40 Reservists Volunteer for Mideast Duty

Forty medical evacuation technicians from the Air National Guard unit at Point Mugu have volunteered to support “Operation Desert Shield” in the Middle East and are scheduled to depart early next week, a spokesman said Friday.

The team of medical technicians and nurses will report for duty as early as Monday to go through “mobilization processing” at the Channel Islands Air National Guard Base next to Point Mugu, said base spokesman Maj. Michael W. Ritz.

After a day of briefings, paperwork and inoculations, the group will deploy to an undisclosed location, Ritz said. The group, which will leave on one of the base’s C-130 Hercules cargo planes, could go as early as Tuesday, he said. The final timetable is still being developed, he said.

The 40 volunteers will not be the first members of the 146th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron to join in Operation Desert Shield, the military name for the U.S. mobilization brought on by Iraq’s invasion of neighboring Kuwait.

“We deployed five already last Sunday,” Ritz said. These volunteers are a small portion of the 165 members in the air evacuation squadron. Six squadron members are full-time technicians assigned to the Channel Islands base.

The rest are traditional Guard reservists who are on duty one weekend a month and undergo two weeks of annual training and occasional flying proficiency training.

All of the emergency medical technicians and nurses live in Ventura and Los Angeles counties, he said. Some of the volunteers are women.

The air evacuation squadron is attached to the 146th Tactical Airlift Wing, which has 16 C-130 Hercules cargo planes stationed at the Channel Islands base. The air evacuation technicians take the wounded from battlefield medics, stabilize them and transport them to a hospital.

The medical technicians and nurses are trained to operate on C-130s or other larger cargo planes--such as the C-5A Galaxy and the C-141B Starlifter--used by branches of the military.

“They are capable of working in a chemical warfare environment,” Ritz said. Each technician will be equipped with a chemical-resistant suit. U.S. forces stationed in Saudi Arabia are bracing for the possibility of Iraq using chemical weapons, as it did in its eight-year war with Iran.

“They are volunteering to do this, rather than being ordered to do it,” Ritz said. “A number of them were down in Panama during ‘Operation Just Cause,’ ” he said, referring to the U.S. military operation that toppled Manuel Noriega.

As of Friday, the Air National Guard base had not received orders to call any of its units to active duty. The 1,400-member base’s principal mission is to provide airlift equipment and personnel for ground forces within a military “theater of operation.”

“As for now, we were asked if volunteers were available and this group is going,” Ritz said.

On Friday, top-ranking officers of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps began to activate reservists nationwide. Most of these reserve forces are destined to go to the “theater of operation” in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, a Pentagon spokesman said earlier this week.