First U.S. Troops Return; Pullout Will Take Months : Homecoming: Cheering crowd greets 24th Division GIs in Georgia. Southland units are among those scheduled to begin arriving home this weekend.

The first planeload of the nation’s returning Gulf War soldiers touched down here early this morning and began a national homecoming that promises to be a cacophonous, emotional wave of welcome.

The military transport carrying 104 first-in, first-out soldiers from the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division, which arrived in Saudi Arabia scant days after Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait last Aug. 2, landed at this base in southeast Georgia just before 12:25 a.m.

They descended a few steps leading off the olive-drab C-141. One man dropped to his knees on the tarmac and crossed himself. Another jabbed a triumphant fist into the air.

But the first man out of the transport, at 12:38 a.m., was Brig. Gen. Terry Scott, who was mobbed by his wife and two daughters to the cheers of base personnel and the brassy sounds of an 84-piece high school band playing its rendition of “As the Caissons Go Rolling Along.”

“We are glad to be here. We are glad to rejoin you,” said the general, as the crowd flapped their signs--”Welcome Home” and “Our Heroes”--in the cool air of a cloudy night.

“I’d like to tell the American people how much we appreciate your support, your prayers and your confidence during these last seven months. You have truly been our inspiration,” said Scott.

“Now I’m gonna turn this podium over to the real heroes, these 100 soldiers representing the 100,000 we’ll be bringing in here real soon.”

“As for myself,” he added in an aside, “I could probably use a shower.”

And, like the chorus on cue in a Broadway show, beaming soldiers, M-16s slung at their backs and identical American flags stuck in their front pockets, came down the flight steps beneath a large, fluttering Stars and Stripes that someone had stuck near the cockpit after the plane landed.

Each shook hands down a receiving line of state and local dignitaries, checked their weapons into a hangar and boarded buses for Ft. Stewart, where the division is based. Two more planes carrying another 600 members of the unit were expected later today.

The arduous days and nights it had taken the 24th to dash the 281 miles to cut off Iraqi troops, and even the 25 1/2-hour flight from Saudi Arabia, must have seemed, in retrospect, less tedious than the 40-mile bus ride that carried the soldiers from the airfield to their base, where their eager families waited.

There, the returning soldiers were at last allowed the welcome that they had been waiting for--the one from their loved ones.

As their families sang “I’m Proud to Be an American,” they were ordered into formation. Wives and children in three pavilions 50 yards away shouted and waved. Some sobbed uncontrollably.

“I hear my wife!” declared one soldier as he stepped off one of the buses.

The troops marched across the 50 yards and stopped.

It was quiet.

And then a huge roar went up from the soldiers. They broke ranks. The families surged forward.

Men and women and children searched for each other.

Some hugged strangers.

2nd Lt. Pete Moore found his wife, Sally, and their two children right away. They fell into one another’s arms. He said simply, “I feel great.”

Even some soldiers on duty at the base had brought their own cameras to record an event that promised to be the most emotional military reunion since the last American prisoners of war were flown back from Vietnam in the 1970s.

More than a day earlier, the troops had boarded the C-141 at dawn in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. “Good to go,” said several, flashing grins and upturned thumbs, moments before their jet thundered into an ashen desert sky, bound for Hunter.

Their division, with its motto “First to Fight,” was among the first units sent to the desert last August after Iraq invaded Kuwait. Another 14,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines--including some Camp Pendleton and Twentynine Palms units--are scheduled to begin arriving home Saturday as the return of more than 500,000 American service personnel begins in earnest.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said the Pentagon will try to return an average of 5,000 GIs from the Persian Gulf each day over the next several weeks. “We’ve started the flow,” he said in an interview with a group of reporters in Washington. He cautioned, however, that some units as well as some individuals will remain in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and southern Iraq for months.

“We still have an awful lot of work to do over there,” Cheney declared. “I don’t want to create false expectations . . . that Dad’s coming home tomorrow.”

He said thousands of U.S. troops will have to stay in the Persian Gulf area until a formal cease-fire is signed to assure that Iraq abides by the terms it has already agreed to. Thousands more will be needed to clean up the battlefield, repair vehicles, prepare supplies for shipment home and load gear.

Others, he said, will stay to help restore services to Kuwait and to assist in efforts to repair the environment.

On the list for first-out, the 24th Infantry Mechanized Division was to be followed today by the 1st Tactical Fighter Wing, which came to Saudi Arabia on Aug. 8, six days after Iraq invaded Kuwait. It was expected to land at Langley Air Force Base, Va. Other units were to follow Saturday.

In all, 7,168 men and women were expected to arrive home today and Saturday.

The lucky ones who headed back Thursday had only a few things in mind: the loved ones they missed so badly, the cold beer they would drink--alcohol is banned in Saudi Arabia--and the luxurious, steaming showers they would take when they got home-- home .

“I got so much dirt in my hair,” said a rifleman, “I could grow potatoes.”

As they slowly shuffled through pre-flight inspection lines at the Dhahran air base, still lugging their weapons, packs and other trappings of war, they looked for all the world like the steeled infantrymen they had become. They even spoke like soldiers have always spoken after having witnessed combat.

“I hope I never have to go to another war again,” said Spec. 4 Paul Vanover, 24, of Oklahoma City. “I hope nobody does. I took a lot of pictures of dead people to remind me.”

But despite the somber nature of their mission and the pain that resulted, many said going to war was not all hell.

Vanover, for one, recalled with fondness how he and his buddies passed the time before the shooting started by building elaborate sandcastles and trying to ride the camels that roamed wild near their bivouac.

“Not too many camels in Oklahoma,” he pointed out.

Staff Sgt. Esteban Torres, 24, of Puerto Rico said he will be disappointed that he will no longer see the “beautiful sky” that often burned glorious red and gold over the Saudi desert as the sun rose and set.

“You get some really good sky out there,” he said.

Lt. Rodney Font, 24, of Pensacola, Fla., said he will miss “the allure and mystery” of Saudi Arabia. “Whatever that means,” he added.

Several others said it would be the hospitable Saudis and Kuwaitis they had met whom they would miss most.

Indeed, U.S. commander Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf dispatched a farewell message Thursday commending his departing troops for having respected “other religions, other cultures, other races and other nationalities’ while serving in what became Operation Desert Storm.

“While you served here,” Schwarzkopf said in a statement read to the soldiers, “you learned rather than criticized, and by learning you’ll take back to your homes knowledge little known about cultures that are thousands of years old. More importantly, you have left among those . . . cultures knowledge of what it means to deal with Americans.

“You have written history in the desert sands,” the general said, “that can never be blown away by the winds of time.”

May reported from Georgia, and Freed from Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Times staff writers William J. Eaton and John M. Broder in Washington contributed to this story.

RETURNING TROOPS Here is a list of the first returning units with their approximate arrival times, according to the Pentagon. All are local time. MARINES 600 members of the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Expeditionary Brigade, will arrive at Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, at 9 a.m. and 11:59 a.m. Saturday. 200 members of Regimental Combat Team 7 will arrive at Twentynine Palms at 12:55 p.m. Saturday. 200 members of Brigade Service Support Group 7 of Camp Pendleton will arrive at 12:55 p.m. Saturday. ARMY 900 members of the 82nd Airborne, Ft. Bragg, N.C. will arrive at Pope AFB in three flights at noon, 1 p.m., and 2 p.m. today. 386 members of the 5th Special Forces Group, Ft. Campbell, Ky., will arrive at 8:15 p.m. and 10:15 p.m. today and 12:15 a.m. and 1 a.m. Saturday. 137 members of the 197th Infantry Brigade Separate (Armored) of Ft. Benning, Ga., will arrive at Lawson Airfield at 9 p.m. today. 175 members of the 1st Infantry Division of Ft. Riley, Kan., will arrive at Forbes Army Airfield at 5:30 p.m. today. 75 members of the 2nd Armored Division Forward, of Garlstedt, Germany, will arrive in Hamburg, Germany, at 4:45 a.m. today. 100 members of the 513 Military Intelligence Brigade of Ft. Monmouth, N.J., will arrive at McGuire AFB at 3:45 p.m. today. 250 members of the 11th Air Defense Artillery, of Ft. Bliss, Tex., will arrive at Biggs Army Airfield at 4:51 p.m. today. ARMY RESERVE UNITS 15 members of the 14th Quartermaster Detachment, Greensburg, Pa., will arrive at Langley AFB, Va., at 6 p.m. today. 225 members of the following units will arrive at Langley AFB, Va., at 1 a.m. Saturday: 413 Chemical Co., Florence, S.C. 318 Chemical Co., Birmingham, Ala. 907th Chemical Detachment, Birmingham, Ala. 433rd Chemical Detachment, Chamblee, Ga. 46th Judge Advocate General Detachment, Boston. 120th Rear Area Operations Center Reserve, Ft. Jackson, S.C. AIR FORCE 520 members of the 1st Tactical Fighter Wing will arrive at Langley AFB in four flights at 12:25 p.m., 12:35 p.m., 12:45 p.m. and 1 p.m. today. NAVY 400 crew members of the hospital ship Mercy, Oakland Naval Hospital, will arrive at Travis AFB at 2:15 p.m. today. 242 crew members of Fleet Hospital 5 of Portsmouth, Va., will arrive at Norfolk, Va., at 11:20 p.m. today. Source: Associated Press