Family Life Often Revolved Around Base

El Toro Marine Corps Air Station will forever be memorialized in Carolyn Hahn’s mind as a place of refuge.

“You’d go on base, and the Marines would salute, and you would say, ‘OK. I’m safe now.’ ”

Hahn is among the last in a long line of military wives whose lives over the years have revolved around El Toro just as closely as their spouses’ have.

Her husband, Capt. Rick Hahn, a Navy dentist assigned to the Marine Corps, was among the first wave to leave for Operation Desert Storm in 1990. The Mission Viejo homemaker tried to carry on life as usual with the couple’s two children. It was at the base with other military wives that she found support. “Most of us just went numb,” she recalls. “We had no idea what to feel, other than being scared and praying they would be safe.”

Activities on base for children and spouses left behind included an elaborate Christmas party. The Hahns’ oldest son had his 6th birthday party at the base’s bowling alley.

Now, as her husband is set to retire, Hahn hopes her children will always remember what she told them as they were growing up beneath the scream of jets overhead: “I always said to my kids, ‘That’s the sound of freedom.’ ”