County Mounting Operation Parade : Gulf War: 3,000 service personnel and up to 500,000 spectators will savor victory Saturday with bands, floats and military displays.

EL TORO — In the months when Cpl. Gene Langford struggled for breath in the thick humidity of the Saudi Arabian desert or tossed about in the sand fighting for sleep, one of the Marine’s greatest fears was that his 3-year-old son in Tustin would not remember him.

For the eight months he was gone, Langford’s wife, Robin, told him that little Jonathon would break out his toy airplane, place a GI Joe doll inside the cockpit and say, “Daddy, come home. Daddy, come home.”

When Langford’s plane finally did return in March, Robin and Jonathon were there waiting. “He ran up to me and just stopped and looked at me,” Langford said. “I was crying, and he stood there for three or four minutes before he finally hugged me. I was glad he remembered me.”

Coming home.

It’s what Maj. Thomas (Marbles) Shaw dreamed about after streaking through the skies over Kuwait on combat missions in his El Toro-based F/A-18 fighter jet. And it is a time that Capt. Louie Narvaez will never forget, when what seemed like the “whole town” of Bangor, Me., turned out to greet him and other troops as they stopped en route to Orange County in March. “It was the most hugs and kisses I ever had,” the CH-46E Sea Knight helicopter pilot said.

On Saturday, Orange County will join in the patriotic fervor that has swept the nation following the Gulf victory, hosting a grand and colorful parade of marching bands and military hardware expected to draw more than 500,000 people.

Not since the end of World War I has Orange County staged such an event to welcome home the country’s fighting men. Jonathon and his dad will be there, as will Shaw and Narvaez, joining an estimated 3,000 local troops to parade along Alton Parkway near the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, on a route stretching from Irvine Boulevard to Jeronimo Road.

“We hope this will be a day in which all Orange County residents can offer a tribute to the men and women who served in the Persian Gulf,” said Board of Supervisors Chairman Gaddi H. Vasquez, who has led the effort to coordinate the event. “The outpouring of spirit and the number of volunteers this has drawn defies anything I have ever been involved in.”

Named “Operation Orange County Victory Parade,” the event will feature floats, a group of Britain’s Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, giant helium balloons (one in the shape of the Liberty Bell), M-60 tanks and a Patriot missile, which gained fame for its effectiveness against Iraqi Scud missile attacks.

Vasquez said the floats will be decorated with fresh flowers and will display themes celebrating the military family and national patriotic symbols. The Dragoon Guards, an elite British unit, fought with U.S. Marines in the Persian Gulf as part of the famous “Desert Rats” of Britain’s 7th Armored Brigade.

Scheduled to begin at 11 a.m., the parade is expected to last about 90 minutes. The festivities are to continue through Sunday, when the Tustin Marine Corps Air Station will hold its annual open house to display Marine helicopters used in Operation Desert Storm. The base will also stage 5- and 10-kilometer runs.

“I really hope it’s a day for people to express their appreciation, not only for those who served in the Gulf, but for all those who have served in the military,” Vasquez said. “This is our big salute.”

Although the nationwide attention paid to returning troops has been waning, the memories of war and, especially, the fears, are still clear in the minds of many who served in the Gulf. Some of those experiences, they say, have changed them and their families forever.

For Langford, 21, the desert heat--128 degrees when he landed in Dhahran last August--and the constant Scud threat became disturbing factors in his everyday existence.

“I am from Florida and I know humidity,” Langford said, “but I have never felt humidity like that. The sun came up at 5 a.m. It would get hot by 6:30 a.m. and by 7 it was 90 degrees. You didn’t have to do anything. My shirt was soaking wet.”

At night, the corporal, who served in a support unit for the VMFA 314 Black Knights, said he was in bed by 3 a.m. but hardly ever slept.

“I would put my gas mask next to my head and just lay there,” he said.

The country’s support for the Persian Gulf War didn’t hit Langford until, attired in his dress blues, he arrived back in the United States and was flying to Florida to pick up his family for the trip home to Tustin.

“Everybody talked to me,” Langford said. “The flight attendants and the pilots came back. People would switch seats to talk to me during the flights. It was really neat. I don’t know the feeling . . . the support. . . . It is so hard to explain. When I called home, the (telephone) operators would want to talk to you.”

Ask Marbles Shaw, 35, what he remembers about going to war last summer and he will describe for you a scene pulled from a Hollywood movie script.

Shaw, whose nickname was inspired by his eyes, one blue and one brown, was taken along with other pilots to a darkened runway in Beaufort, S.C., where F/A-18 Hornets sat glistening under harsh flood lights, waiting to fly to the Middle East.

“It was like the scene in ‘Close Encounters of a Third Kind,’ ” Shaw said, “where you come on an alien landing site. Here were these airplanes loaded for bear, and not a whole lot of talking. Everybody just kind of filed out of the van, got into them and we were gone, off to the Persian Gulf. The only thing that was missing was background music.”

But once in the Gulf, Shaw found himself dreaming of his wife, DeAnn, and the kids, 8-year-old Steven and 5-year-old Michael.

“For seven months, somewhere around 2 or 3 in the morning when I was asleep, in my mind I was back home. And then to wake up and realize you are out there in a combat zone and you are going to fly a combat mission, it was tough to get used to.”

After he arrived home, Shaw said, the dreams continued about the same time of the morning, but this time they were visions of life back in the Gulf.

“To wake up (at home) was a real luxury,” Shaw said.

After his experiences, Shaw says, he doesn’t “sweat the small stuff any more.”

“I realize certain things are out of my control. Life can be short. I think I have grown up a little bit.”

Narvaez, 30, spent most of his time at the Jubail airfield in eastern Saudi Arabia and moved from place to place as the conflict escalated, transporting the injured and flying rescue missions in the areas of downed aircraft.

“The feeling that you were actually at war came when you . . . crossed the border for the first time and you knew that there is someone down there who has the capability to shoot at you,” he said. “Going into combat: I would like to describe it as pregame butterflies. When you are excited you take a couple of breaths.”

Yet, despite the nervousness and the longing for his 9-year-old son, Stephen, and 14-month-old daughter, Briana, coming home has meant considerable adjustment.

“It is a fast life out here,” Narvaez said of his return home. “Traffic, phone calls, the bills and all that stuff. We (friends) were talking about it last night. . . . In a way, we wish we were back there.

“Life was simpler. You got your routine pretty much set up. You wanted to eat, you eat. Time off: You either rested or you worked out. You had only one goal, one job and one effort common to everybody.”

Narvaez, who flies with the HMM-161 squadron out of Tustin, also remembers how good it felt to come home on that day with his colleagues in Bangor.

“When we got there, (airport officials) said there are some people out there who want to meet you,” the captain said. “It was real neat. The VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars was there) and there was a long line of people shaking our hands.

“We thought it was the whole town. . . . They had their babies come up to you and kiss you or hug you. It was something.”

Operation Orange County Victory Parade

Highlights of Saturday’s Operation Orange County Victory Parade:

* Some 4,500 participants in all, including 3,000 military troops and their families.

* The 55-member Royal Scots Dragoon Guards from Britain, an elite band of bagpipers and drummers popularly known as the “Desert Rats,” in one of three U.S. postwar appearances.

* A dozen motorized military units, including M-60 tanks, artillery units and a Patriot missile battery.

* Fireworks, two dozen military and high-school bands, sculpted floats, a military flyover by fighter jets in formation, the U.S. Marine Corps Color Guard, and other attractions.