COLUMN ONE : Budget Cut Blues Hit the Ranks : Military downsizing has meant dreams broken or deferred. After years of loyal service, many feel confused and betrayed. ‘The future isn’t there for so many of us,’ one Navy man sighs.

The bad news came at sea. Navy Capt. Chris Cole and his crew of 350 were returning here last summer when they learned their El Paso, a 24-year-old, steel-and-gray amphibious cargo ship, was coming home for good.

It will be decommissioned next month, its days of ferrying personnel and equipment to far-off places such as Somalia gone forever.

Cole is lean and tall, almost towering, his bearing ramrod straight. He’s been a Navy man for two decades. Despite his military demeanor, he struggled against tears to describe the decision to mothball his beloved ship.

“As a naval officer, I understand it,” he said. “The country wants to cut the military budget. But as a captain of a ship, I can hardly talk about it. It’s a wonderful ship. It’s a wonderful crew.

“The ship is metal and paint. But it’s the crew that brings it to life.”

The human toll of military downsizing is clear. Across the nation, many people are learning--grudgingly--that a service career may not be as promising or rewarding and certainly not as lasting as it once was.

Gone with the Cold War is the job security it provided. Units with illustrious pasts are being disbanded. Promising careers are being cut short. For those who stay in the service, forced transfers are all too common.

“It’s disappointing,” said Maj. David Deykes, a 43-year-old West Point graduate and one-time field infantry platoon leader. He has been told that June 30 is his last day in the Army.

“You take it personal at first,” Deykes said. “Everybody does. You try for a goal and you fail. Suddenly, the Army is not placing any special fidelity and trust in you any more.”

Deykes fears for his own future and that of the armed forces.

But to some experts, the human toll of downsizing is not all that worrisome. Charles Moskos, a Northwestern University military sociologist, points out that the Army, which has been saddled with the brunt of the reductions, has already made virtually all the necessary cuts and is “out of the woods.” The Navy and Air Force, he said, did not face such drastic changes.

“Sure, there’s been a lot of heartbreak,” he said, “but institutionally (the reduction) has been a remarkable success. If civilian industry had to cut this far, there would have been blood all over the floor.”

“A lot of the uneasiness is because of the wild stories that are circulating about the cutbacks,” said Lawrence J. Korb, a former Defense Department manpower official now at the Brookings Institution. “It’s scared away some of the kids.”

He blames the Pentagon for letting rumors of mass firings, though largely false, go unchallenged.

Whether real or imagined, the so-called drawdown has troubled and confused many and even left some feeling betrayed.

For eight years, Lt. Pat Dennison devoted his career to the Navy, working aboard the aircraft carrier fleet and seeing duty in the Persian Gulf. All he wanted to do was go to sea. But once he realized that ships were being dry-docked, he was retrained in public affairs.

Now 30 years old and at the midpoint of the 20 years’ service needed to earn his retirement, Dennison wonders if he’ll make it to the end. “These ship cutbacks are scaring me,” he said. “Getting promoted has become too competitive. Career enhancement isn’t there. A lot of my friends were giving up and getting out.

“The future isn’t there for so many of us.”

Two rounds of base closings have devastated dozens of defense installations nationwide. And commanders spared so far are having to justify why their posts should not be shuttered in a third round set for 1995. Total uniformed personnel, nearly 1.8 million at the end of 1992, is heading for 1.5 million by the end of next year.

Soldiers are returning by the tens of thousands from attractive Army posts in Europe. More than 100 Navy ships have been decommissioned, many of them mothballed at East Coast shipyards-turned-graveyards. Some are broken down into spare parts; others sold to foreign governments.

Stealthy, slender “nuclear attack submarines” that once spied on Russian subs are serving as escorts for naval battle groups or as floating museums for cadets at Annapolis, Md. The Strategic Air Command, once the Air Force’s “first alert” nuclear defense, closed two years ago, costing 3,000 military jobs in Omaha.

All four military services are drastically slashing the numbers of new recruits. Even still, the Army and Air Force have had to jettison thousands of personnel, mainly by attrition and special retirement incentives. The Navy and Marine Corps so far have not had to let anyone go, but they are requiring all first-term enlistees to compete for a second tour of duty.

The Navy Training Center in San Diego, where 25,000 recruits used to go through boot camp each year, closed in November.

“They made the Navy sound bigger than it really is,” said Brian Beltz, a 19-year-old from Findlay, Ohio, and a member of the last boot camp class there. “They made it sound like the President was coming to our graduation and everything, and he didn’t. They built our hopes up.”

Unlike drawdowns following World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars, this one seems particularly painful to the rank-and-file trying to make a living in uniform.

In the past, the Pentagon has simply cut from the bottom, said Carl Cocke, head of research and analysis at the Center for Military History in Washington. The draftees were the first to leave, almost always by their own decision.

This time, it is the career soldiers and sailors who feel they are caught in the greatest swath of personnel cuts. There are fewer jobs, fewer promotions.

“The one dark cloud on the horizon in recruiting is we have substantial statistics which indicate a decrease in the propensity to enlist,” Defense Secretary William J. Perry said recently. “Many young people believe the Army is no longer recruiting, no longer bringing new people into it in the face of the drawdown.”

At the San Diego boot camp, it is clear that the Navy is not what it used to be. All but three of the center’s 80 buildings are closed, the furniture and equipment moved out. The staff has been cut from 500 to 40, and the rest are ticketed for departure soon.

“When we found out about this, it was utter disbelief,” said Capt. Patricia M. Spishock, the assistant chief of staff. “It was like going through a denial process.”

In Northern California near Monterey, there is--or was--Ft. Ord. Once bustling with 35,000 service members and dependents, the historic Army post is down to 1,000 and targeted to drop to 500 by the end of this month.

Gone too is the 7th Infantry Division, which saw action in both world wars, Korea and Panama. One of its last missions was to help restore calm during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

The 7th is one of four Army divisions that are being eliminated. Soldiers still left at Ft. Ord are turning to new assignments or preparing for new lives out of the military.

Jon Hatemi, 23, an infantryman, has decided to take on one more enlistment, this time as a military policeman, before returning home to Inglewood. After that, he said, “it’s time to move onto bigger and better things.”

Staff Sgt. Betty Ramos, 33, has spent 10 years as an Army chaplain and goes from Ft. Ord to Ft. Monroe, Va.

“It’s early mornings and late evenings and it could go into nights,” Ramos said of her job. “They’re drawing down and it’s getting competitive, but I think I can hold my own.”

Capt. Bryan Cox is leaving. Thirty-four years old, with nine years’ service, he is taking a $60,000 severance bonus under the Army’s volunteer separation program. He plans to open a commercial golfing range.

Cox, who has four sons, didn’t feel he could pass up the bonus money. “I wanted the cash in hand,” he said.

And as Ft. Ord closes, those at the Monterey County veterans center are feeling the pinch as well.

With the post’s closing, there go the local health and medical care facilities.

For them, it means a day’s bus ride to the Bay Area for treatment at the closest military installation.

“If I could have seen what the military was doing today, I would have gone somewhere else,” said Joe DeWitt, a 20-year Army soldier before he retired in 1977.

At Norfolk, where the sailors from the El Paso are living on a berthing barge and emptying their ship, the future remains uncertain.

Some, like Petty Officer Larry Brock with 24 years’ service, are retiring sooner than they would have liked.

With the ship’s decommissioning, he said, he cannot expect to win another promotion.

“I promised my wife not to get out unless I was forced out, and here I’m being forced out anyway,” Brock said.

Others like Seaman Sal DeFazio, with only two years’ service, are being transferred for new training. He’s hopeful there’s a future when he’s done. “My only fear is that they’re going to cut down too much,” he said.

Adm. Henry H. Mauz Jr., commander-in-chief of the Atlantic Fleet, sympathizes with their uncertainty.

“They’re concerned about the future,” Mauz said. “Will there be a Navy? What will it be? I tell them to have hope.”

Aboard the Gunston Hall, the 325-man crew takes pride in its re-enlistment rate. They like to call their ship the “Gunston Hilton.” But many feel the pressure to compete against each other for promotions.

Lt. Cmdr. Chris Chace, the ship’s executive officer, recalled how one sailor was sent to an admiral’s mast for punishment for a minor infraction--a short absence from duty--that cost him any real chance to promote later. “That was it for him,” Chace said.

Master Chief Rick Yarbrough thanks the Navy for helping him mature when he enlisted as a troubled youth. “And the Navy did a lot for me. It gave me a life, gave me a career. Now I’m ready to go out.”

His retirement from the ship’s signal corps will come soon, and already he’s worried that the skills he has learned will not help him in the civilian world. “There’s not a lot of jobs out there for a signalman,” he said.

Across the base, classes are doubling at the Transaction Assistance Program.

Begun four years ago to help sailors ease back into civilian life, the program first offered a dozen sessions a year, with about 75 in each class.

That number has climbed to 24 sessions a year, with class sizes of 150 or more.

Jeannie Keith, 20, from Bowling Green, Ky., is leaving after just two years, upset that her classification as a machinist mate prevents her from switching to nursing. The Navy health care slots, she found, are overstaffed, while machinist mate positions are understaffed. So she’s stuck.

She started to talk about her predicament, and then began to cry. She said it wasn’t fair to have to quit the Navy to better herself. “I have to leave to get ahead,” she said.

Those same kinds of pressures are being felt in the Pentagon.

Col. William Foster, an Army war planner, helped devise the strategy of closing posts in Europe and reassigning soldiers throughout the United States.

In the 1990s, Foster said, the military is finding itself undertaking a wide array of responsibilities, such as drug interdiction and peacekeeping, and many servicemen and women are being deployed more often and to more hot spots.

“It causes turbulence and uncertainty,” he acknowledged. “They are being asked to deploy more than before. Your time away from your home station is increased. There’s a certain perception that the stress is higher. But there’s also the old adage that a busy soldier is a happy soldier.”

Even those with plum assignments are not feeling all that comfortable.

When the old weather tracking operation was closed recently at McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento, less than a fourth of the 200 crew members was chosen for a more ambitious program: flying the Open Skies reconnaissance missions over the Soviet Union and two dozen other countries.

Most of the weather pilots passed over for the Open Skies mission at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha were given less exciting assignments. Some retired. Some took desk jobs.

But even the 43 lucky ones who were selected still do not see it as a firm sign of job security.

“Sometimes,” said Capt. Curt Lindskog, a pilot with nearly 20 years in the Air Force, “the ax falls indiscriminately.”