Parents of Scud Victim Speak of Premonition

The parents of Steve Farnen had a premonition that something was going to happen to their son when he went off to Operation Desert Storm, and the 22-year-old Army Reservist seemed to, as well.

When Farnen boarded an airplane for Saudi Arabia on Jan. 31, he looked back at them twice and smiled, his father remembered Tuesday. “The third time,” Hugh Farnen said, “he looked back and couldn’t smile.”

Farnen was one of 28 U.S. soldiers who were killed Monday when flaming sections of an Iraqi Scud missile plunged into a single-story warehouse near Dhahran that had been converted into an Army barracks. One hundred soldiers also were wounded by the Scud, making the attack the most deadly of a war that has so far inflicted unexpectedly slight casualties on allied forces.

The Pentagon has been notifying the families of the killed and wounded, but officials have not made public all of the names of the casualties or the units to which they were attached.

Farnen’s parents said they were not bitter about the war and neither was their son.

When he was recalled by the Army in January, only five months after his discharge from regular service, “he took it better than we did,” remembered Hugh Farnen, who also has a second son, Virgil, 25, serving in Saudi Arabia. “He said: ‘Somebody’s got to do it, and I guess it’s got to be me.’ ”

Hugh Farnen, a maintenance worker at Booneville Hospital in Columbia, was seated next to his wife, Gladys, in the living room of their small, white house, which sits in a wooded area about 10 miles north of the city’s center. He was wearing red suspenders and a button that said: “We Support Desert Storm.”

“The good Lord must have wanted Steve, because he picked him out of a half-million people,” Hugh Farnen said.

The parents last spoke to Farnen when he was in New York en route to Saudi Arabia. But their conversation was full of silences, because they did not know what to say, Hugh Farnen said.

The parents, who are churchgoers with four children in all, said they were not mad at the Iraqis.

“It’s their damn fool leader,” Hugh Farnen said. “I hope the Iraqi people take care of him; he’s brought more hell on them than anybody.”

Farnen had been living with his parents and had arranged to train as a commercial pilot before he was recalled to the service. He loved hunting and canoeing, and his passion in high school had been drama, his parents said.

He had worked part time last fall for Ed Heimreich Farm Supply in nearby Booneville. Kenneth Stegner, an assistant manager at the store, told the Columbia Daily Tribune that Farnen was “real clean and real sensible. Didn’t have no faults about him. Just a real good boy.”

Initial reports about the Scud attack said the barracks housed members of the 475th Quartermaster Group, based in Farrell, Pa., northwest of Pittsburgh. The reports panicked family members of some soldiers in the group, but officials of the unit said they so far knew of no serious casualties from their ranks.

The dead included at least two members of the 14th Quartermaster Detachment, based in Greenburg, Pa., near Pittsburgh. They were Richard Wolverton, 22, of Latrobe and John Bolivar Jr. of Monongahela.

Staff writer Paul Richter contributed to this story from Washington.