Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 27, 1991 TAG: 9102270126
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
They were both 21 and had become engaged the week before Yates left for active duty with 50 other Navy Seabee reservists based in Roanoke.
It was a lengthy, early-morning airport goodbye before a commercial jet took Yates and the others from Roanoke to Port Hueneme, Calif. Now Yates is stationed on Okinawa.
He and the other reservists were sent to scattered posts in the South Pacific to replace regulars who went to Saudi Arabia.
"I'm OK," Chris Hasselman said last week. "I'm a little lonely, but I'm OK."
The loneliness is diluted somewhat at 10 o'clock every Saturday night. That is when Yates, a Virginia Tech student, calls her collect from Okinawa.
This also results in a "a really huge phone bill" that doesn't particularly bother her.
There also were the two dozen red roses she got from Yates on Valentine's Day.
Yates, she said, is doing all right, but "he wishes he was home and in school."
Chris Hasselman is one of many Western Virginians left behind when reservists were called up because of war in the Persian Gulf.
Although the long-awaited ground war in the gulf started this week and was going well, the reservists still had an undetermined amount of time to serve.
Just before Thanksgiving, Robert Wright, a 39-year-old Hillsville reservist, found himself saying an unexpected goodbye to his wife, Hope, 33.
The Wrights were in the Army Reserve's 343rd Medical Company in Galax.
She has been the full-time administrator for the company, as well as a specialist in the motor pool. He was a sergeant and it had seemed they were going to Saudi Arabia together.
They made quick plans for parents to keep their 9-year-old son, Brandon.
But the day the outfit left for Fort Pickett, Robert Wright was told he was medically unfit to go. Hope Wright went on active duty alone and is now in Saudi Arabia.
"They pulled me at the last minute, said I couldn't go," he said in a recent interview. "It kind of upset me. There was no reason why I shouldn't have gone."
But he is is at home with Brandon.
Wright explained that he had been in a serious automobile accident several years ago, which caused multiple bone fractures.
This made him unable to do exercises such as running or push-ups, but he continued as a non-commissioned officer in the company.
But "a captain somewhere down the road" scratched him from the company roster before the 343rd left, although, "I proved I could do everything I was supposed to do."
Wright said he is not bitter about his treatment by the reserves: "They were good to me. They kept me in."
His wife, he said, is "doing pretty good" despite not getting any mail. He said he writes her every day but "mail's a bitch over there. She calls when she can find a phone."
Brandon, he said, is getting along all right without his mother.
"Everything's fine with him," Robert Wright said. "We just miss her and want her home."
Desert Storm was a week old when 24-year-old Phillip Hash reported for active duty with other members of a Navy Reserve amphibious construction detachment based in Roanoke.
He left his wife, Lorinda, 21, behind after two years of marriage.
Lorinda Hash came to Roanoke from the Eastern Shore to attend National Business College, so she's far from home.
But, she said in a recent interview, her husband's folks have been kind to her. They "have been very supportive," she said. "They call me and make sure I don't need anything.
"It was hard at first. I cried every day. I'm getting a little better every day.
"You begin to tough it out."
Her husband called her on a recent morning at 4:15. He said he was on a ship, but he couldn't tell her where.
"He just told me he was safe," she said.
To help tough it out, she said, "I've been praying day and night."
It was late August when Scotty White left his job as senior cardiovascular technologist at Roanoke Memorial Hospital and headed for active duty at Portsmouth Naval Hospital.
White, 43, was among the first Navy reservists called up to replace medical regulars who had been sent to the Middle East.
He left his wife, Carolyn, also 43; his daughter, Michelle, 18, and his son, Matthew, 12.
His leaving also created some financial anxiety because of a gap between his reserve and civilian pay.
But Carolyn White said that has subsided now.
"It hasn't been that bad," she said, although "it kind of got to me at first."
For example, they will have the mortgage on their Southwest Roanoke County home paid off by time Michelle goes to college this fall.
There were some problems with health insurance, but those have been solved.
Scotty White gets home on occasional weekends and probably won't miss Michelle's graduation from Cave Spring High School.
Carolyn White works as a secretary at Brambleton Family Physicians. She has a sharp perception of family budgeting.
Her husband's absence means there are no longer two cars at home, but the distance from his quarters to the hospital in Portsmouth is shorter than his Roanoke Valley commute.
Thus, she figures, they probably are saving on gas.
But the other expenses go on, she said.
Carolyn White said she is worried about the reserve system in the country after the war is over.
"We're able to deal with" the call to active duty, she said, but "those in their 20s . . . they just never thought this was going to happen to them."
"I think the reserves are going to lose a lot of people."
She said she is grateful that the chances of her husband going to the Middle East are slim. She recalled telling him: "We knew there was a chance [of active duty] when you joined 20 years ago."
Members "used the reserves for an extra payday," she said.
And when the call-up came, she and her husband said: "OK. It's pay-back time."
by CNB