In Sadness, U.S. Receives 33 Caskets at Dover

With their flag-draped caskets as his backdrop, an emotional President Clinton on Saturday honored Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown and the 32 American companions who died with him when their plane crashed into a foggy mountainside in Croatia.

“The 33 fine Americans we meet today, on their last journey home, ended their lives on a hard mountain a long way from home,” said Clinton as he stood in a chilly dusk at this air base that has long served as the destination for Americans killed in the line of duty in distant lands.

“In a way,” the president continued, “they never left America. On their mission of peace and hope, they carried with them America’s spirit.”

As members of an Air Force honor guard saluted nearby, the coffins carrying the bodies of Brown, government officials, American business executives, a journalist and the doomed plane’s crew were taken from the C-17 cargo plane that had brought them home from the mountainside near Dubrovnik, Croatia, where the delegation had traveled on a mission to help rebuild war-torn Bosnia. Two Croatians, a photographer and an interpreter, also died in the accident.

The president, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and Vice President Al Gore had arrived at the base here early in the afternoon to meet privately with each of the families touched by the tragedy.

Each family was assigned a private room in a training building, and the president, Mrs. Clinton and Gore went from room to room, spending a few minutes with each. Brown’s widow, Alma, joined them in meeting with the families of Commerce Department officials.

“You know, we can say a lot of things, because these people were many things to those who loved them,” Clinton said in his brief remarks. “But I say to all of you, to every American, they were all patriots; whether soldiers or civil servants or committed citizens, they were patriots.”

The ceremony drew scores of family members, Brown’s fellow Cabinet officers and 25 members of Congress. Many of the guests, who were seated on chairs arranged on the tarmac, wrapped themselves in blankets to shield them from the unseasonable cold that gripped the Washington area a day before Easter Sunday.

Many of the mourners cried openly and hugged each other as a military band played religious and patriotic music and an honor guard offered a 19-gun salute--the traditional tribute to a fallen federal official of Brown’s rank.

Earlier, at the Dubrovnik airport, under a brilliant sunny sky and against a backdrop of the mountains that claimed their lives, the plane crash victims were given a somber and emotional send-off by Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and hundreds of local residents who packed the terminal to watch.

Four coffins rested on the tarmac--two covered with American flags and two with Croatian flags--while Tudjman said the “tragic deaths” should strengthen the Croatian and American commitment to peace and to the deepening of their political and economic ties.

Noting that the ceremony was taking place the day before Easter, U.S. Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith quoted the Sermon on the Mount.

“Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God,” he said. “Blessed indeed are those who perished on a mission of peace.”

Officials of the government of Bosnia-Herzegovina also attended, and the caskets were blessed by Dubrovnik Archbishop Zelimir Puljic before military pallbearers carried them past an honor guard of 19 Americans and 19 Croatians.

The two American caskets were loaded onto the Air Force jet, where the other 31 American victims already had been placed--lined up one after another in the aircraft’s cavernous belly. The two Croatians’ bodies remained behind.

“I feel sorry for them as human beings,” said housewife Pave Baletic, 31, who brought her three children to the airport to watch the service. “They came here to help us, and the least we can do is to be here and say goodbye.”

Dover is no stranger to such ceremonies, having received victims from as long ago as the Vietnam War and as recently as the conflict in Somalia.

The president arrived at the U.S. ceremony on Air Force One, accompanied by Alma Brown, whose hand he clutched as the two stepped from the plane. Gore comforted Doris Meissner, the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, whose husband, Charles, also died in the crash.

“The sun is going down on this day,” the president said as the wind whipped across the airfield. “The next time it rises it will be Easter morning, a day that marks the passage from loss and despair to hope and redemption, a day that more than any other reminds us that life is more than what we know, life is more than what we can understand, life is more than, sometimes, even we can bear.”

After Clinton spoke, waiting hearses--one for each casket--left the tarmac in a somber procession.

Funeral services for Brown will be held this week after public and private observances in Washington that will resemble a state funeral.

After his body is released from the mortuary at Dover, it will be taken to Washington, where it will “lie in repose” for a day at the Commerce Department, Deputy White House Press Secretary Ginny Terzano said.

Services will be held at Washington National Cathedral, where Clinton will deliver the eulogy. Burial will be at Arlington National Cemetery.

“I feel for all the families and all the suffering I know they are going through,” said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), whose wife and infant daughter were killed in a car accident in 1972. “It’s astounding to see 33 hearses all lined up. It really drives home the enormity of it all.”

Commerce Department employee Brenda Travis dabbed her eyes during the ceremony, mourning the loss of Brown, a boss who had inspired her.

“He made us want to come to work every morning,” she said. “I wasn’t working for the federal government. I was working for Ron Brown. His picture is going to stay right on the wall behind my desk.”

Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Dubrovnik contributed to this story.