Bush Tribute Hails ‘the Men Behind Guns’

NORFOLK, Va. —  A day after the stricken battleship Iowa glided silently into its home port, the families and shipmates of 47 sailors killed in last week’s gun turret explosion bade a solemn goodby to the sailors President Bush hailed as “the men behind the guns.”

In an emotional tribute, President Bush told mourners gathered in a cavernous hangar at Norfolk Naval Air Station: “I can only offer the gratitude of a nation, for your loved one served his country with distinction and honor.

“We join today in mourning for the 47 who perished, and, in fact, for the 11 who survived,” Bush said. “They all were, in the words of a poet, ‘the men behind the guns.’

“They came to the Navy as strangers, served the Navy as shipmates and friends, and left the Navy as brothers in eternity. In the finest Navy tradition, they served proudly on a great battleship, the USS Iowa.”

To the 1,453 Iowa crew members who returned from last week’s ill-fated gunnery exercise, Bush offered a poignant moment of camaraderie and an assurance of a full investigation. “I understand your grief,” said Bush, a Navy combat flier in World War II. “I promise you today, we will find out ‘why’. . . .

“But in a larger sense, there will never be answers to the questions that haunt us,” Bush said. “We will not--cannot, as long as we live--know why God has called them home.”

Console Families

To the mournful strains of the Navy Hymn, the President and his wife, Barbara, consoled the families of the fallen seamen, as many in the crowd of 6,000 inside the hangar and 2,000 outside it hugged and sobbed quietly. The President smiled nervously as he shook hands with relatives of victims, moving briskly along the rows of folding chairs.

Some showed Bush pictures of their lost ones. “This was our only son, this was our only boy,” one couple told the President. Several women stopped him for comforting hugs.

Speaking to reporters later as he flew to Chicago, the President said that he found it difficult to console the victims’ families. “I did choke up at the end,” he said, but “I felt I had to represent our country. You’ve got to deal with it, you’ve got to show them concern. This one was tough.”

Advice From Reagan

He said that he had called former President Ronald Reagan to ask for advice before he came here. “I asked him, ‘How do you do this?’ ” Bush said. Reagan told him, he said, that “you puddle up once in a while.”

h Middle Gun Lowered

Monday’s memorial came a day after the Iowa had docked at Pier 5, the middle gun of the No. 2 turret sagging lower than the two barrels that flanked it.

Beneath its lowered barrel, a basket of flowers and a single cross of chrysanthemums lay as a reminder of one of the nation’s greatest recent peacetime naval disasters. As a naval investigative team, led by Rear Adm. Richard D. Milligan, worked to determine the cause of last Wednesday’s disaster, Navy engineers pondered whether the damaged gun could be repaired, as well as whether the 16-inch guns aboard the nation’s four battleships can be used safely.

The Navy has placed a moratorium on firing the 16-inch guns until the cause of the fiery explosion is determined.

Meanwhile, Iowa crew members wearing black armbands gave their own accounts of the accident. Iowa Capt. Fred P. Moosally said that the 47 men killed in the blast probably died in the first of three explosions, which rocked the ship with what one crew member called “a dull, flat sound--not the sharp crack of a rifle.”

Moosally said that the crew of the Iowa’s turret No. 2 was the most highly trained and best led on the ship.

Testing of Gun ‘Normal’

“That was my best crew,” he said, adding that when he brought visiting dignitaries aboard, he always showed them the turret in which the disaster struck. Cmdr. Robert J. Kissinger, the ship’s weapons officer, added that a 90-minute check of the gun’s systems had been conducted the morning of the disaster. Both the maintenance and the loading of the gun had been “completely normal,” he said.

Officials here said that the technical state of the gun, as well as the crew’s adherence to strict procedures for loading and firing it, will be a major focus of the Navy investigation. “There was no indication we had problems,” Moosally said. “That was one of the safest places we could go.”

The seaman in charge of turret No. 2--39-year old Reginald O. Ziegler, who died in the blast--was the ship’s highest-rated petty officer, Moosally said. The ship’s skipper added that from the lowest level of the seven-story turret, the resounding crack of the Navy’s most powerful guns firing from above was muffled.

That fact led 21-year-old gunner’s mate Kendall L. Truitt, overseeing a crew of seven ammunition handlers at the base of the turret, to believe that he had heard the turret’s first shot when 550 pounds of explosive powder ignited, apparently while it was being loaded into the breech of the 16-inch gun.

When Truitt and his men called the compartment above on the radio and got no answer, he said, they suspected that something was wrong. It was not until the team opened a hatch and felt heat and smelled smoke that they realized what had happened.

“We knew something was drastically wrong,” said Truitt, who was among those who crawled through an escape hatch to safety. Clearly shaken by the disaster, Truitt, one of 11 who survived inside the turret, said: “Some people, they’re not over it yet. I’m working on it. But I’ll be back in the turret.”

“We’re going to try to keep the pride going,” Moosally said. “Yes, 47 shipmates died, but God gave birth to 500 heroes that day,” he added, referring to the Iowa’s firefighting team.

The Navy investigative team rooted through the debris aboard the Iowa Monday. Officials acknowledged that they have few eyewitnesses to shed light on the cause of the incident. Investigators will rely heavily on crew members’ recollections of radio communications between the crew of turret No. 2 and the rest of the ship, officials said. They added that a videotape of the explosion, taken by a crewman, may provide further clues.