A thundering, low-altitude flyover by six F-15 Eagle fighters announced the moment they had all been waiting for–and at Langley Air Force Base, Va., several thousand spouses, girlfriends, boyfriends, children and assorted well-wishers raced joyfully across the tarmac to welcome the First Tactical Fighter Wing home from the Persian Gulf. A C-141 transport carrying some of the fighter wing’s ground-support personnel touched down and lumbered to the flight line; Patti Fox’s seven-month ordeal was over. “It’s your daddy, babycakes,” she cooed to her daughter Melody Joy, aged 5 weeks. Tearful and grinning, Sgt. Michael J. Fox peered down at the child he had never seen and swept his wife and baby into an ecstatic, three-way embrace. “Babycakes, your daddy’s home,” said Patti Fox.
From Bangor, Maine, to Twentynine Palms, Calif., the victorious troops of Operation Desert Storm were welcomed by a proud and grateful nation last week. Although it will be months before all 540,000 American fighting men and women in the gulf come home, the arrival of the first few thousand servicemen and -women touched off a nationwide celebration of pride and patriotism. George Bush summed up the euphoric mood in his televised speech before a joint and jubilant session of Congress. “This victory belongs to them–to the privates and the pilots, to the sergeants and the supply officers…to the finest fighting force this nation has ever known,” the president said. “We went halfway around the world to do what is moral and just and right. And we fought hard and, with others, we won the war [to lift] the yoke of tyranny and aggression from a small country that many Americans had never even heard of.” “Thank you, guys,” the president concluded. “Thank you very, very much.”
For the troops themselves, it was the big-little moments of reunion that seemed to matter most–the first glimpse of a newborn child, the first cold beer after seven months in alcohol-free Saudi Arabia, the green of early spring in North America. During a refueling stop at Bangor, one 82nd Airborne Division trooper borrowed a saxophone from a high-school band and wowed the crowd with an impromptu solo rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner. At Fort Stewart, Ga., a proud papa from the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division, Specialist Robert Teague, searched the crowd for his wife, Wendy, and his 4-month-old son, Sean. “There he is!” Teague exclaimed, as he pushed through the welcoming throng to scoop up his wife and son. “He looks beautiful.”
The troops of the 24th, which made a hell-for-leather drive to the Euphrates River during the 100-hour ground campaign, had their share of close calls and dicey moments. Platoon Sgt. James Coleman said he and his buddies were rounding up a group of Iraqi prisoners when a volley of small-arms fire “started popping all around me, bouncing off the turret of my [Bradley Fighting] vehicle.” The shots were fired by a single Iraqi soldier in a nearby bunker, who was quickly put out of action. “If we hadn’t been watching each others’ backs and doing the things that we should, I probably would have gotten shot,” Coleman said. Last week when the 24th was still bivouacked far from home in the Iraqi desert, Coleman got a surprising radio call. “Guess what?” the radioman said. “I have additional information, you maggot–you’re going home.”
In El Paso, Texas, 352 members of the Army’s 11th Air defense Artillery Brigade got a tumultuous reception on their way back to Fort Bliss. The 11th Brigade–“the Scudbusters”–and its Patriot missiles were the heroes of the Iraqi missile attacks on Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. When the first Scuds were falling on the Saudi capital on the night of Jan. 21, said Army Specialist Sheila Sexton, “we went on alert [and] there were explosions everywhere. We were just saying, “Please, Patriot, work.’ It did, and we were all in shock,” Sexton said. “We did it! They didn’t miss.” Since then, Sexton said, the brigade has received “letters, phone calls and [gifts] from people all over the world and all over the United States…it was just amazing [and] it made us feel good about what we had done.”
The families of 21 newly liberated U.S. POWs had even more to celebrate. Pentagon officials said the 19 men and two women would be flown to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, where they would be welcomed by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Gen. Colin Powell. Military sources said the former POWs seemed malnourished and that some had apparently “been slapped around” by their captors. Two of them, Air Force Capt. William F. Andrews of Syracuse, N.Y., and Army S/Sgt. Daniel J. Stamaris of Boise, Idaho, initially had to be carried on stretchers because of leg injuries. Army Maj. Rhonda L. Cornum of East Aurora, N.Y., captured when her helicopter crashed in southern Iraq, suffered two broken arms, a broken hand, and facial and knee injuries. But when her worried family saw her on TV last week, even the bandages looked good.
With an estimated 5,000 troops coming home every day from now through the end of June, the celebrations have only begun. But the mood was set for a whiz-bang Fourth of July, and it all came down to this: “I’ve never been so proud to be a soldier and I’ve never been so proud to be an American,” said Sgt. Don Meadows of the 11th Air Defense Brigade. “In fact, I can’t see how anybody, right now, could not feel proud to be an American.”
