ORANGE COUNTY AND THE AFTERMATH OF WAR : The Waiting Ends Tragically for Family

“Return to Sender . . . Unclaimed” read the stamp on the still-unopened letters that Larry Galvan got back in the mail Tuesday from Saudi Arabia. Even then, more than a month after Capt. Arthur Galvan’s AC-130 plane was shot down in Kuwait, his brother hoped to someday hand him the letters in person and watch as he read them.

Just a few hours later, a phone call shattered that hope: The captain, military officials told Galvan’s family in Newport Beach, was now believed dead.

And so the 33-year-old Air Force officer, once a second-string high school quarterback at Estancia High school in Costa Mesa, then a husband and father, became the only war casualty known to have hailed from Orange County.

Now, while the rest of the nation and the county celebrate the end of a war that claimed remarkably few American men and women, the Galvans mourn one who did not make it.

Galvan and 13 fellow crew members were shot down Jan. 31 in their AC-130 Spectre gunship during the battle of Khafji. Prevented by vision problems from becoming a fighter pilot, he was the fire-control officer and bombing navigator on the plane.

Galvan’s family has still had no word about his body. And until they do, Doris O’Campo, 51, of Costa Mesa says she will continue to cling to the vexing hope that her son may still be alive--somehow, somewhere.

“That’s the worst part--that I might not be able to see him again,” O’Campo said, crying in the arms of her aunt, Lucille Quintana, as she and other family members gathered Thursday at the Newport Beach apartment of one of her four children.

“So much waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting--and then (to end) like this!” she cried.

“There were a lot of things that I wanted him to know about,” said Larry Galvan, 29, as he clutched two of the returned, unclaimed letters to Saudi Arabia, unsure whether he would ever open them, “and there are a lot of things now he’ll never know.”

Even before he made his mark as an Air Force officer, Galvan was the pride of his family.

Not only did he become the first in his family ever to get a college degree, he also went on to get a master’s degree in international relations at his undergraduate alma mater, Troy State University in Alabama, family members said.

Descended from a people that had always worked with their hands, “Art worked with his brain,” Larry Galvan said. He hoped to become a lawyer after retiring from the Air Force.

The family plans to travel to Navarre, Fla., where Arthur was based and where his wife and 12-year-old son live, to attend his still-unscheduled funeral. But brother Ray Galvan, 32, a local postal worker, has been feverishly contacting Costa Mesa officials to try to arrange a local memorial service for Arthur as well.

“It’s real important for the people here to be able to say goodby,” Ray said. “The cheer and the champagne-popping (over the end of the war) is all fine . . . but we want to make sure people are recognizing the ones that lost their lives for us Americans.”

Galvan’s family say they believe that he had already said goodby.

During a two-week visit home to Orange County before leaving for Saudi Arabia, Galvan made it a point to look up many old friends, to see his father, Ramon Sr., a Mexican immigrant and former gardener in the county, and to contact other rarely seen relatives and share a few words.

“He knew he was going to be gone forever, it seemed,” said Larry Galvan.

During the visit, O’Campo recalls her son telling her: “ ‘Mother, touch me; mother, hold me,’ ” as if to savor the closeness of what might be their last time together.

The visit held happy times, too, as the family gathered around Ray’s Newport Beach living room to talk, sing songs and listen to Arthur play guitar.

Now the family clings to those memories and to the few letters they got from him in Saudi Arabia. One such letter, in fact, was apparently written the morning he was shot down.

“Please don’t worry too much about me, Mom,” Galvan wrote. “Everything is in God’s hands.”