The Waiting Gives Way to More Waiting : Bases: The ground war breaks the tension around Southland Marine facilities. But more uncertainty is ahead.

The long, dreary, numbing wait is over.

Now, the briefer, more nerve-racking wait has begun.

In the barracks and houses that cluster around Southern California’s Marine bases, in the churches and bars that offer their own kinds of solace, the news that the ground war had finally come was a break, if not exactly a joyous one, from the tension that has overhung these places since men and women shipped out for the Persian Gulf as long as half a year ago.

“There’s a sense of relief that the ground war has started,” Rita Hall said Sunday morning outside a church near Camp Pendleton. Her husband’s 17-year career as a Marine sergeant was winding uneventfully down toward retirement when he was sent overseas to help with combat training.

“We don’t think it will last long,” Hall said with conviction. “This is the last phase, and then they’ll be coming home.”

From the first, military families have clung to the premise that a full-scale war couldn’t be over until the ground war had begun, and now, at last, it had.

“Bombing is not going to win this war,” said Lance Cpl. William R. McNett, 22, who had stopped in at the El Toro Marine Corps air station on Sunday. “You have got to go in and take some land. I think it’s great. . . . We’re tired of waiting.”

A Marine wife was coming out of the 10:30 a.m. Mass at Blessed Sacrament Church in Twentynine Palms, five miles from the Marine base that has sent thousands of men and women--65 from her parish--to the Gulf.

“I’m glad it started, because the sooner it starts the sooner they’ll be home. I just want it over with,” she said. She would not give her name; her husband is a sergeant in a light-armored vehicle at the front.

Their two children, ages 3 and 4, who went romping off into the sunshine outside the red-tile-roofed church, will be getting counseling this week, she said. All of this is just too hard on them.

Not that it’s been easy on her. Sunday’s confident military predictions about a quick and easy ground war were too familiar. “That is what they said with the air war too, at first.”

From the seaside towns edging Camp Pendleton to the desert community of Twentynine Palms--its weather reports so like those in the Saudi desert--these places have always rolled with the punches, and they figure to do it again.

Many spouses have steeled themselves for this moment for so long that the reality of ground war, in the words of Karyl Ketchum at Camp Pendleton, “hasn’t hit me.” Her husband, Staff Sgt. Dwight Ketchum, fought at Kafji a few weeks ago and his unit suffered casualties. Their children, ages 9 and 7, have not taken any of this well. “They’re convinced in their minds he won’t return. That’s the safety factor they’ve put up in their minds. When he calls, they won’t talk to him.”

Barbara Lee, 33, spent Sunday doing what she guessed her sergeant-husband was doing half the world away: her duty. She went to church, drove her 7-year-old daughter to a Brownies meeting, and headed to work as a hotel cook.

“There isn’t a lot of wailing and moaning going on. This is a military town, and that is the nature of the beast.” But “I don’t feel relief. I would have felt relieved if it hadn’t started and Saddam had left and everybody lived happily ever after. But it isn’t going to happen that way.”

In Tustin, at Debbie Guddeck’s house in the shadow of a giant aircraft hangar, dinner was ready Saturday, the baby-sitter hired, the rented videotapes waiting. She and several friends with family in the Gulf had arranged for a relaxing evening--and then came the ground war.

Guddeck, whose Marine major husband left for the Gulf six months ago, decided the news could wait a bit, and so she taped it. “After dinner, we watched ‘Beaches’ and we cried. Then we watched the news and cried again.”

On Sunday morning, she scanned more censor-delayed footage “thinking I might see my husband. I don’t know where he is. I know that he is riding in a LAV (a light-armored vehicle). And I know he doesn’t like that. I just hope that the phone doesn’t ring and that there are no knocks on the door.”

At churches in these towns, clergymen strove to weave the virtues of peace into the justifications for war. Tambourines accompanied the choir at the storefront Faith Community Baptist Church in Vista, where the guest pastor, the Rev. Terry Wilcox, told 75 or so parishioners:

“We’re saddened by the need for this (military) action, but we’re supportive of our troops. We’re saddened,” he said, by Iraqi suffering at Saddam’s hands, and “by what he has done to Kuwait and tiny, little Israel with his missiles, and his scorched-earth policy, and of his polluting the Gulf.”

They punctuated his phrases with cries of “Amen!” As for their military men and women, “we want them protected so they can protect others, so they can help others,” said Wilcox. “God is concerned about the souls of all men, even Iraqi souls.”

At Blessed Sacrament in Twentynine Palms, where the altar table is wrapped in a yellow net ribbon bearing the names of its parishioners in Saudi Arabia, the Rev. Gerard McGuinness didn’t mention the war, except to repeat the prayer he’s said almost every Sunday, asking for a quick and safe end to it. “We do best to carry on as normal, not overemphasizing,” he said afterward. “Life has to go on.”

Parishioner Cecilia Plezia, at 70, carries memories of every war since World War II. She is a rarity in town, non-military. She too wore to church the yellow ribbon and the red, white and blue one the church gave away two Sundays ago. But other wars have left her with contrary feelings about this ground assault.

“I never thought we would come to this. I thought we were finished with these types of wars. I was very disappointed. It is so primitive. Yet here we are at it again,” she said sorrowfully.

“We are saying that it is for humane reasons, but actually it is for oil.”

The church services reminded these people of what, the night before, some others had tried for a time to forget.

The Max in Twentynine Palms is one of the few nightspots still open; many closed after the troops shipped out and took their business along with them. Pink abstract neon lights illuminated patrons drinking long-neck beers at the long bar Saturday night, but the TV was pointedly dark.

“It’s not that people don’t care,” explained Cpl. Aaron Brami, 22. “They have just become desensitized to the whole thing. This far down the road, people say, ‘OK, let’s go for it.’ ”

Second Lt. Alex Pashawn, just back from unloading tanks in Saudi Arabia, bent over a pool table in a mirrored back room. “This is not a place to talk about it. This is just a place to get away from it all.”

Standing with their drinks on a deck at the end of San Clemente Pier on Sunday, some Marines from Camp Pendleton were fighting in amiable fashion the only war they’d fought so far--a battle of words.

“I think they (Iraqis) are trying to suck us in so they can use their gas chemicals,” said Lance Cpl. Oscar Hinojosa, 21, between sips of beer.

“I don’t know what to think,” complained Cpl. Elton Fowler, “because they’re not giving us enough information.”

The Pacific Ocean at his feet was a long way from Cpl. Paul Johnston’s Texas home, and a long way from the Persian Gulf. “We either want to go home or we want to go to Saudi,” said Johnston. “We just want to get out of Camp Pendleton.”

Morrison reported from Los Angeles and Murphy from Twentynine Palms. Also contributing to this report were Times staff writers Gebe Martinez, Kevin Johnson and Mark Landsbaum in Orange County and Ray Tessler and Tom Gorman in San Diego.