Nation Somberly Honors War Dead : Ceremonies Reflect Painful Memory of 37 Killed on Stark

With parades, prayers and the playing of taps, Americans honored their war dead on a Memorial Day made freshly somber by the painful memory of the 37 sailors killed on the U.S. frigate Stark.

About 5,000 veterans joined family and friends of dead servicemen at Arlington National Cemetery, where a ceremony honored the Stark crewmen killed on May 17, when an Iraqi warplane attacked the Navy frigate in the Persian Gulf.

Surrounded by rows of headstones marking the graves of nearly 200,000 U.S. military dead, Navy Secretary James H. Webb said the dead sailors, like others killed in peacetime, were “the quiet heroes of their generation.”

“The markers remind us that miscalculation, failed diplomacy and naive isolationism can ask a costly price,” said Webb, who laid a wreath from President and Mrs. Reagan at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, honoring the unknown dead from America’s last four wars.

‘Make War Obsolete’

At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.) told a crowd of about 3,000 people that “the best memorial we can possibly create” to honor the dead from Southeast Asia would be to “make war itself obsolete.”

“The next war, if it is a nuclear confrontation, could be the most obscene thing in history,” said Gore, a Vietnam veteran who is a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

At the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, military representatives were to present a lei containing 2,335 flowers, one for each of the men killed in the Japanese attack on Dec. 7, 1941.

And, in Boston Harbor, cannon were fired 21 times at one-minute intervals beginning at noon from the decks of the Constitution, the Navy’s oldest commissioned warship.

Monument to Crash Victims

At Ft. Campbell, Ky., a black granite monument was unveiled to honor the 248 soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division who died in a 1985 plane crash at Gander, Newfoundland, when flying home from a peacekeeping mission in the Middle East. “A season of grief has come to a close,” said Maj. Gen. Teddy Allen, the base commander.

In many communities, volunteers placed flags on soldiers’ graves.

“All of the men we recognize here today with our little flags, they saved America for us,” 70-year-old Helen Witt said at a cemetery at Fort Worth, Tex. “God forbid that we ever forget why we do these things on Memorial Day, that these men laid down their lives and saw their comrades die.”

Former prisoners of war gathered for a small ceremony in a cemetery at Las Cruces, N. M., some of them bound together by memories of the horrors of the Bataan Death March in the Philippines in World War II.

“It was one hell of a horrible experience, and I lived it for a long, long time,” Donald Harris said.

Recalls Pacific Service

In Kansas City, Mo., the Rev. Thomas Denzer recalled his service in the Pacific during World War II in a speech at the city’s Liberty Memorial.

“It was only when I stood at the graves of my comrades in the steaming jungles of New Guinea and the sticky mud of the Philippines, and I heard the plaintive refrain of taps echoing off the hills, that I came to realize that from death and sacrifice comes life and freedom,” Denzer said.

Americans of Japanese ancestry who served in the U.S. armed forces were honored at a cemetery atop Capitol Hill in Seattle.

In New York City, ex-servicemen gathered at a Vietnam monument to back a measure to establish a shelter in the city for homeless veterans.

Not Just the Dead

“On Memorial Day, everyone focuses on those veterans who died, but we have to take care of the ones who are dying,” said John Rowan, a member of the national board of directors of the Vietnam Veterans of America.

In West Virginia, which had the nation’s highest casualty rate in the Vietnam War, a Vietnam Veterans Park was dedicated at Philippi by Sen. John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV (D-W. Va.). “This park will always remind us of the dangers they faced and the sacrifices they endured,” he said.