USS Stark Victims Arrive in U.S.
Their journey began in towns such as New Bethlehem and Charleston and Choctaw and took them from a home port in Florida to the Persian Gulf on May 17, 1987; it neared an end in a bare metal and concrete hangar in Delaware. Nine days after their frigate was pierced by two Iraqi missiles, 36 of the men who died on the USS Stark were returned to American soil. The remains of 35 were honored in a simple ceremony at Dover Air Force Base, where most stayed another day before being flown home for burial.
"In a few months, they would have been welcomed again with banners flying and bands playing and families crowded on the pier," said Adm. Carlisle A.H. Trost, Chief of Naval Operations, who conducted the ceremony. "For these men, it is not to be. They are returning to us in stillness and silence," he said.
While a military investigation began in Baghdad, the dead were being brought home on an Air Force C141 Starlifter transport. The plane slid into view over the gray Dover sky at 7:53 a.m., then sat for three hours on the runway with its cargo still aboard.
Four teams of pallbearers carried the dead off, marching slowly down a ramp from the belly of the plane, passing in front of huddled relatives and through a Navy honor guard to the hangar, Building 706. There, the identical, flag-wrapped "transfer cases" were arranged in rows at the base of an immense American flag.
The parents of 22-year-old Wayne R. Weaver, the wife of John Ciletta, the eight friends and relatives of Thomas MacMullen did not know which of the unmarked coffins carried their son or husband or friend. They stood to the side, many of them huddled against the cold wind in borrowed green military blankets.
"Under cover of dark, like a thief in the night, death stole the lives of 37 American sailors," said Rear Adm. John R. McNamara, Navy Chief of Chaplains. "We welcome home...these husbands and fathers, these sons and brothers, these shipmates."
The dead were escorted home by three shipmates to this cavernous hangar, where giant Air Force C5s are washed and the dead are memorialized. The six-story hangar is, literally and figuratively, an echo chamber, where the fate of unknown warriors reverberates with the power of bitter foreign wars.
The lives of Weaver, an electronics technician married two years ago; Jerry Farr, a 17-year veteran; and Randy Pierce, 28, who never saw his baby son, were magnified into the affairs of history. Thirty-seven men died, but only 35 bodies were at the ceremony on May 26, 1987. The remains of Terance Donald Welden, 20, have not been found. The family of another sailor, whom the Navy would not identify, asked that his body be shipped home before this ceremony.
Trost said the men of the Stark were mindful of the hazards of their mission. "A deep pall from the war between Iraq and Iran had settled over the gulf," he said. "Belligerents, friends, and neutrals slipped in and out among the shadows. Stark's crew understood the risks. Trost described the missile attack as a "strike of madness" that transformed into chaos the Stark's "clean, efficient, secure world."
It took 46 minutes to move the bodies from the plane, with the Navy band playing somber, muffled drum rolls and intermittently, the Navy Hymn. The flight from Rhein-Main Air Force Base near Frankfurt, West Germany, had taken eight hours. By contrast, the 13-minute ceremony was brief and crisp.
Unlike the memorial service on Friday, May 22, 1987, in Mayport, Florida, where all of the families had gathered to hear President Reagan eulogize the dead, today's service was muted. And a hollow hangar on an Air Force base seemed an unlikely place to honor such sailors. But their bodies were to remain here only briefly, some waiting mere hours before the last leg of their journey home.
—Barbara Vobejda
1987 The Washington Post
Reprinted with Permission