Husband Says ‘Hi’ From Gander but Bad News Follows

Malinda Parris received a call from her husband, Rudy, at 4 a.m. Thursday from Gander, Canada.

He was bound home to Ft. Campbell after a six-month tour of duty with peacekeeping forces in the Sinai Peninsula, and the chartered jetliner carrying him and 249 other soldiers from the 101st Airborne had stopped briefly to refuel.

“He said, ‘Hi,’ ” Parris’ daughter, Marguerite Gmeiner, said later. And Mrs. Parris teased him, saying, “ ‘How come you called me when you are going to see me so soon?’ He said, ‘I just wanted to talk to you.’ Then he had to go because the plane was taking off.”

The phone rang again at the Parris home two hours later, with the news that the jetliner had crashed on takeoff at Gander and all aboard were presumed dead. Malinda Parris burst into tears.

Similar stories were told here Thursday as the 34,000 soldiers and dependents on this sprawling Army base and 30,000 others living on its fringes absorbed the news of what had happened to friends, relatives and colleagues who had wound up their tour of duty in the dangerous Middle East and were bound for home and safety.

Charles Keesee, the chainsmoking bartender at the Vacation Motor Lodge a few miles south of this table-flat military post, got the first inkling that some of his friends were dead early Thursday, when an Army buddy roused him from bed and told him to turn on the television.

Susan Pak got the final word on her brother-in-law’s death about 5 p.m. as she prepared to open Showdowns, the perennially crowded GI bar she runs in nearby Clarksville, Tenn.

About 200 people, three-quarters of them women, were told of the crash about 7 a.m. PST Thursday in a garland-bedecked, concrete-block Army gymnasium where they had planned to welcome the members of the 3rd Battalion, 101st Airborne Division, back home. A ceremony, complete with a brass band, had been planned.

. “There was grief, there was concern,” said Army spokesman Maj. James Gleisberg of reaction at the base. “There was no hysteria.”

Notifications Begin

Slowly, methodically, the Army went about the business of notifying relatives of the crash.

A big board in Ft. Campbell’s Family Support Center, scrawled with the names of the 250 servicemen believed on board the Arrow DC-8, had only 35 names scratched through by midafternoon.

Each scratch symbolized a passenger whose relatives had called one of eight phones at Ft. Campbell and been read a statement: “Your (relative) was believed to have been a passenger on a military charter aircraft that went down after taking off from Gander, Newfoundland, Canada, on 12 December.

“You will be advised as soon as additional information is available pending positive identification of remains.”

And so most of the families waited for further word, uncertain in some cases whether their loved ones were aboard the downed plane or were scheduled to come home on a later flight.

“The Army tries to take care of itself. They know the process for notification of next of kin,” Gleisberg said.

The Army, Gleisberg said, had rarely seen a peacetime tragedy on the scale of the Gander crash, believed to be the worst military air disaster in U.S. history.

Border Region Roots

Probably half of the the 250 who died had roots in the Kentucky-Tennessee border area around Ft. Campbell, one Army official estimated. They were the second group of soldiers who had flown back to Ft. Campbell this month from the desolate Sinai Peninsula, where they were part of a 2,600-person multinational force keeping peace along the Egypt-Israeli border.

Had the latest planeload made it, most would have taken extended holiday leaves to visit their families or friends, said Sgt. Joseph Peake, an Army press officer.

Maj. Gen. Burton D. Patrick, commander of the base, somberly called the crash “a tragic loss that will be everlasting,” but pledged that the post would carry on.

“We will lick our wounds, help those families in grief, and reconstitute the mission,” he said. “Each of those soldiers who lost his life in Newfoundland would not have wanted it any other way.”

And carry on they did. Thursday night, the 101st Airborne band played a long-scheduled selection of Christmas carols at the post theater, dedicated to the men lost in the Arrow disaster. Outside the base headquarters, a decommissioned UH-1 Huey helicopter was merrily harnessed to eight wooden reindeer.

At Showdowns, Pak left shortly after getting news of her brother-in-law’s death from her sister, the janitor at the bar said. “The manager doesn’t get in till 9. I guess I’ll be taking care of things till then,” he said.

And at the Vacation Motor Hotel, Keesee took the news of the crash philosophically. Retired from the Army since 1984, he said he knew several men who served in the Sinai force that was being rotated back to Kentucky, and “had a gut feeling” that some of them were on the plane.

“It’s a blow. Most of my life, being a soldier--27 1/2 years in the Army--you see a lot of death. But in peacetime, it’s shocking,” he said.

“Very sad. Depressing,” said the motel’s desk clerk. Outside, the motel marquee had been changed early Thursday to read: “God bless the families of our heroes.”