USS Fletcher crew comes home to warm welcome
By Karen Blakeman
Advertiser Staff Writer
Anna Honaker looked nervous and excited yesterday as she stood in the hangar at Marine Corps Base Hawai'i at Kane'ohe clutching her newborn baby.
Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser
Her husband, Jerald, was about to meet their 2-month-old daughter, Hayleigh, for the first time. He had been deployed to the Arabian Sea during the last months of Anna's pregnancy. She had given birth while he was gone.
Jeremy Thomasson kisses his wife, Colette, after leaving the chartered airliner that carried the crew of the USS Fletcher to Marine Corps Base Hawai'i at Kane'ohe Bay. The crew left the Fletcher in Australia, where a new crew will take it back to the Persian Gulf.
So had three other wives of crewmen from the USS Fletcher.
Chris Arney of Springfield, Mo., waited in the hangar, too. She carried a sign that read "Welcome home, Autie," and "You go, girl." The mother of a woman serving in the Fletcher crew, Arney alternated between weeping and giggling while bouncing on her toes like a schoolgirl. Jet-lagged, she'd spent half the night making the sign.
Her daughter, Autumn Brown, had also been deployed aboard the Fletcher for six months.
Brown and Honaker were among more than 300 Fletcher crew members who returned home yesterday, arriving via a chartered airplane that parked just beyond the hangar where their family members waited, clutching lei, roses and damp tissues.
Cheers went up as the Fletcher crew exited the plane. As the crew reached the hangar, children, spouses and parents ran forward, arms ready to embrace long before the loved one was in hugging distance.
"Her first deployment," Arney said of her earnest looking daughter. "She did really well."
"His hands were shaking when he took her," Anna Honaker said after her husband's first meeting with their daughter. He'd read "What to Expect When You're Expecting" while deployed, she said.
The Fletcher did not return with the crew. The ship remained in Perth, Australia, where the Hawai'i-based crew had turned it over to a replacement crew, which will take the Fletcher back to the Persian Gulf. Another crew will replace that crew in six months, and eventually, the Fletcher will be decommissioned.
The innovative crew rotation program is expected to increase the time the Fletcher will be able to spend in or near the Arabian Sea, without having to spend weeks in transit.
Ship's captain Thomas Neal had mixed feelings about that.
"It's hard to leave your ship —anytime," Neal said. "It's not traditional. It's not done. But the transition went very smoothly."
The Fletcher and its crews are enforcing United Nations sanctions against Iraq in the Arabian Sea.
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Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser
