Military Briefing Fails to Ease Widow’s Mind : Pilot: Officers describe how her husband died over Iraq. But she finds their explanation inconclusive and confusing.

They came carrying official reports, color photographs, charts and jarring gun-camera footage showing her husband being blasted out of the sky by American fighter jets.

But the three Pentagon officers who visited Kaye Mounsey’s home in Culver City on Wednesday were unable to explain why friendly fire killed Erik Mounsey three months ago while he was piloting a U.S. Army helicopter over Iraq.

“I’d say I feel more confused,” the tearful widow said after the private, 2 3/4-hour Pentagon briefing at her Hubbard Street home. “So who do you point a finger at?”

Army flier Mounsey, her childhood sweetheart and father of their 2-year-old daughter, was among 26 killed in the April 14 mishap. He was piloting one of two UH-60 Blackhawks ferrying a team of foreign officers through a “no-fly” zone during a routine visit to Kurdish villages.

Since then, Kaye Mounsey, 28, has anguished over his death. Were sloppy procedures by the two Air Force jet pilots to blame? Poor communication by Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) controllers supposedly watching all four aircraft? A cockpit mistake on the part of her husband?

To her relief, Mounsey learned that the helicopter pilots were not at fault for what Defense Secretary William Perry on Wednesday characterized as the “tragedy that never should have happened.”

But basically everything else that could have gone wrong on April 14 did, suggested the findings of a 3,000-page Air Force investigation delivered to Mounsey’s home by Army Lt. Col. James W. Kelton, Air Force Maj. Jeff Rochelle and Army Capt. Mark Turner.

The officers declined to discuss the investigation as they left the unusual briefing. But Mounsey said it may have raised as many questions as it answered.

Instead of helping draw the tragedy to a close, the inquiry has turned out to be “more of an opener,” she said as she stood beneath a front-yard canopy of Chinese elm leaves with daughter Natasha in her arms.

“Now that we know what they’ve told us, all we can do is start from ground one. This is what they say to be the facts: What do we believe of what they’re telling us? I guess I’ll sit down and read everything they gave me and try to make heads or tails of this--and make a life for her.

“I’m trying to explain to a 2-year-old daughter . . . why her daddy’s not here.”

Mounsey said the three military men patiently explained that “a multiple breakdown of communications” between the two F-15 fighters and the AWACS controllers occurred. They also carefully outlined the sophisticated electronic codes used by pilots to tell friends from foes in Iraqi airspace.

But she acknowledged being left “kind of numb” by gun-camera videotapes they played for her that showed fighter-jet missiles slamming into her 28-year-old husband’s distant helicopter.

“It’s black-and-white and pretty blurry. But you can see the missile launch and then the smoke,” she said.

“I keep thinking that I know my husband was taken quickly and suffered no pain and didn’t know what hit him. If he’d been lying there hurt, that would really have distressed me. But the fact they came and surprised him and he didn’t know is somewhat comforting, if you can put comfort in that.”

Mounsey said she would like to see those responsible for the 26 deaths punished. Finding the guilty parties may be difficult, however.

“It seems like they’re placing the blame on a handful of people,” she said.

“I’m going to have to suffer for the rest of my life. The fact that somebody (may) just get early retirement is not going to be justice for me.”

Wednesday’s briefing--one of about 15 staged simultaneously nationwide for victims’ families--did not go without one hitch. Raymond and Sarah Mounsey of Westchester complained that the Army excluded them from the discussion of their son’s death.

But Army spokeswoman Kathy Ross said the couple would have been welcomed if they had shown up. “We thought they were going to be there,” she said.

* MAIN STORY: A14