Thousands Return to Clamorous Celebration : Military: Orange County families fly east for an emotional reunion with soldier sons and daughters.

Thousands of American GIs returning from the Persian Gulf stepped off transport planes and climbed out of cockpits Friday as the first full day of nonstop homecomings rolled across the country, launching a weekend of festivities in virtually every American time zone.

The returning servicemen--and for the first time in the nation’s history, goodly numbers of servicewomen--were welcomed at bases and airfields by relatives and friends they had for the most part not seen in seven months since they were summoned to Gulf duty.

More than 6,300 American GIs--the first of 540,000 dispatched to the Gulf--headed home Friday to bases in California, Virginia, Maine, North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Louisiana. More were to come home throughout the weekend, including 1,000 Marines returning to bases in Southern California today.

And by the thousands, they were thankfully peeling off their fatigues, turning in their guns, shedding the desert dust and digesting the last of the combat rations that most never wanted to have to eat again, relishing instead the novelty of clean clothes, peace and quiet, hot showers and pizza, ice cream and beer.

Among them were Pfcs. Daren Keeney and Robert Muir, whose families had flown from Orange County to North Carolina’s Pope Air Force Base.

For what seemed like hours, the Keeney and Muir families huddled in the cold rain Friday, their eyes peeled on a hulking air transport idling on the Tarmac.

They had waited months for this day, to greet two young men who had become Army buddies while serving with the 82nd Airborne in the Gulf.

But in a wild scene Friday, during which hundreds of families rushed the airfield to find their loved ones, the Keeneys, of Santa Ana, and the Muirs, of Fullerton, were temporarily lost in the crush of bodies.

“My daughter was pushing through the crowd with tears in her eyes,” Delores Muir said in a telephone interview, describing the mad search for her son. “We were going through all these people kissing and hugging. Then I saw him. We put our arms around each other, and he told me he loved me.”

When Daren Keeney’s family finally caught up with him--a rifle still strapped to his back--they found him in the arms of his fiancee, Amy Shiner, who made the trip with the family Wednesday night from Santa Ana.

“It was a great day,” Shiner said. “He had a lot more hair than I expected, and he looked tan. I told him we were proud of him and that it was nice to see him again. It just took them forever to get the guys out of that plane!”

For Valerie Keeney, Daren’s mother, the wait was a particularly nervous time in which a button with her son’s picture became a permanent wardrobe accessory. Old Glory and the 82nd Airborne flag have flown every day in the front yard. And yellow ribbons have been tied to every tree and around the neck of the family dog.

Not leaving much to chance, the family even tracked the return of their son and his buddy country by country.

“He called this morning when he arrived in Maine,” Valerie Keeney said. “Before that, they had stopovers in Egypt and Ireland.”

It seemed Friday could not come soon enough for both families.

“To be involved in something that big. . . ,” Valerie Keeney said, her voice trailing. “All the flags were waving. People were yelling and whistling. All my prayers were answered. The girls went running out on the airfield. They were yelling for Daren.

“I was so excited, even though I knew this was going to happen. I asked if he was hungry. He said he was just thirsty.”

Delores Muir said the friendship her son formed with Daren Keeney grew to include the two families when Robert Muir called home to tell his mother about the guy he met from Santa Ana while playing volleyball.

“It’s almost uncanny how much our families are alike,” she said. Friday night, the two families, with sons in tow, were headed out for a night on the town in Fayetteville, where they will celebrate the homecoming and Robert Muir’s 21st birthday. By today, the families hope to learn whether their sons will be able to spend some time at home in Orange County before returning to duty.

“We’re glad to have them home,” Delores Muir said. “The welcome was just super. I know it really touched them.”

In California, the first substantial contingent of personnel to return arrived Friday at Travis Air Force Base, west of Sacramento, aboard a Continental Airlines 747. The 420 active-duty and reserve Navy personnel had worked aboard the Mercy, a Navy hospital ship in the Persian Gulf.

Their homecoming marked one week short of seven months’ duty at sea for the men and women who had tended the sick, the wounded and some of the American prisoners of war.

Two decades ago, outside the gates of Travis, anti-war demonstrators had gathered to chant, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh,” as the big-bellied military planes arriving from Vietnam had disgorged their cargo of soldiers in body bags.

Inside Travis’ gates Friday, relatives who had passed the two-hour wait in part by singing “God Bless America” became a delighted mob. After enduring seven months of separation with oceans and desert between them, they were not about to let a few yards of thin nylon cord strung on some flimsy metal stanchions stand in the way.

They hung back initially as the Navy men and women stepped down the bunting-draped gangway, but many among the 2,000 relatives and friends soon followed the reporters’ lead and stepped over the low restraints, surging toward their loved ones. The servicemen and women spotted their families and began running toward them. Navy personnel pleaded helplessly for them to stay orderly and get onto the buses that would take them to an Oakland processing center.

The wife of Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Steve Lesley, and the son he had not seen, had come from Cheverly, Md., to meet him.

The little boy, Tanner, 5 1/2 months old, was bundled in a white bunny suit with fuzzy ears, and Lesley held him close. “It’s wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. I can’t describe it,” he said.

Oakland radiologist Frank H. Crankovich, one of the first off the plane, fell into the clutches of his wife and two daughters, Amanda, 4, and Emma, 7 months.

“I’m glad we didn’t have to work too hard over there,” Crankovich said. And as for this welcome--”great. In a word, great.”

For Lt. Cmdr. Randall Culp, “the hardest part was the boredom. There wasn’t much to do. Thank goodness they didn’t need us.”

Although the crew members of the Mercy had a comparatively quiet war, they were accorded what is quickly becoming a standard hero’s welcome.

The hurried telephone calls home had already given most of the soldiers an inkling of the excited reunions that awaited.

But many returnees, battle weary and exhausted by flights lasting as long as 22 hours, seemed stunned at the emotion that was playing out in front of them, even a bit disoriented.

“It really didn’t hit till we got here,” said Capt. Doug Moore, an F-15 fighter pilot with the 1st Tactical Fighter Wing, after arriving at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton Roads, Va. Moore said that it was only as his fighter aircraft flew over the cheering throng that he began to realize the depth of the nation’s jubilation.

When the engines of six returning F-15s finally throttled down and the pilots popped open their cockpit hoods in unison, the crowd’s quiet anticipation swelled into a roar of approval. Wives, parents and children surged forward, and minutes later, Moore grinned happily into the cameras with his 3-year-old son, Ryan, on his hip.

The message scrawled across the back of Ryan Moore’s miniature flight jacket seemed to say it all: “Day of the Hero.”

“Everybody coming back’s a hero,” said Air Force Capt. Rod Yates, a beefy B-52 bomber navigator whose 3-year-old daughter, Esther--like countless children Friday--burst into tears in his arms. “But there’s some quiet inside us for those who won’t come back.”

At Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina, where a group of paratroopers finally ended its journey, military police strained to hold back 1,000 family members who chanted, “Let them go!” North Carolina Gov. James G. Martin declared, “You are home. Well done, good and faithful soldiers.”

Then the lines broke, and seven months of separation ended in shouts, tears and passionate embraces.

In military communities across the nation, the bands and bunting that awaited the returning GIs honored not only the veterans of the Gulf War victory, but implicitly atoned to those who returned from a less successful and less popular conflict in Vietnam. It was a day not only of jubilant personal reunions but of coming to terms with a defeat that scarred a generation.

“We might . . . challenge all Americans to open our hearts to all veterans that have gone before us, particularly those of Vietnam who did not share the welcome that you have today,” said Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) to whoops of applause from the Langley crowd of 20,000.

Retired Navy Vietnam veteran Gary Brown, among the welcoming throng in California, said simply: “I’m glad to see my friends home. I’m glad to see them coming home walking. This is a helluva lot different than when I came back from Vietnam.”

More than 200 locals formed a welcoming line at the Bangor, Me., airport refueling stop for paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division. On their way home to Ft. Bragg, N.C., the soldiers were welcomed by a high school band and a free Maine lobster roll breakfast.

“We just feel like we know them all,” said Val Bellomy of Hampden, Me. “When my husband came back from Vietnam, I was the only one who went out to meet him.”

At Langley Air Force Base, Air Force Secretary Donald B. Rice told returning forces, “You turned it into the mother of all retreats followed by the mother of all defeats, and extending over the next months, we will have the mother of all homecomings.”

Defense officials said it will take months for the remaining Americn troops to return home. Some whose specialties are crucial to rebuilding Kuwait or maintaining the security of the chaotic region may remain for years.

But for most who were sent in the first wave of Operation Desert Shield, homecomings are expected within a few weeks.

“It’s a great day to be a soldier,” Desert Storm commander Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf told departing troops Friday.

Healy reported from Washington. Times staff writers Jerry Gillam reported from Travis, Don Shannon and Helaine Olen in Washington and Christopher Elliott in Oakland contributed to this story.