Gulf casualty remembered
TULSA - The only Oklahoman to die in the Persian Gulf War was remembered Tuesday, thanks to a fellow soldier.
The memorial service at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post in Tulsa came on the 10th anniversary of George Swartzendruber's death. He was killed two days shy of his 25th birthday in 1991.
"It's so easy to forget one out of so many thousands of other war veterans," said Raymond Newcomb, who organized the service although he never knew Swartzendruber. "That was my whole point, to make sure nobody forgets."
Newcomb, 36, was visiting his in-laws in Adair when he happened to spot the town's war memorial for Operation Desert Storm. A former Gulf War veteran himself, he stopped to look at the town's tribute to a lost son.
"I had never heard of George Swartzendruber," said Newcomb, who figured maybe half a dozen or more Oklahomans had died in the Iraqi desert. "I had no idea that he was the only one."
And so then and there, standing in the weeds around the memorial, Newcomb decided he wouldn't let Oklahoma forget about George Swartzendruber.
Swartzendruber's family, formerly of Adair but now residents of Kansas, were among the 75 to 100 people who attended the memorial. A rifle team paid tribute with a 21-gun salute. Black Hawk helicopters conducted a flyover in a missing man formation.
Swartzendruber was flying a Black Hawk helicopter on Feb. 27, 1991, over southern Iraq on a mission to help recover a downed Air Force pilot. Anti-aircraft gunfire damaged the main rotors. He died when the helicopter hit the ground.
A day later, the war was over.
With its lopsided victory and comparatively light death toll, even other veterans sometimes have a hard time taking the short-lived Gulf War seriously, Newcomb said.
"I tell them that maybe Desert Storm wasn't as long a war, but guys like George Swartzendruber are no less dead. And he died for the same country. And he's just as much a hero," said Newcomb, the state commander for the Desert Storm Justice Foundation, which lobbies for support of Desert Storm veterans.
Even before he enrolled in pre-school, Swartzendruber was telling people he was going to be a pilot when he grew up. He lived for a time in Papua, New Guinea, where his parents were missionaries and used to watch helicopters ferry supplies over the mountainous terrain.
Swartzendruber worked to get his fixed-wing license soon after high school graduation. Then he enlisted in the Army so he could train in helicopters.
"Before he left for Saudi Arabia," his mother said, "he told me, 'Mom, if God has something in mind for me to do yet, he'll keep me alive.' That was his confidence. Death meant he had nothing to lose and everything to gain."
Unlike World War II and Vietnam, where nearly everybody knew somebody who didn't come home, the fewer than 150 U.S. deaths during Desert Storm gave many people the impression it was a "bloodless war," Newcomb said.
But Swartzendruber's family and the thousands of former soldiers who suffer from "Gulf War syndrome" know another story, he said.
"War is war," Newcomb said. "And like always, the real heroes were the ones who didn't come back. I figure if people don't make the effort to remember them, the rest of us are sure to be forgotten."
The Oklahoman online. Archive ID 841019
