The Scud That Hit Greensburg : For One Pennsylvania Community, The Gulf War Has Not Ended

ARLENE WOLVERTON knew what it meant when she saw the black Cougar drive slowly past her little white frame house in the western Pennsylvania countryside, turn around and then pull into the gravel drive. Just 45 minutes earlier, she had called Jan Hvizdos, coordinator of a military-family support group, to ask how the Army would notify her if her husband, Richard, had been killed in the Persian Gulf.

“If you see a car with two men in uniform,” Hvizdos had said.

And now, to her horror, there they were, two U.S. Army sergeants, getting slowly out of the car and walking up the drive in the cold gray dawn.

Fighting back hysteria, she picked up the phone to call her mother-in-law. “They are coming now,” said Wolverton, an honest and unsentimental woman. “Rick is killed.”

The sergeants, from the nearby Greensburg Armory, were on the verge of tears themselves as they began their official litany: “We are here from the President of the United States and the Secretary of the Army to inform you that your husband, Richard, was killed in action on Feb. 25 in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.” But Wolverton didn’t let them finish. “Stop! Stop! I don’t want to hear it. Don’t tell me this.”

After they left, Wolverton went crazy. She was a German citizen, married only eight months. Now she was a war widow, alone with a dog and two cats and a husband coming home in a body bag. It made her so furious she tore down the American flag and yellow ribbons from her front door, ripped up the sign from the Operation Desert Storm Family Support Group and threw it in the corner.

“I wanted to burn everything from the military,” she says.

She was still angry two hours later when Rep. John Murtha, powerhouse chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, a former Marine and the longtime Democratic representative for Greensburg, called her to offer his condolences. “Your husband is a hero,” he said.

“No, he’s not a hero,” Wolverton snapped. “I don’t want to hear that. I want him back.” And she slammed down the phone.

RICHARD WOLVERTON HAD SERVED WITH THE 14th Quartermaster Detachment, an Army Reserve unit home-based in Greensburg, a town of 17,000. The 14th’s mission, when it was dispatched to the Gulf on Feb. 18, was to go into Kuwait after the fighting had stopped and set up large water-purification units. But the 14th never got the chance.

Five days after the unit’s arrival, while it was still in Dhahran awaiting orders, an Iraqi Scud missile fell out of the sky on the warehouse that the unit was using for a barracks, killing 13 of the 69 members outright and wounding 39 others. Fifteen other soldiers from other parts of the country also died in the explosion. It was the worst military disaster suffered by U.S. forces in the entire Gulf War; of the 141 Americans who were killed in action in the Gulf, a quarter died in that single blast.

Unlike regular army units, which draw people from all over the country, the 14th was a reserve unit. Eighty percent of its dead and wounded came from the same geographic area: the Pennsylvania counties of Allegheny, Cambria, Clarion, Indiana, Washington and Westmoreland. And when news of the attack flashed across TV screens, it left families all over the rolling hills around Greensburg shattered, frantic and convulsed with grief.

But on one level, perhaps, they were not completely surprised. They had, after all, grown up in western Pennsylvania. As the mother of one wounded soldier observed, “Things never go completely right for us.”

PEOPLE SOMETIMES CONFUSE THE COVERED bridges, soft pretzels and buggy-driving Amish farmers of eastern Pennsylvania with the western part of the state. In fact, because the Allegheny mountains slice diagonally through Pennsylvania, the eastern and western extremities have quite different personalities: The west has a gritty blue-collar vitality coupled with an economy that is chronically depressed. “There’s a ruralness there you don’t feel at the eastern end of the state, a backwardness, a gloominess,” says one Greensburg native who left the area 25 years ago for the Pennsylvania Dutch country. “I sort of perceive it with coal dust hanging over the air.”

Blame it on the area’s persistent unemployment (ranging from 16% in 1983 to just under 6% today), which over the years has engendered a kind of economic fatalism that is now as much a part of the culture as high school football and all-you-can-eat fish fries at the fire hall on Friday night. Starting in the late 1970s, the area took one quick hit after another: first the closing of the glass factories, then the steel mills, then the coal mines, even a huge Volkswagen plant, which shut its doors in 1988 despite a $40-million government loan and a 100% property-tax abatement the first year. In contrast to the 1950s, when high school graduates could reasonably expect to work at high-paying union jobs in auto plants and steel mills, career opportunities for 1980s graduates were confined to semi-skilled work at half the pay in auto-body shops, tire dealerships, department stores and fast-food joints.

In Westmoreland County, the population has dropped 6% over the last decade. “A lot of young people have joined the military because there are not any jobs,” says Marilyn Trout, the mother of Michael Trout, a sergeant in the 14th. During the Vietnam era, says Duane Brokenbeck of the McKeesport Vietnam Vet Resource Center, the enlistment rate from western Pennsylvania was nine times the national average. After the steel mills closed, the population of Monessen, a small town in Westmoreland County along the Monongahela River, dropped from 20,000 to 9,000, forcing the Roman Catholic Church to merge five parishes into one. Today, just driving through these former industrial towns can be an unnerving experience. “You sit at an intersection waiting for the light to change, and you look around, and there’s no other cars,” says one still slightly dazed native. In depressed downtown Monessen, a quarter in a parking meter, an astonished out-of-town reporter recently noted, buys five hours of parking.

And yet in many ways the area has a powerful appeal. Outside the dying steel towns and rickety coal towns, western Pennsylvania looks much as it has for decades, which is to say, rolling green hills interspersed with stands of old hardwood, placid cows in the fields at dusk, rabbits wildly racing before car headlights down narrow country lanes and ringneck pheasants strutting through the corn stubble on bright fall days. In contrast with the residents of big cities, people here share a sense of community as pervasive as the shrill of cicadas on a summer day. “People have been here since the turn of the century,” says Carnegie Mellon history professor Peter Stearns, “often living in the same houses their grandparents lived in.”

There is such a strong ethnic consciousness that you can’t turn a corner in some of these valley towns without running into a Polish Club or a Ukrainian Club, if not clubs for Slovaks, Hungarians and Italians. (In Westmoreland County, a mere 1.8% of the population is black, and Asians and Latinos register hardly at all.) And all these are in addition to the Moose, Elks, Eagles, American Legion, Amvets, Veterans of Foreign Wars and numerous volunteer-fire-department social halls where graying veterans line bar stools on football nights, drinking beer at 40 cents a glass and watching Joe Montana (a local boy) on the color TV.

Perhaps because good jobs are so hard to come by, western Pennsylvanians have an abiding confidence in the value of hard work. As they will gladly tell you, their parents (or grandparents) came here from the old country, never took anything from anyone, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, worked every day of their lives and now have something to show for it.

And despite the economy, many people live quite well in solid, old, yellow-brick two-story homes, in Victorian farmhouses with wide, deep porches or, more recently, in new ranch houses with lush green lawns out front and satellite-dish antennas on the side. (“People here are not newspaper readers,” says Anthony Bosco, the Roman Catholic bishop of Greensburg, “but they watch TV.”)

In politics, most are socially conservative, blue-collar ethnic Democrats for whom Jane Fonda is anathema and support for one’s country in wartime is as necessary as snow tires in January or flat rocks on the garbage cans to confound the raccoons. Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 1/2 to 1, and the Democratic candidate has carried Westmoreland county in the last four presidential elections.

“This is typical small-town America here,” says Bishop Bosco, a trim, tailored man who keeps a Tiffany lamp and a plastic figure of Mickey Mouse on his desk. “And I don’t think it (has so much) to do with Republicans or Democrats (as it does with) old-fashioned, flag-waving patriotism.”

Their patriotism notwithstanding, few if any welcomed another war. The reason: So many western Pennsylvanians were in the military, someone was always getting killed--three sailors in the 1989 gun-turret explosion on board the USS Iowa, a Green Beret sergeant in a 1987 mortar attack in El Salvador, a paratrooper in the 1985 crash of a charter flight in Gander and an Army corporal in the 1983 attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut.

“Whenever a disaster happens anywhere in the world,” says Greensburg Tribune Review reporter Richard Gazarik, “people around here hold their breath.”

As a result, when President Bush started calling up reservists, says Kenneth Balego, a first sergeant at the Greensburg Armory, it made people so “jittery” that it was hard to reach them on the telephone.

“I’d call up and ask to speak to a reservist,” says Balego. “And his wife would say, ‘What for?’

“ ‘I just want to talk to him.’

“ ‘You ain’t taking my husband!’

“ ‘Can you please just let me talk to him?’ ”

Carolyn McCawley was so distraught when she learned her son might be going to Saudi Arabia that she had nightmares. “I told my husband, ‘I know something is going to go wrong for Eddie,’ ” says McCawley, a candid, emotional woman from Westmoreland City. “ ‘I am so worried,’ I said. ‘I just hate this.’ ”

To Marilyn Trout, the most unnerving thing was how wrong everyone was about the war. “They’d say, ‘Don’t worry, he’s in the reserves. He won’t be called up.’ Then he gets activated, and they say, ‘Don’t worry. He’ll stay in the States.’ Then he goes to Saudi Arabia, and they say, ‘Don’t worry. He won’t be on the front line.’ ”

As it turned out, the 14th Quartermaster Detachment never got within 200 miles of the front lines. But even that was too close.

Late on the second day of the allied ground offensive, Iraq fired its 72nd Scud missile of the war. Like most Iraqi Scuds, it was a rickety, short-range ballistic missile, cobbled together with rivets and plywood, looking not unlike a flying hot-water tank. Designed by the Soviets and modified (badly) by the Iraqis for greater range, it was slow, unstable and inaccurate in the best of times, with a tendency to tumble in flight, if not break apart entirely.

About 8:30 p.m. on Feb. 25, the warhead came down on a tin-roofed warehouse in Dhahran where members of the 14th were sleeping, listening to war reports on the radio, playing nickel poker or Trivial Pursuit. Suddenly-- blam !--the warehouse exploded in red and yellow flames.

“I was knocked down,” says Edwin McCawley, a quiet, solid, 19-year-old college student. “Sheet metal folded over me. My first thought when the missile hit was, ‘Get me out of here!’ I was in awe of the devastation. The building was gone. It was just like nothing was there--just twisted metal girders.”

The warehouse, which was located behind a chain-link fence next to a major highway, became an instant tourist attraction. In the meantime, the survivors, choking back tears and wiping away blood, dragged their friends out of the smoking rubble amid a shower of fiberglass roof insulation, which left them itching and picking at their wounds for days.

Back in western Pennsylvania, Carolyn McCawley was at work at a coal-testing lab in Pittsburgh, listening to every-10-minute Persian Gulf updates on the radio when they announced that a Scud missile had hit a warehouse in Dhahran.

“Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” McCawley screamed.

A girlfriend came running out of the next office. “What happened? What happened?”

“I know that’s my son’s barracks,” wailed McCawley, who was crying so hard she had to take a tranquilizer. “Eddie called last Saturday. He said they were living in a warehouse. That’s just the way they described it--a 60-by-90-foot warehouse. I know it’s Eddie. I know it! I know it!”

In West Point, a comfortable ranch-house subdivision on the outskirts of Greensburg, Marilyn Trout was just walking in the door when she got a frantic call from her younger son asking if she’d heard anything about Michael.

Trout, who works with handicapped children but has the worldly-wise manner of a waitress at a truck stop, grabbed her channel changer, flicked on CNN, and there it was. “They were showing the burning, collapsed building and carrying out bodies, and I’m thinking, ‘Dear God in heaven,’ ” Trout says. “I started screaming. I banged my head on the wall. I was screaming hysterically. The dog was frantic, pacing back and forth.”

THE GREENSBURG ARMORY, HOME OF THE 14TH Quartermaster Detachment, is far from some kind of Pentagon branch office where people in starched shirts and shining boots stride purposefully down waxed and gleaming halls. Rather, like western Pennsylvania itself, it’s an open, accessible, homey kind of place where soldiers feel comfortable bringing their wives and children, more like a community social hall with scuffed institutional-green paint, a battered community kitchen and arcane administrative memos curling unread on the bulletin boards.

Once the Scud hit, the Army instantly transformed the place into an emergency command center, installing 11 new phone lines, three fax machines, two new copy machines and six mobile phones. So much was happening that wives and mothers of soldiers in the 14th passed out hoagies and pizzas that had been donated by local restaurants and helped handle the phones.

“It was a madhouse, chaos” after word came of the calamity, Balego says. “Everyone was calling me. And I’m calling all over. I didn’t sleep for three days.”

The biggest problem was getting information on the dead and wounded. The best and by far the fastest information was coming from survivors themselves who, after being treated at Saudi hospitals (mainly for concussions, shrapnel wounds, broken limbs and perforated eardrums), were calling home collect. Those families were the lucky ones. They knew more than the Army did. The commanding officer of the 14th, 26-year-old former tire-dealership manager Paul Lombardi, was in a Saudi hospital with shrapnel wounds to the head and chest. Unit personnel records were destroyed in the blast. In any case, the wounded were being shifted so fast from one hospital to another that the Army couldn’t keep up with them.

In the meantime, families who hadn’t yet received a call were so frantic for information that when the 99th Army Reserve Command, parent of the 14th Quartermaster Detachment, announced a 10 a.m. news conference at the armory, families flew to the building as moths to a bright light. To shield them from the press, the Army put them in a private room upstairs. “It was pathetic,” Marilyn Trout says. There were 80 people in the room, tense, drawn, clinging to each other and pale with fear.

After an hour and a half of addressing more than 100 reporters, Maj. Gen. James B. Baylor, commander of the 99th Army Reserve Command, came up to speak to the families. They weren’t happy.

“You have been protecting the Israelis with Patriots,” demanded one woman. “Why can’t you protect our own troops?”

“What were the casualties?” others wanted to know.

“Why don’t you know where they are?”

“Why can’t you bring them home?”

Someone stormed out of the room and slammed the door, and the briefing was over.

Then it got worse. Because the family members were so desperate for information, the Army, which usually conducts death notifications at homes, decided just that once to have the chaplain tell people on the spot, starting with the parents of 23-year-old Beverly S. Clark of Armagh, a secretary who, after the war, had planned to become a teacher.

“The chaplain was trying to put his arm around (Mrs. Clark) to get her out of the room,” Hvizdos says. “But she realized instantly what had happened. She was pounding on his chest with her fists. I held her. She was crying: ‘My baby. My baby. She was my baby. She always turned to me when she needed help. Now she can’t turn to me, and I can’t help her.’ ”

It was a pitiful scene, Hvizdos says. “The chaplain would ask if a certain family was there. Then they would leave the room, and you’d hear the screams, the cries, the ‘Oh, no’s!’ People were sitting terrified. ‘Am I next?’ ”

“It felt like a firing squad,” says Sherry Skufca, director of emergency services for the Westmoreland County Red Cross. “You’re just sitting there waiting for your turn.”

After three families had been called in, Hvizdos went to Sgt. Balego. “You can’t do this!”

“Yeah,” he said. “I see your point.”

WITH THE SURVIVORS OF THE 14TH IN HOSPITALS or on their way home, the Pennsylvania community turned itself to healing, grieving, adjusting, coping--and dealing with unresolved conflicts left over from Vietnam.

The Saturday following the attack, the community held a memorial service at the First Presbyterian Church of Greensburg. Thirteen hundred people came, including Pennsylvania Gov. Robert Casey and both senators--Arlen Specter and John Hines (who died in a plane crash several weeks later).

The service was broadcast across western Pennsylvania. Gov. Casey gave a moving speech, describing the victims as “our sons and daughters, the best of Pennsylvania. They gave of themselves for their communities, in service to their Commonwealth and in service to the country.”

Afterward, a chaplain read each name, a bell was rung and a bugler played taps.

“If you didn’t cry during that,” says Lt. Col. Paul Rots, a public information officer with the 99th Army Reserve Command, “there is something humanly wrong with you.”

The 13 who died ranged in age from 20 to 44. In civilian life, the victims, two of whom were women, had been clerks and secretaries, a mail-truck maintenance man, a forklift operator, college students, a boxer, a trumpet player and a future teacher. They left behind nine children and a community that was so touched and moved it inundated the families with sympathy cards, telephone calls and flowers. One industrialist anonymously paid to fly two medical specialists to Saudi Arabia to treat David Campbell, a critically wounded soldier from the 14th. The Rev. Billy Graham came to Greensburg to offer condolences. Congressman Murtha prevailed on Gen. Carl E. Vuono, Army chief of staff, to bring the remaining members of the 14th home early, and he did--on March 9. When Arthur Keough buried his 22-year-old son, Frank, he was stunned to discover that 500 people came to the church. Then on the way to the cemetery, he turned and glanced back at the top of a long hill and saw a line of 225 cars accompanying the hearse.

In New Derry, the citizens named their new fire hall after Richard Wolverton. The Army set aside a 30-foot-diameter circle in front of the Greensburg Armory as a site for a memorial, and concerned citizens donated nearly $50,000 for three 7-foot polished granite tablets with the names of the dead and wounded. The survivors were invited to welcome-home parties, to luncheons, banquets, dances, rallies, parades, spaghetti dinners, baseball games, tree plantings and speaking appearances in the public schools. And the reasons went beyond mere sympathy and patriotism. Casting its long, dark shadow was a painful, hulking memory: the shame of Vietnam.

“We used up Vietnam vets and threw away the can,” says Bob Bishop, a career counselor with the Pennsylvania Army National Guard.

Before the Scud hit, says Hvizdos, a Vietnam vet had approached her and asked, “Why a support group? You didn’t do it for us in Vietnam; why are you doing it for them?”

“That’s the reason,” Hvizdos replied. “We don’t want this to be another Vietnam.”

The tragedy of the 14th had given people a second chance. This time they were determined to do it right: When the survivors of the 14th landed at Latrobe airport, local residents stood for hours along the highway leading to town, just for the chance to wave a flag and cheer when their bus went by. The area suddenly sprouted so many flags and ribbons, it looked like some patriotic early spring. “I never saw so many yellow ribbons,” Bishop Bosco says. “People were indulging in reparations and catharsis for Vietnam. I was astonished.”

For some survivors, the attention was more than a little disorienting. As they saw it, they were passive victims of a random disaster. And yet they arrived home to discover half the state awash in flags, parades and “Welcome Home, Heroes” signs. “They didn’t consider themselves heroes,” Sgt. Balego says. “They didn’t even get into the battle.”

“We weren’t over there long enough,” agrees 21-year-old Spec. 4 Kelli Everson. The unit was activated on Sunday, Jan. 18. The following Saturday, they left for Fort Lee, Va., for training on reverse-osmosis water-purification machines. A month later, they were on their way to Saudi Arabia. “And a week later,” Marilyn Trout says, “13 were dead.”

It was such a painful time for the survivors that even people who didn’t go to Saudi Arabia felt traumatized. “I woke up last Wednesday night just bawling,” says Balego, who had many friends in the 14th. “My wife says I should see a psychiatrist.”

To help the survivors cope, Veterans Administration psychologists scheduled as many as four sessions a day for members of the 14th and their families at the armory on such topics as stress reduction and coping with anger. But some people don’t care to talk about their feelings, and others don’t feel they need to. “They offered us psychologists and psychiatrists,” Arthur Keough says. “But we didn’t need them. We had the Lord.” And a few, like Sgt. Terry Davis, get upset when asked how they’re managing. “I’m doing my job,” he says simply.

Marlene Wolverton’s anger lasted only one day. Now, she says, she spends all her spare time hanging out at the Greensburg Armory. “It feels like family,” she says.

Wolverton still winces at ambulance and fire sirens; they remind her too much of the air-raid sirens she heard on TV. And before going to bed, she double-checks the locks on the doors and looks under the bed. “Everyone thinks I’m strong, but inside I’m like a little baby sometimes,” she says. “I go to the reserve center and cry my heart out.” Her attitude toward life has changed as well. “Don’t think about the future,” she advises. “Enjoy what you can. Act selfishly. Live for yourself. And don’t do what other people want for you.”

Some people were less thrilled to see the troops home than others. At a mall one night, Edwin McCawley--who had been awarded a Purple Heart for his injuries--ran into a girl who acted as if he’d somehow made the whole story up: “So where’s your wound? I don’t see no injuries. How do I know you were even there? What proof do you have you were even hurt?”

“I have 13 dead friends,” McCawley answered. “Is that proof enough for you?”

A few book publishers and film producers have inquired after the rights to the story of the 14th, but an Army lawyer showed up one day at a family-support-group meeting, urging the families to beware of such slippery tricksters: “There is money to be made from this. Do you want it to go to some Hollywood producer or to make some rich actor a little bit richer? Or do you want it to go for the college education of some kid who has lost his father? Don’t sign anything (till we have a plan to handle this). Don’t let them divide and conquer.”

Not surprisingly, a few survivors and family members have reported feeling used. “Some (reporters) are real pushy,” says Davis, a medical-equipment repairman in civilian life. “They have their own opinion of what happened, and they’re calling just to get a name.” Other reporters apparently had political agendas. Right after the missile attack, a reporter from a Washington paper called Jeanne Wolverton, Richard Wolverton’s mother, to ask if she felt differently about Bush’s war now that her son was dead.

“No, I will not answer the question,” answered Wolverton, a soft-spoken, thoughtful woman who teaches nursery school part time.

“It made me angry,” she now says. “It was just somebody looking for support for a cause.”

The Army released the survivors from active duty on April 24; three, including David Campbell, remain at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. The members of the 14th have become so close, Everson says, that most plan to stay with the unit. “This way we can help each other.”

Although much of the country already seems to have forgotten the war, Jeanne Wolverton, like most of the parents and survivors, still firmly believes it was a “job that needed to be done.” Even so, she says, she couldn’t help feeling so “frustrated” the first 24 hours after her son’s death that “every time I saw a yellow ribbon I wanted to rip it off the porch, the car, whoever was wearing it, and say, ‘My son isn’t coming home.’ ”

Later, she discovered, she and her husband had to spend so much time comforting other people--”They felt so bad for us”--she didn’t have time to mourn properly. And now that all the sympathy and attention have subsided, she’s starting to hurt all over again.

“The end of last week, it really hit me,” she says. “This is real. He’s not coming back.”