Word: crewmen
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...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 the men's return...
...least seemed ashamed by its own violence and killing; it wanted to cure its violence at home and seemed more and more to regret the violence it inflicted overseas. And even though American violence continued, even though it was in many ways more brutal than the tortures the Pueblo crewmen endured, it lacked the chilling pride of the Korean punishment...
...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...
...false alarm. After an interminable five minutes when the planes were taxiing back to the crowd, the doors opened but the crewmen didn't get out. From one door stepped Senator Margaret Chase Smith, wearing a red dress and walking on crutches; out of the other plane came California's Governor Ronald Reagan and his family. A brief titter over Reagan subsided, and the crowd went back to its waiting. As the band broke into "76 Trombones," a voice came over the loudspeakers: "the planes bearing the men of the Pueblo are 40 miles away...
...without smiling, down the ramp and into the 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...