Bombing Shatters Normal Routine Maintained by Family After Furor

If Will and Sharon Rogerses’ lives were turned traumatically upside down last July, when the U.S. Navy ship under his command mistook an Iranian passenger airliner for a hostile warplane and shot it down over the Persian Gulf, they did their best to disguise it.

Rogers, captain of the guided missile cruiser Vincennes, returned to his home port of San Diego last October and offered dockside remarks about the July shooting that killed 290 people.

“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,” Rogers told a reporter for a radio station popular in San Diego’s immigrant Iranian community. “It does not mean that we regret it any less and certainly we never considered the Iranians an enemy.”

Never Spoke About Incident

Rogers then left with his wife on his arm for their home in the La Jolla area of northern San Diego County. They have spoken nary a word about the incident since, even among close friends.

In fact, the couple had not been in the news again until Friday--when Sharon Rogers escaped injury after jumping clear of her Toyota van moments before it was destroyed by fire after a bomb went off.

Rogers had returned to a normal, in-port regimen, continuing to command his ship, oversee routine maintenance tasks in dock and participating in short training exercises off the coast of San Diego.

At home--in a favorite neighborhood where they had lived once before--Rogers and his wife have been careful not to mix Navy with neighborliness.

Watched Out for Wife

“They’re good people. Good people,” said George Petrou, who lives directly across from the Rogerses’ home and who characterized himself and his wife as perhaps their closest friends on the block. The Rogerses, he said, “never talk shop.”

His wife, Mary, remembered how neighbors would watch out for Sharon Rogers’ welfare in the wake of the news last July that the Vincennes had knocked a passenger airliner out of the sky, because of fear that someone might retaliate against the ship captain’s wife.

“We watched her every single day,” Mary Petrou said, recalling how she would even set the alarm on her son’s clock to make sure he was awake to watch her leave the home on her way to work.

The Petrous and other neighbors said Friday there was never any spoken concern about threats against the couple--and certainly no signs of danger.

If Will Rogers and his wife were worried about their safety, it didn’t show. What about the red-white-and-blue sign in their front yard, advertising that the home was somehow watched by a private security service? Heck, said one neighbor, we’ve all got those signs.

Besides, this was not a private neighborhood behind walls, but simply a quiet cul-de-sac a block away from one of San Diego’s most popular shopping centers.

And so it was that the Rogerses had apparently made the transition from controversial headlines to suburban regimen, simply avoiding any discussions about the Navy.

“We talked for happiness, not for business,” Petrou said. “But he is a tough guy, a good soldier.”

Petrou watched Friday morning as the couple left their home--Rogers in his uniform, behind the wheel of a blue Mercedes-Benz sports coupe, and Sharon Rogers in her Toyota van, headed to her class of fourth-graders at the private La Jolla Country Day School not far away.

‘Laughing, Smiling’

“I gave them some strawberries about 7,” Petrou said. “When they left, about 7:30, they were laughing and smiling, and they drove down the street together.”

Sharon only got a few blocks from home when the explosion occurred; her husband did not learn of the bombing until he arrived at the 32nd Street Naval Station, where his ship is docked.

A Navy spokesman, Chief Craig Huebler, said Rogers had been busy readying his ship for redeployment--although a specific assignment and departure date has not yet been announced.

“Everything a normal commanding officer would be doing for his ship, Capt. Rogers was doing,” Huebler said. “He’s been taking care of all the overhaul and repair items. Whatever. It’s a wide range of tasks, basically the general shore operation of the ship.”

Rogers, while admitting grief over the July 3 downing of the Iranian airliner, nonetheless did not apologize for his actions.

As he put it at the time: “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 recalled how the crucial decisions were made in the 189-second period during which the Vincennes was engaged in a battle with seven Iranian Revolutionary Guard patrol boats that had been firing on an American helicopter. The Vincennes sank two of the gunboats and damaged a third.

Crucial Errors

The Pentagon concluded that the crew of the ship made crucial errors that led to the decision to shoot down the airliner, but that it could not be held responsible because Iran’s behavior in the incident was “unconscionable.” The plane, which took off from a joint civilian-military airfield in Bandar Abbas and began to cross the Persian Gulf, failed to respond to 12 radioed warnings from the Vincennes, the Pentagon report noted.

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