Vincennes Crew Gets Upbeat Welcome Home

The officers and crew of the Vincennes, the U. S. warship that mistakenly shot down an Iranian airliner in the Persian Gulf last July, got a boisterous, flag-waving welcome Monday from friends and family as the ship pulled into port after a six-month cruise.

Capt. Will C. Rogers III, who gave the orders to fire two missiles at the airplane July 3, said he and his men were “devastated” when they learned they had fired on a civilian airliner and that all 290 people aboard Iran Air Flight 655 had been killed.

Facing the press for the first time since the incident, Rogers repeatedly defended his actions and those of his crew and said the Iranians bear most of the blame for the tragedy.

‘No Other Choice’

“Of course we were all devastated. It goes without saying,” Rogers told reporters. “But I have to look at it--and my crew looks at it--that, given the fact that the airliner made no indication that it was not a hostile threat, we had no other choice. So our grief and our despair over that is tempered by the knowledge that we did what we had to do when we had to do it.”

Rogers said the crucial decisions were made in a 189 seconds during which the Vincennes was engaged in a battle with seven Iranian Revolutionary Guard patrol boats that had been firing on an American helicopter. Two of the boats were sunk and a third was damaged.

“I reviewed that few seconds a hundred times, a thousand times,” Rogers said. “My decisions were correct. I have absolute confidence in this vessel behind me and the systems that are in place on that vessel.”

In a report released Aug. 19, the Pentagon said the crew of the Vincennes made crucial errors that led to the decision to shoot down the airliner but that it cannot be held responsible because Iran’s behavior in the incident was “unconscionable.”

The Iranian plane, which took off from a civilian-military airfield in Bandar Abbas and began to cross the gulf, failed to respond to 12 radioed warnings from the Vincennes, the report says.

The ship’s crew misinterpreted computer data from its Aegis defense system on the airliner’s altitude, speed and bearing, the report says. Although the plane was flying slowly and climbing in a civilian air corridor, the crew concluded that it was flying at fighter-jet speed and descending for a possible attack on the ship. The mistaken readings prompted Rogers to judge the aircraft a threat and order the launch of two Standard missiles.

Censure Recommended

A panel of Navy investigators exonerated Rogers, but recommended a letter of censure for Lt. Cmdr. Scott E. Lustig, 34, the officer who was coordinating the ship’s anti-aircraft systems at the time of the incident. That recommendation was overruled by Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci and Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., who decided to take no action against Lustig or anyone else among the Vincennes crew.

Rogers agreed Monday that his crew had made mistakes, but said that “there always are (mistakes) in a combat environment.” He added that “no particular mistake was critical” to his decision to fire on the plane. He said he disagrees with the Pentagon finding that the mistakes were the result of stress.

As the Vincennes pulled into a pier at the 32nd Street Naval Station on Monday morning, its loudspeakers blared the theme from the movie “Chariots of Fire” and nearby Navy ships saluted with gunfire. The reception, complete with balloons and a Navy band playing upbeat songs, was organized by Navy officials who did not want the Vincennes to “sneak into port,” a public affairs officer said. Several hundred friends and relatives of the officers and crew waited on the pier, but the public was not allowed on the base.

Rogers’ most difficult moment Monday appeared to come when a reporter for a radio show broadcast for the Iranian community in San Diego said, “Can you tell us as a people and as a community how you really feel, because they really need to hear from you.”

Rogers responded: “Certainly the loss of innocent lives in any combat engagement is a tragedy . . . but my absolute responsibility was for the safety of my ship and my crew. It does not mean that we regret it any less, and certainly we never considered the Iranians an enemy.”

Sees No Leniency

Asked if Defense Department officials were lenient in not holding him accountable, Rogers said: “Absolutely not. I spent 20 days in front of a very professional group of people who examined this incident in all of its detail” and found him not culpable. Rogers added that he did not agree with the recommendation to censure Lustig.

“I had the greatest faith in Lt. Cmdr. Lustig then, and I have the greatest faith in him now,” he said.

Rogers said all U. S. captains who sail through the Persian Gulf are mindful of the fate of the Stark, a guided-missile frigate that was attacked by an Iraqi warplane in 1987. Thirty-seven American sailors were killed in the incident, and the Stark’s skipper, Capt. Glenn R. Brindel, was relieved of his command for failing to take defensive action.

“No skipper sails through the gulf without the Stark at least in your subconscious,” Rogers said. “Whether it was a factor in (my) decision process, I don’t consciously remember. It’s always on your subconscious, but I certainly didn’t have time to recall the Stark.”

Rogers said the first inkling he had that the Vincennes had attacked a civilian airliner came about 90 minutes after the missiles were fired. “We picked up some bits and pieces of traffic through the . . . tower about an overdue aircraft. It was about another 15 to 20 minutes past that time when we began to try to put the bits and pieces together.”

Rogers said he quickly became convinced that the Vincennes missiles were responsible for the disappearance of the aircraft. “I knew that my missiles had left the rail. I knew that an aircraft had come out of the air. We had one aircraft missing. It was pretty easy to put the two together.”

Called Crew Together

Once the ship had cleared the Strait of Hormuz, Rogers said, he called the entire crew together on the flight deck to explain.

“I walked them through the time line and explained the basics of what happened,” Rogers said. The crew’s reaction was “quiet, disturbed,” he said, “but with the full understanding that there was no other choice.”

“Of course they regret it, but they are trained, well-trained. They’re not automations or robots, they’re human beings. But they functioned well then and continue to function well.”

Capt. Ted Atwood, a Navy chaplain and Episcopal priest who was on the Vincennes from Sept. 27 to Oct. 5., said Monday that he held several assemblies with the sailors and found that some were apprehensive about the reception they might get upon returning home. Atwood said a special Navy team consisting of a psychologist and a psychiatrist was sent to the Vincennes immediately after the downing of the Iranian plane and that both were “impressed with the way the crew handled the tragedy.”

“I saw not a single depressed sailor, and I’ve been all over that ship,” Atwood said.

Because of a flood of letters, the crew “began to recognize that the support of the American people was behind them.”

Asked how the crew dealt with the Navy finding that they had made mistakes, Atwood said, “I think they absorbed it, they’ve dealt with it, and they’ve grown beyond that incident.”

Letters Changed Moods

Lt. Bill Johnson, 26, the navigator who was steering the Vincennes at the time of the incident, said Monday that, after the incident, a number of crew members were depressed but that the letters of support had changed their mood.

“They were real important,” he said. He called the reception Monday “incredible” and said that “we had a good idea it would be a real big assembly and a real good reaction.”

Of the incident, he said: “We couldn’t believe that the whole thing had happened. It was just incredible.”

He added, however, “We were pretty much sure of what we did and why we did it.”

“A large part of the blame has to do with the Iranians sending a civilian aircraft in the middle of a hot battle, and, believe me, it was hot,” Johnson said.

Crew member Charles Brands, who operates a missile launcher on the ship, called the six-month deployment “very stressful” and said, “With the warmth of the homecoming, it eased a lot of the guilt we might have had.” He added: “I don’t feel any guilt.”

Brands said that at first he had doubts about the incident “and whether we made a mistake. Personally, I was reassured by the fact the captain said we had made the right decision.”

There was a good deal of denial among crew members initially, Brands said. “No one could imagine that it could have been a civilian aircraft. . . . Everyone who saw it go down, we thought it was an F-14.”

The mood afterward was “subdued,” he said. “People felt bad about it. For a period of a week, two weeks, it was real quiet on the ship.”