Posted on 12/12/2005 6:27:05 PM PST by mark502inf
The words still turn stomachs 20 years later: "No survivors."
Malinda Parris was preparing to welcome her husband home for the holidays from a mission in Egypt when she first heard them. She had decorated the house, baked wildly to fill the kitchen with his favorite foods and was dressing to go to a homecoming ceremony at Fort Campbell.
All that stopped when the television flashed with news that would change her life.
A plane carrying her husband, Rudy, an Army pilot, and 247 other soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division home from a peacekeeping mission in the Sinai had crashed in Canada.
Fully fueled, the plane burned on impact. It was two weeks before Christmas.
"It wasn't a gradual letdown. It was like jumping out of a helicopter or airplane. The fall was endless," said Parris, 61, of Herndon, just outside Fort Campbell. "To go from that peak to the depths of hell was more than devastating."
Soldiers from 28 units at Fort Campbell were killed instantly when the Arrow Air DC-8 crashed seconds after taking off on Dec. 12, 1985, from Gander, Newfoundland, International Airport, where it had refueled for the final leg of its return to Fort Campbell. An eight-member civilian flight crew also died in the crash.
Most soldiers on the plane were with the division's 502nd Infantry Regiment returning from a six-month deployment to Egypt, where they had been sent to ensure compliance with the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.
The peacetime crash resonates two decades later as the Army prepares to honor the soldiers with military and civil memorial ceremonies Monday. The anniversary comes as the 101st is grieving deaths in Iraq -- 19 Fort Campbell soldiers died in November.
Retired Lt. Gen. Hubert Smith, then commander of division support, recalls waiting with families in a heated gymnasium that winter morning for the soldiers to return.
The day was excited, filled with laughs and infectious smiles as the clock ticked nearer to the plane's arrival. Many wives had spoken with soldiers on the telephone just hours before.
None was prepared for the plane not to arrive, he said.
"We're used to dying in battle," said Smith, of Clarksville, Tenn. "But to lose that number of people in peacetime, it was a waste."
President Reagan consoled families at a memorial service days later as the nation's sympathies turned to the families in anguish, awaiting word that their loved ones' bodies had been identified in the charred remains. Letters flooded in from across the country from strangers reaching out to families at Fort Campbell and neighboring communities.
"It was like they had been hit in the stomach with a baseball bat. It was just terrible. And I'm talking about people who didn't know any of them," said Ted Crozier, a retired Army colonel who was then mayor of Clarksville.
The crash remains among the worst aircraft disasters in Canadian history. Families were consumed with questions when there was no immediate word on the cause of the crash. Was it ice on the wings, as the reports said? Had there been an error in the cockpit? The crash occurred while kidnapped Americans were being held in Beirut. What ties were there to terrorism?
In the end, an investigation completed three years later by the Canadian Air Safety Board and the National Transportation Safety Board determined ice on the plane and excess cargo compromised the plane during takeoff. The findings were contentious and have been disputed through the years.
George Heath, a division public affairs officer at Fort Campbell who was getting ready for work when the phone rang the morning of the crash, has heard the questions and explanations. The circumstances are immaterial decades later, he said with a somber voice as he talked about the day that began a "funeral that virtually went on to a year."
The day won't be forgotten soon, Heath said.
"It will be all right by me if it is a day that lives in infamy," he said.
Billboards in nearby communities lamented the loss with expressions of grief for months, while the division held a seemingly endless litany of memorial services.
Fort Campbell dedicated a memorial to the fallen soldiers. A monument in Gander, Newfoundland, and a tree park and monument in Hopkinsville, where 248 Canadian maples line the landscape, also were erected.
The trees in Hopkinsville were struck with disease, died and have been replaced. But the names of all the soldiers who died last in deep engravings on black marble.
Names like Chief Warrant Officer Rudy Parris.
While it took years to find closure, Malinda Parris is remarried now, to another Fort Campbell soldier who is preparing to leave for Iraq.
She said the bitterness that followed Rudy's death has subsided.
"I have been upset. I have been unhappy. I have cried. And I'm tired of doing that," Parris said. "You can't change it."
We know what the FBI would have said: "no suspected ties to terrorism."
Move on nothing to see here. Becoming a real skeptic on these type of accidents even though this happened 20 years ago.
Thank you. My brother was in the 101st. I was stationed overseas when this happened and he never mentioned it to me nor did I see it in the press. God bless them all.
According to what I could Google, it was a DC8-63. Standard seating capacity would have been from 180 to 220 for that model per Boeing. So they were really packed in, and probably had a full load of luggage and equipment as well. If the model info is correct, the plane wouldn't have been that old. 63s were built between 1967 and 1972 and many have racked up over 100,000 hours in the air.
Sgt. Brian Dumpert and his wife lived next door to me in 1983-84, back when he was in the 82nd. I remember they'd come over with homemade popped popcorn (pre-microwave) to watch movies, and I'd roller skate on their carport. Sgt. Dumpert was also the person who taught me the word "wuss." (No, he didn't call me one -- I was only seven or eight at the time). His family had moved to Indiana by the time of the crash. He had an 18-month-old, and a newborn he had not yet seen. Sad, sad day all around.
Wonder if someone planted eight maples separately for the crew members.
How very sad.
I had PCSd from the 311th MI earlier that year. The day after the crash I called back to my old unit to find that two of my friends had died.
Odd enough, one was from Lebanon if I remember correctly.
Should be remembered these soliders died on yet another mission to the ME - peacekeeping ops in the Sinai.
The source I looked at gave the 259 figure for the -61, with the 63 having the wings from the 62 and the fuselage from the 61, with a longer range. http://www.airliners.net/info/stats.main?id=194
Your source seems to suggest that the 62 was longer than the 61, while the other source says that the 62 was shorter than the 61.
If the 61 and the 63 were the same length, as the other source suggests, you probably could cram in 259. But remember, a planeload of combat soldiers is probably going to weigh more than a standard planeload of passengers which would include men, women and children.
There is a picture of the memorial at:
www.cdli.ca/monuments/nf/gander2.htm
(Sorry, don't know how to do a link.)
There are several online lists of the names of those who died, arranged by what state they were from, including these:
www.screamingeagle.org/ganderlist.html
nlt.rootsweb.com/disasters/gander/
that's a great post to his memory, Mike.
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