Friday, April 13, 2001

By Sandra Jontz, Dave Ornauer and Carlos Bongioanni,
Stars and Stripes

The 24 U.S. crewmembers detained in China will undergo intense medical and psychological analysis in Hawaii, U.S. military officials say.

"The key first is getting them their medical checks," Lt. Col. Stephen Barger, a spokesman for the Pacific Command in Hawaii, said Thursday. "They were eating local food, drinking local water, they were in a country which they didn’t have vaccinations for."

The crew members were expected to leave Hawaii on Saturday and fly to Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, Wash., where most of them are stationed. Twenty-two of the crew members are stationed at Whidbey. One, Airman Curtis Towne, is stationed at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa. Another is a Marine based in Hawaii.

Barger said he didn't know when Towne would return to Kadena.

The crew was on board a U.S. Navy EP-3E Aries II on a surveillance and reconnaissance mission off the Chinese coast when it was flanked by two Chinese fighters. U.S. officials say that one of the fighters crashed into the EP-3E. The U.S. pilot was forced to make an emergency landing on a Chinese military airstrip on Hainan Island, where the plane has sat since.

A commercial flight on Thursday carried the crew from Hainan to Guam, where they were to take a military flight to Hawaii. Barger said the crew was expected to land in Hawaii at about 1:30 a.m. Friday Japan time.

"The initial report from the crew is that they’re in great shape, good spirits," Barger said. He said the crew would also go through debriefings on their mission, but wouldn’t say what other types of debriefings they might undergo or how long they will be in Hawaii.

"It depends on their general health and welfare," Barger said. "They’ve had a long flight."

Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, officials planned a welcome home celebration for the crew, complete with a Marine Corps band and red-carpet treatment.

The main event is expected to be held at Whidbey Island, and some crewmembers might not be reunited with their families until then because the schedule in Hawaii would be tight, Barger said.

"If the families desire to come here, even though we discourage that, we’d work that into the schedule," he said.

The poking and prodding of the crew actually started as soon as the plane carrying them to freedom lifted off from Hainan on Thursday, said Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. Craig Quigley during a press briefing in Washington.

A 13-member repatriation team of psychologists, medical doctors and intelligence officers was aboard the Continental Airlines 737 that left China carrying the crew toward American soil, Quigley said.

"You get a 12-hour, more or less, jumpstart on the whole process before you get to Hawaii," he said. "Before details of the collision start to fade ... we want to see if we can capture their memory while they are still fresh."

A military mental health professional at Yokosuka Naval Base near Tokyo said that, in general, getting the crew to talk about their experience is a top priority.

"The goal for these type of teams is to get people to process through their emotions ... to get them to talk about how they feel," he said.

It’s important for the crewmembers to express how they feel and to be reassured that they are not mentally ill, said the official. They need to know that what they are going through – the feelings of anger, sadness and mental distress – is normal, he said.

The typical routine is to get the crewmembers to have group discussions so that they can see that they are not alone in their feelings, he said. It also is important for crewmembers to get back into a normal routine.

"If they take too much time off from their work, they might start believing something is wrong with them," he said. "It’s important to get people back on the horse, so to speak."

Quigley said the EP-3E pilot demonstrated a "spectacular feat of airmanship to bring it down safely."

Now that the crew is on its way home, the U.S. military’s next concern is retrieving the plane. "We consider it American property and we want our plane back," Quigley said.

Jan Childs contributed to this report.

Back to April's stories
Page Two news roundup
Stories from March, 2001
Stories from February, 2001
Stories from January, 2001
Stories from December, 2000
Stories from November, 2000
Stories from October, 2000
Stories from August and September, 2000
Stories from June and July, 2000
Home