacks. It’s pandemonium.”