Thousands Return to Clamorous Celebration : Military: 'Everybody coming back's a hero,' an Air Force officer says. 'But there's some quiet inside us. . . . '

By MELISSA HEALY and JERRY GILLAM

March 9, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. — Thousands of American GIs returning from the Persian Gulf stepped off transport planes and climbed out of cockpits Friday as the first full day of nonstop homecomings rolled across the country, launching a weekend of festivities in virtually every American time zone.

The returning servicemen--and for the first time in the nation’s history, goodly numbers of servicewomen--were welcomed at bases and airfields by relatives and friends they had for the most part not seen in seven months since they were summoned to Gulf duty.

More than 6,300 American GIs--the first of 540,000 dispatched to the Gulf--headed home Friday to bases in California, Virginia, Maine, North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Louisiana. More were to come home throughout the weekend, including 1,000 Marines returning to bases in Southern California today.

And by the thousands, they were thankfully peeling off their fatigues, turning in their weapons, shedding the desert dust and digesting the last of the combat rations that most never wanted to have to eat again, relishing instead the novelty of clean clothes, peace and quiet, hot showers and pizza, ice cream and beer.

The first substantial California-based contingent to return flew in Friday to Travis Air Force Base, west of Sacramento, aboard a Continental Airlines 747. The 420 active-duty and reserve Navy personnel had worked aboard the Mercy, a Navy hospital ship in the Persian Gulf.

Their homecoming marked one week short of seven months’ duty at sea for the men and women who had tended the sick, the wounded and some of the American prisoners of war.

Two decades, outside the gates of Travis, anti-war demonstrators had gathered to chant, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh,” as the big-bellied military planes arriving from Vietnam had disgorged their cargo of soldiers in body bags.

Inside Travis’ gates Friday, relatives who had passed the two-hour wait in part by singing “God Bless America” became a delighted mob. After enduring seven months of separation with oceans and desert between them, they were not about to let a few yards of thin nylon cord strung on some flimsy metal stanchions stand in the way.

They hung back initially as the Navy men and women stepped down the bunting-draped gangway, but many among the 2,000 relatives and friends soon followed the reporters’ lead and stepped over the low restraints, surging toward their loved ones. The servicemen and women spotted their families and began running toward them. Navy personnel pleaded helplessly for them to stay orderly and get onto the buses that would take them to an Oakland processing center.

The wife of Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Steve Lesley, and the son he had not seen, had come from Cheverly, Md., to meet him.

The little boy, Tanner, 5 1/2 months old, was bundled in a white bunny suit with fuzzy ears, and Lesley held him close. “It’s wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. I can’t describe it,” he said.

Oakland radiologist Frank H. Crankovich, one of the first off the plane, fell into the clutches of his wife and two daughters, Amanda, 4, and Emma, 7 months.

“I’m glad we didn’t have to work too hard over there,” Crankovich said. And as for this welcome--”great. In a word, great.”

For Lt. Cmdr. Randall Culp, “the hardest part was the boredom. There wasn’t much to do. Thank goodness they didn’t need us.”

Although the crew members of the Mercy had a comparatively quiet war, they were accorded what is quickly becoming a standard hero’s welcome.

The hurried telephone calls home had already given most of the soldiers an inkling of the excited reunions that awaited.

But many returnees, battle weary and exhausted by flights lasting as long as 22 hours, seemed stunned at the emotion that was playing out in front of them, even a bit disoriented.

“It really didn’t hit till we got here,” said Capt. Doug Moore, an F-15 fighter pilot with the 1st Tactical Fighter Wing, after arriving at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton Roads, Va. Moore said that it was only as his fighter aircraft flew over the cheering throng that he began to realize the depth of the nation’s jubilation.

When the engines of six returning F-15s finally throttled down and the pilots popped open their cockpit hoods in unison, the crowd’s quiet anticipation swelled into a roar of approval. Wives, parents and children surged forward, and minutes later, Moore grinned happily into the cameras with his 3-year-old son, Ryan, on his hip.

The message scrawled across the back of Ryan Moore’s miniature flight jacket seemed to say it all: “Day of the Hero.”

“Everybody coming back’s a hero,” said Air Force Capt. Rod Yates, a beefy B-52 bomber navigator whose 3-year-old daughter, Esther--like countless children Friday--burst into tears in his arms. “But there’s some quiet inside us for those who won’t come back.”

At Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina, where a group of paratroopers finally ended their journey, military police strained to hold back 1,000 family members who chanted, “Let them go!” North Carolina Gov. James G. Martin declared, “You are home. Well done, good and faithful soldiers.”

Then the lines broke, and seven months of separation ended in shouts, tears and passionate embraces.

In military communities across the nation, the bands and bunting that awaited the returning GIs honored not only the veterans of the Gulf War victory, but implicitly atoned to those who returned from a less successful and less popular conflict in Vietnam. It was a day not only of jubilant personal reunions but of coming to terms with a defeat that scarred a generation.

“We might . . . challenge all Americans to open our hearts to all veterans that have gone before us, particularly those of Vietnam who did not share the welcome that you have today,” said Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) to whoops of applause from the Langley crowd of 20,000.

Retired Navy Vietnam veteran Gary Brown, among the welcoming throng in California, said simply: “I’m glad to see my friends home. I’m glad to see them coming home walking. This is a helluva lot different than when I came back from Vietnam.”

More than 200 locals formed a welcoming line at the Bangor, Me., airport refueling stop for paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division. On their way home to Ft. Bragg, N.C., the soldiers were welcomed by a high school band and a free Maine lobster roll breakfast.

“We just feel like we know them all,” said Val Bellomy of Hampden, Me. “When my husband came back from Vietnam, I was the only one who went out to meet him.”

At Langley Air Force Base, Air Force Secretary Donald B. Rice told returning forces, “You turned it into the mother of all retreats followed by the mother of all defeats, and extending over the next months, we will have the mother of all homecomings.”

Wives with babies born since their fathers left last August were waiting impatiently in light rain and 40-degree weather as the first two of three planes landed at Hampton Roads.

Cold beer, home-cooked meals and parties ranked right behind time with families as the top priorities of returning troops. Kim Merlack, welcoming her husband, F-15 pilot Capt. Bo Merlack, home in a bitter Virginia wind, had a simple formula: “We’re going to go home and build a fire and cuddle.”

Defense officials said it will take months for the remaining Americn troops to return home. Some whose specialties are crucial to rebuilding Kuwait or maintaining the security of the chaotic region may remain for years. But for most who were sent in the first wave of Operation Desert Shield, homecomings are expected within a few weeks.

“It’s a great day to be a soldier,” Desert Storm commander Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf told departing troops Friday. “Big Red One, First Team, Old Ironsides, Spearhead, Hell on Wheels platoon, Jayhawk patrol. Today you’re going home.”

Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, joined the cheering at Hunter Army Airfield at Savannah, Ga., as a second planeload of troops from the Army’s 24th Mechanized Infantry Division arrived home.

“It’s just inspiring to be here to see families meet their loved ones. To be able to see it firsthand is just an honor,” Nunn said.

At Oakland’s Oak Knoll Navy Hospital, the white-painted school buses from Travis arrived about 4:10 p.m., men and women half-hanging out the windows, whooping and waving to a smaller, quieter crowd than had greeted them at Travis.

To the fuzzy blare of patriotic music distorted by loudspeakers, they paused at a snacks table--with store-bought chocolate chip cookies, fruit and punch.

In Ft. Bliss, Tex., according to CNN, soldiers from the 11th Air Defense Brigade, the “Scudbusters” who staffed Patriot missile batteries, were handed beers as they left their plane.

But in Oakland it was paper cups of punch, period. “No beer,” said Red Cross volunteer Letha Lee. “This is the military.”

A lot of Navy people walked around in an exhausted daze, among them corpsman Robert Amsler, wearing an overnight stubble and plain blue T-shirt in a crowd of scrubbed, beaming faces and bright Desert Storm garb.

Amsler didn’t have far to go; like about half of the returning men and women, he is stationed right in Oakland. And he is waiting, he said, “for the culture shock to set in.”

Healy reported from Washington and Gillam reported from Travis. Times staff writers Don Shannon and Helaine Olen in Washington and Christopher Elliott in Oakland contributed to this story.

WELCOME HOME

Many communities are planning celebrations to salute U.S. troops returning from the Persian Gulf. They include:

A welcome-home celebration today at about 4 p.m. PST at OAKLAND NAVAL HOSPITAL for 420 returning Navy medical personnel.

A parade today at 11 a.m. EST at the VIETNAM WAR MEMORIAL IN WASHINGTON. The parade will end at the Ellipse, where speakers will address the crowd.

A Victory Party today at TEXAS STADIUM in Dallas.