Word: miramar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...INSIDE front cover of a glossy brochure describing Miramar Naval Air Station, there is a picture of one of the many military home-comings Miramar hosts every month. Five smiling and lei-draped young men--"MIG-killers returning from Vietnam," the brochure says--stride away from their parked fighter planes and towards the kind of reward that Miramar, with its bowling alleys and movie theaters, offers those who have earned a hero's welcome...
Although newsmen picked up that brochure on their way into Miramar last Christmas Eve, it was obvious that what they were coming to see would be different from the normal homecomings. The 82 Americans who had been in North Korea's prisons for about a year were returning. Men at the base had worked hard, all night, to give Miramar the red-carpet trappings of a heroic celebration. The crewmen's families were flown to San Diego and "Welcome Home" signs were up everywhere. But beneath the frenetic preparations was the sobering realization that there was something inglorious about...
...some 200 people waiting at Miramar, the Pueblo crewmen weren't symbols of anything except a whole family; they were fathers and brothers and husbands, and their relatives wanted them back. The officers in charge of the homecoming at the base also put aside their concern for what the crew symbolized and concentrated on having a standard welcoming ceremony. Real red carpets were out on the runway, the officious M.P.'s were manning rope barricades to keep newsmen from swarming over the place where the men would arrive...
...hour before the men were due to land, Miramar's own marching band stepped up and began a series of hopelessly incongruous songs, like "Windy" or the Gillette Razor song. Midway into their third number ("The Girl Watcher's Theme"), the band stopped abruptly. Two planes were zooming in from the north; the crowd was suddenly silent and the families rushed up to the wire fence by the runway...
...crowd. A few hugged wives and children, but it wasn't a wild kissing-the-soil scene from the end of World War II. Most of the men cried. The Navy had tried hard to round up the families of the crewmen, and had shipped nearly 200 people to Miramar. But that wasn't quite enough, and there were 20 or 30 crewmen who simply tried to disappear into the swirling crowd...