O.C. Troops’ Training Paid ‘Big Dividends’

When Saddam Hussein was still a threat and Iraq’s vaunted Republican Guard was feared but untested, young Jason Fain spent most mornings in his fishing boat just off Newport Beach, wondering how many American troops would not come home.

The 21-year-old commercial fisherman feared that a resumption of the draft would take him from the job he loved so much and, more important, that the massive allied force assembled in the desert 12,000 miles away would ignite World War III. It was a grim time. Reservists were being called to service by the thousands and enlisted men and women spent spare moments dictating their wills.

But when the shooting started, the crush of body bags never came. Although the first days of combat were heavy with dread, history will no doubt reflect a war remarkable for its swiftness and precision.

That chapter of history will tell the story of fighting men and women from Marine bases at El Toro, Tustin and Camp Pendleton. Marine aviators were among the first to drop bombs when the air war started and the first to breach the border of Kuwait when the ground war erupted Feb. 24. Their high-tech helicopters and F/A-18 Hornets cleared the way with missiles, smart bombs and anti-tank rockets, the likes of which the enemy had never seen before.

But when the big guns stopped rumbling, the tens of thousands of Marines, hundreds of tanks and aircraft sent from Orange County and Camp Pendleton were mostly unscarred by battle.

“It was absolutely incredible that so few lives were lost and so few airplanes and tanks were damaged,” said Marine Maj. Gen. Donald E. P. Miller, a Pentagon planning director. “It was a textbook execution of Gen. (H. Norman) Schwarzkopf’s battle plan. Marines all along knew they were faced with a formidable enemy . . . I don’t think anyone ever thought it would be this easy.”

For family members left to wait anxiously at home, the war was never easy. And for the family of Marine Cpl. Stephen E. Bentzlin, Orange County’s only known casualty, lives have been changed forever.

“I know all of us are proud of the men and women who are over there,” said Bentzlin’s 29-year-old widow, Carol, who lives just outside San Clemente, “but I hope nobody forgets the families who were left at home, because they were heroes, too.”

Those left behind formed support groups in which they waged battles of their own to overcome loneliness, promote patriotism in their neighborhoods and buoy the spirits of allied forces abroad with gift boxes at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

In a matter of weeks after troops began to depart for the Persian Gulf, the membership of Kathy Collier’s Anaheim-based group ballooned from just a handful to a list that now tops 175 families. The organization, which produces a newsletter circulated in Saudi Arabia, has been touted on national television as a model for similar groups across the country.

Members of such groups, which sprouted throughout the Southland, shared letters and photographs from their loved ones, formed car pools and relayed information about key developments in the war as quickly as news networks could report them. Red, white, blue and especially yellow were their battle colors.

“After all is said and done, we were proud to be a part of this,” said Collier. “We are coming away with lifelong friendships. We proved we did not have to sit home alone and muster through this by ourselves.”

Today, Collier’s group has scheduled what promises to be a raucous victory celebration at the Crescent Baptist Church in Anaheim.

At Moulton Elementary School in Laguna Niguel, dozens of schoolchildren joined letter-writing campaigns to soldiers in the field. Initially, school officials feared that children would be devastated by news of heavy casualties, but computer instructor Carolyn Grubb, whose Marine husband is in the Gulf, said the children were celebrating Thursday morning.

“We all expected this to be much worse than it was,” Grubb said. “It is hard to believe that it turned out this way. I am still shaking. I think we are all looking forward to the time when they come home.”

Marines here and in the Middle East credited the success and the low loss of life to training and the mettle of the men and women in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf.

It was hard for them to hide their pride.

“We did our job extremely well,” said Maj. Jim V. McClain of the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro, who has been in Saudi Arabia since August. “We would have never enjoyed the success we did without the training and preparation we had before we were shipped here.”

In a telephone interview from Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, McClain said that while the months away from home have been difficult, time has been well spent getting ready for battle. In the end, he said, this “paid big, very big dividends.”

Miller, a former commanding general of the 3rd Aircraft Wing at El Toro and now director of planning for the Marine Corps in Washington, D.C., said the Gulf War should silence critics of the military as to whether it is properly trained and can fight.

“When they started the attack across the border and ended up in Kuwait city, they had been up 42 hours on the attack,” Miller said. “That should tell you something about the fortitude of those young kids. They don’t get any better.

“I don’t care what the old-timers say, I would put those kids up against any aviator or any ground guy. I’m glad I’m not competing against them, because I wouldn’t make the cut, they’re that good.”

F/A-18 pilots from El Toro were among the first to drop bombs on the enemy in a pre-dawn attack Jan. 17, using infrared pods to see their targets in the darkness and destroy two Scud missile storage sites in southeastern Iraq.

Hornets, Harriers and A-6E Intruders under the command of Maj. Gen. Royal N. Moore Jr. of El Toro flew thousands of sorties during the war. They lost only two AV-8 Harriers and no F/A-18s or Intruders.

Even more remarkable was the low number of casualties suffered by Camp Pendleton’s 1st Division, which not only fought in the initial battle of Khafji, but later spearheaded the attack to take Kuwait city, which Schwarzkopf described as “brilliant, absolutely superb.”

Once the 20,000-Marine division began its march to the Kuwaiti capital, McClain said, heavily armed Cobra helicopters from Camp Pendleton were out in front destroying tanks (they had 50 kills to their credit) and enemy bunkers. For weeks F/A-18s and Harriers had been softening up the narrow corridor that the troops passed through, and CH-46 and CH-53 helicopters from Tustin moved thousands of troops north of the border. McClain said 50 helicopters were involved in that initial attack.

Preliminary casualty figures show 89 Americans were killed in the war.

Of those, 16 were Marines. Five of those Marines died after the ground campaign was launched. Six are missing in action, three since the ground war began, and 46 have been wounded, 34 since Feb. 24.

Military officials said no one from the air stations in Tustin and El Toro died in the Persian Gulf War (a total of 8,000 men and women were sent to the Gulf from the two Orange County bases). Seven Marines from Camp Pendleton have been killed since January, all but one of them in the fight to regain the Saudi border town of Khafji, a preview to the ground war.

Back in August, during the initial troop movements, and in the subsequent months leading up to combat, a swift, decisive victory seemed only a dream.

“You had that awful feeling inside that things may not go well,” Collier said of the weeks of waiting after her son, Darrin, shipped out to join the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division in the Gulf. “We thought we were up against a much bigger enemy. We were prepared for the worst.”

In fact, Collier’s support group invited military officials to a meeting to discuss how family members would be notified in the event their husbands, wives, sons or daughters became casualties of war.

“We were very fortunate when you compare the number of casualties with the total number deployed. Orange County was really spared. With all those Marines from Camp Pendleton over there, somebody in San Clemente should put together a ticker-tape parade for them when they get back. We’re all very grateful.”

Outside of school, Grubb marvels at the outpouring of support she has received from neighbors, some of whom hold strong anti-war views. “Looking back, I almost get the feeling that people are trying to make up for what happened during Vietnam,” she said. “The people got really personally involved in this.”

Looking back on the past five weeks, Brig. Gen. Harry W. Blot, who is in charge of the

remaining forces in the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, said he did not imagine the war going so well, even in his wildest dreams.

“How can you take on an army of one million men and say, ‘I’m going to take casualties of less than 100 people’?

“We could probably kill that many in peacetime accidents just running up and down the interstate.”