The Pendleton Preserve : Marines and Environmentalists Are Unlikely Allies in Protecting the Largest Undeveloped Chunk of Southern California Coast

JAMES R. AICHELE spent 40 years in the Marine Corps, a career that spanned a world war, Korea and Vietnam. But ask him which amphibious assault was the most difficult to stage, and he talks about the day a California least tern almost brought the Marine Corps to its knees on its own beach at Camp Pendleton.

“We had a whole bunch of congressmen and dignitaries from all over coming in to view a large landing exercise,” recalls Aichele, who was chief of staff at the time, back in the late ‘70s. “That landing is a big show for us every year, but a week before it was to happen, a woman biologist on base spotted the California least tern on the beach and ordered her people to start putting up barbed wire fence to keep the beach off-limits to us.” The bird is on the federal endangered species list.

To this day, the former colonel is rankled by the memory. “I told her she couldn’t fence off the whole damn beach because we had this big show in a week. It looked to me like the birds were just rummaging along the beach for food and hadn’t begun to nest yet, and I was afraid the biologist was going to let them have the run of the whole beach. But she wouldn’t back down. She said it was her job to protect them.”

Not to be outfoxed by a biologist, Aichele ordered his bulldozers to push natural beach debris down the beach, to lure the birds away from the planned attack site. The biologist was livid, Aichele says, but the war games were played for all to see as the relocated birds nestled in for the summer. Aichele, who retired in 1981, says he shouldn’t be judged too harshly. After a particularly rough winter storm that left the beach slippery smooth, he took the same biologist’s advice and ordered AMTRACS, ship-to-shore assault vehicles, to run up and down the strand to create new sand tracks so the least tern would have nesting ruts to call home.

This sometimes antagonistic but strangely symbiotic relationship between military professionals and passionate environmentalists exists because Camp Pendleton, unique for the variety of combat situations it can simulate, is also one of the most varied wildlife refuges in Southern California. Both the Marines and the naturalists appreciate what they’ve got here: 196 square miles of beaches and bluffs, mesas and canyons, mountains and a free-flowing river. There is room enough to stage amphibious invasions, troop maneuvers and aircraft bombing runs--and to support an estimated 731 species of plants and animals, 10 of them endangered. It’s the largest undeveloped chunk of coastline in Southern California.

While the Marines inadvertently have turned a section of the base into one of the most hazardous toxic-waste sites in the country and sometimes touch off brush fires during training exercises, the environmentalists see them as allies of sorts in an escalating battle to protect the wild lands that remain. Given a choice between 36,000 Marines and the entrepreneurs who’d like to use Camp Pendleton as a toxic-waste landfill, an airport, a toll road or a yacht club, environmental groups--and many San Diegans--will take the Marines. Bombs and all.

FROM THE WINDOW of a Huey helicopter, the sweep of Camp Pendleton looks like a landscape of early California. Stands of California oak stretch their limbs over broad expanses of lush meadow grasses. Thickets of brush and mosaics of cottonwoods, sycamores and alders stand alongside the undammed river. Willows and reeds frame the coastal estuary and marshes. Miles of sand dunes are anchored not by imported ice plant but by native grasses. By day, the sky belongs to golden eagles and hawks; by night, to owls.

The site of the first Christian baptism in upper California and the one-time home of Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor to rule these parts, the Camp Pendleton tract was part of Rancho Santa Margarita--one of the original Spanish land grants--and later a successful cattle ranch. The base, founded in 1942, was named for retired Gen. Joseph H. Pendleton, a decorated Marine during World War I, who urged the Marine Corps to establish a West Coast training center even before the start of World War II.

Today, U.S. Marine Corps Base, Camp Joseph H. Pendleton, is as unsullied a piece of Southern California coast as you’ll find. Winding through its southern portion is what environmentalists call the area’s greatest natural treasure--not its endangered species but the last free-flowing river in Southern California: the Santa Margarita River, which spends 17 of its 27 miles on the base. On the trail along the river bottom, a hiker is apt to come across beavers and deer, quail and dove, coyotes and bobcats, owls and mallards.

“There’s a mystique about this place, even among biologists,” says Slader Buck, a civilian who works as the base’s wildlife biologist and game warden, “because for years everyone ignored Pendleton when they did their wildlife surveys. Now, they’re starting to take note, because we’re the last remaining biological system in Southern California that reaches from the ocean to the coastal mountains.”

Perhaps more important to the 2.3 million residents of San Diego County, Camp Pendleton is a 17-mile-long militarized zone protecting them from the perceived bogyman of Los Angeles and Orange counties. They prize the base as a barrier to Los Angeles’ sprawl southward and what they fear as the ultimate “Los Angelization” of San Diego.

“For 90% of the people who drive along the Coast Highway through the base, Camp Pendleton is open space--a time for us to take a deep breath and relax as we head home for San Diego, or to catch our breath before we dive into the compression--the density, the noise, the smog--of Orange County and Los Angeles,” says Don Wood, president of Citizens Coordinate for Century 3, a respected San Diego-based urban-planning and environmental group. “It’s only occasionally when you see the amphibious landing craft coming onto the beach, like a little Normandy diorama. Usually, all we see are just miles and miles of beaches and open space.”

The land’s serenity is more relative than actual: It does, after all, house a busy community that includes a 600-bed naval hospital, five elementary schools, six Laundromats, a movie theater, a bowling alley, a golf course, horse riding stables, a bank, three Burger King restaurants and a McDonald’s.

And, of course, there’s the 16,000-strong 1st Marine Division with its 3,000 tactical vehicles, 50 tanks, a couple hundred World War II-era landing craft--and 19 new Hovercraft that will take amphibious assaults into the 21st Century by traveling four times faster than their 40-year-old predecessors and by skimming up to 10 miles inland so troops won’t even get their feet wet. There are 90 pistol and rifle ranges, 40 artillery positions and two bombing runs. Still, the base is a peaceful oasis contrasted with the furious building boom taking place nearby as housing developments rise daily in southern Orange County and northern San Diego County.

So treasured is this buffer that Citizens Coordinate for Century 3 persuaded U.S. Rep. Jim Bates (D-San Diego) to sponsor legislation--still being debated--that would forever preserve Camp Pendleton as a national park or wilderness area should the Marine Corps ever pack up and leave. Some folks aren’t waiting for them to leave and have proposed decidedly non-military uses of the base even as the military continues to occupy it. The base operates a Community Planning and Liaison Office simply to deal with the rash of proposals that would grab a piece of Pendleton, a little here, a little there. “ Encroachment --anything that would affect the routine and operation of this base--is a dirty word around here,” says Lt. Col. Ray Spears, who heads the office. “It’s hard to convince people how badly we need this place, especially since we’re getting along better with (Soviet leader Mikhail S.) Gorbachev.”

Spears’ office has identified more than 50 so-called encroachment threats that, he says, would jeopardize the Marines’ training mission. An Orange County group, looking to relieve crowding at John Wayne Airport, identified as one of six finalists--but not the preferred candidate--in its airport-site search a mesa on the base. Three state legislators are pushing legislation that would allow the counties of Orange, San Diego, Riverside and Imperial to form a regional agency to build an airport, and they propose Pendleton as the site. Entrepreneurs have suggested that a toxic-waste landfill be established here. Private developers in southern Riverside County want to build a private toll road across the base. A proposal that a liquefied-natural-gas tanker depot be built on Pendleton’s coast was defeated in the late 1970s; still being discussed is the prospect of oil-drilling platforms off Pendleton’s shoreline. And the City of Oceanside, looking to capitalize on the scheduled 1991 defense of the America’s Cup in San Diego, wants to lease part of the military harbor for use as a private yacht club.

THE MARINES cling to Camp Pendleton because no other base affords the corps a place to stage in symphony such a wide range of military maneuvers: F/A-18 Hornets drop 500-pound bombs on target ranges. Giant Hovercraft attack the beach from the open sea at 45 miles per hour like giant, rubber-skirted water bugs. Thousands of young Marines scamper, hide and march over hills, through canyons and into woods. Artillerymen lob 95-pound shells from 155-millimeter howitzers. They do this in the wet cold of January and in the desert heat of September. Often they train at night, when the black of a moonless sky is suddenly broken by the pop of a bright flare, and red-yellow tracer bullets from machine guns flash like so many bottle rockets.

But conducting large-scale troop maneuvers in the midst of this highly valued stretch of land has become increasingly complicated for the Marines. Besides staving off the many forces that want to appropriate the base’s land, the Marines have had to cope with escalating environmental restrictions. Nearly every week plans for large troop maneuvers are submitted to the base’s natural resources office, which reviews them for environmental impact and can hold up a proposed invasion site or battle.

And, even without outside encroachment, the base commander, Brig. Gen. Richard H. Huckaby, has seen the space available to his troops diminish. Nearly half of the base’s land, most notably along the river and its estuary, is off-limits to his troops. The state leases 2,000 acres for its San Onofre State Beach Park, next to the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, and additional land is used for agriculture.

There is concern that still more land will be marked off-limits to protect the coyote thistle, a small, unspectacular weed that is a candidate for the endangered species list because it is being plowed under throughout Southern California but thrives in the hills of Pendleton.

The troops have become accustomed to modifying their maneuvers to accommodate wildlife. They joke about how they stop target practice when deer move through their shooting range. Bulldozers sent out to establish fire breaks to contain the frequent grass fires zigzag around an area where the endangered Stephen’s kangaroo rat burrows in the ground. Instead of digging latrines that might pollute the ground water that supplies Camp Pendleton, troops in the field use 1,000 portable toilet stalls that dot the landscape. Mechanics doing work on dented vehicles may only use one quart a day of special, infrared-resistant paint because merely opening the can pollutes the air.

“This wouldn’t be a problem at Twentynine Palms (where the Marine Corps have a larger base), because (San Bernardino County) doesn’t have as strict air-quality laws,” says Tom Zugsay, a civilian who is in charge of the environmental protection branch of Camp Pendleton’s natural resources office. “But we’re doing business in a county with one of the strictest air-quality-control standards around.”

The Marines maintain that despite their tanks, troops and howitzer shells, most of the land they use is in better environmental shape today than when they took it over. Says Huckaby: “If I were attacking the coast of California, I couldn’t care less about the eggs of the least tern. But if I’m training here, I can accommodate them. It’s the right thing to do. And it’s the law. I personally consider myself a conservationist of the highest order. The community (off base) develops and destroys habitat all the time. We may become the only place where these critters can live and thrive.”

Still, environmentalists watch the Marines warily. “Military installations are among the worst polluters,” says Carl Pope, deputy director of conservation for the Sierra Club in San Francisco. “The Department of Defense historically has been unwilling to comply with environmental standards.” For example, last month, the EPA named seven bases in California, Nevada and Arizona to the agency’s Superfund list of the nation’s most potentially hazardous waste sites-- including Camp Pendleton, because of contaminated soil, and the Marine Corps’ Barstow Logistics Base, where “substantial quantities” of solvent wastes were generated.

Emily Durbin, a chairwoman of the county land-use subcomittee of the San Diego chapter of the Sierra Club and a director of the Friends of the Santa Margarita River, offers a favorable assessment of the Marine Corps’ stewardship of the base’s natural resources, but she says she can only give the Marines a “B” on their overall environmental report card, for two reasons. Tanks and troops crush grasses and compact the soils. And grass fires, Durbin complains, are far too common, typically sparked by flares, bombs or bullets. For a few days in October, for instance, three separate fires were burning on Camp Pendleton, including one that consumed nearly 10,000 acres and spilled over into the Cleveland National Forest. In 1985, a fire jumped the base’s borders and burned several homes to the east, leading to multimillion-dollar claims against the government. (Some have been settled; others are still pending.)

“But overall, they’ve been much more responsive than we might have expected in terms of resource protection,” Durbin says. “Despite the fact that this is their West Coast amphibious landing-force practice grounds, for instance, they have protected the nesting spots on the beach for the California least tern.”

Indeed. The black, gray and white bird spends its winters in Mexico but flies north for the summer, and the sands of Camp Pendleton have become its favorite West Coast nesting ground. Last year, 246 breeding pairs of least tern were counted on Pendleton’s beaches and produced more than 365 fledglings. Today, a mile-long section of the upper beach is not only fenced off to keep Marines away from the small birds but is electrically wired to keep predators away from the nests and to prevent the chicks from wandering down to the AMTRAC speedway. (The fenced-off area was a concession by the Marine Corps when it sought the blessing of the California Coastal Commission to construct a beachfront Hovercraft Tarmac in 1983.) Other federally listed endangered birds nesting here include the peregrine falcon, the light-footed clapper rail and the least Bell’s vireo, as well as two birds and a rodent that are on the state’s endangered species list--the California brown pelican, the Belding’s savannah sparrow and the Stephen’s kangaroo rat.

“As more plants and animals become listed (as endangered species), and the more we do a better job in protecting those species here at Camp Pendleton, the more we become restricted in our own activities,” says Lt. Col. Tony Pack, deputy chief of staff for facilities. “We are becoming a victim of our own success.”

Many of the biggest environmental problems on base stem from an era before respect for the land was widespread. One of the six sites targeted for cleanup by federal officials is an area alongside the landing strip where, back in the 1950s and ‘60s, aviation fuel was purposely dumped and set afire for training exercises. “We didn’t think anything was wrong with doing that back then,” says Huckaby. “We know better now.”

Another contaminated spot is the agricultural utility area near the Santa Margarita River, where for years pesticide applicators were washed clean. A third is an old recycling and scrap yard--resting grounds for everything from office desks to Jeeps to old power transformers whose cooling oils are contaminated by carcinogenic PCBs. Studies have shown the soil there to be contaminated by gasoline, oil, copper and zinc. The Marines, armed with $30 million in Defense Department environmental-restoration funds, hope to have the scrap yard cleaned by 1996. More than 700 underground fuel tanks have been removed in recent years, at a cost of more than $2 million. Another 636 storage tanks are still underground--half of them still used--and the cost of removing them is estimated at between $10 million and $100 million. The base handles most of its wastes problems internally, with two landfills. But some items, such as lithium batteries that power communications systems in the field, have to be trucked to an incinerator in New Jersey.

Zugsay says the most ticklish problem is how to dispose of outdated pharmaceuticals. “We have large quantities of packaged medicines to support our field hospitals in combat. They have to be boxed and ready to go, so we can’t leave them on shelves and rotate them as they get older.” Officials are still trying to figure out how to handle the problem, since only a small share of the pharmaceuticals can be incinerated at the naval hospital on base.

Paul Campo, who retired in 1987 after spending 11 years as Camp Pendleton’s natural resources director, is familiar with its cleanup and conservation efforts. He’s widely credited by community organizations, including the Sierra Club, for keeping the Marines environmentally honest. Campo, in turn, credits the string of commanding generals who--nine times out of 10, he says--took his advice. “A lot of people were surprised and chagrined that the military backed me up when I held up the delivery along the beach of the equipment for the San Onofre nuclear power station because of the least tern. A lot of people don’t give due credit to the commanding generals for their support of the base environment.”

All in all, says Campo, the base “is in better condition now than when the Marines took it over in 1942. It had been overgrazed by cattle. Used and abused. But after the Marines came, the grass recovered, and the plants and shrubs started reseeding.” The meadows of Case Springs, for instance, were as barren as an asphalt parking lot 50 years ago, when cattle were rounded up before being herded to railroad cars for shipment to market. Today the meadows are vibrant, with tall brown grasses touching the drooping branches of 100-year-old oak trees.

REDHEAD SLADER BUCK, in jeans and a flannel shirt, is standing 10 miles in from the coastline, atop 3,189-foot-high Margarita Peak, just outside the eastern border of Camp Pendleton. Farther to the east are the canyons of De Luz and the rural, northern San Diego community of Fallbrook, home to gentleman farmers, retirees and military families. Twenty miles behind him is Palomar Mountain, platform for the world’s second-largest telescope. To the northeast, Buck points to the Cleveland National Forest and the San Mateo Canyon Wilderness area and, behind that, Mt. San Jacinto towering over Palm Springs.

Buck turns his attention westward, back toward Pendleton. Just below him is Case Springs. This looks like a place for picnics, not war games. This is where the buffalo roam, thanks to the San Diego Zoo, which released its excess bison here in the early 1970s.

Slowly, the herd grows.

Over five weekends last August and September, Buck’s staff supervised 100 civilian hunters and several hundred Marines who, together, killed 154 deer, providing some of the most bountiful deer hunting in all the state. (Civilians can also camp on one of Pendleton’s beaches by buying an annual permit, though they may be chased off by amphibious assaults.) More often, Buck keeps out poachers who would otherwise stalk Pendleton’s 2,000 deer.

“It’s easier to get the Marine Corps to adhere to all the state and federal regulations than someone else because they know that if they don’t take care of this place responsibly, they risk losing it,” Buck says. “There is no species on base that you can’t find elsewhere. But the difference is, Camp Pendleton is part of an entire wildlife corridor that stretches from the Pacific into the Cleveland National Forest. Elsewhere in Southern California, habitats are becoming fragmented, like little islands, and that eventually leads to genetic inbreeding, which weakens the species. But this is a large-enough area, that shouldn’t occur here.”

He considers the alternatives that have been suggested for Pendleton. A regional airport . . . an amusement park . . . or how about a master-planned residential community--a new town, a 21st Century Mission Viejo? “Pendleton Estates,” quips Buck, marrying military place names to developers’. “Foxtrot Acres . . . .”

Buck gazes over the meadow. “Developers would love to get their hands on this place. This is what Westlake looked like before it was developed. This place is still virtually untouched. This place,” he says, “is a gem.”