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Unknown war leaves victims in anonymity
August 5, 1999
BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
At 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, the remains of 29-year-old Capt. Jennifer J. Odom, U.S.
Army, arrived at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The television cameras,
usually present at such events, were nowhere to be seen. Indeed, the news
media were totally absent, and the event went unrecorded. Nor was President
Clinton there to feel her family's pain.
Odom, along with her co-pilot and three other crew members, died July 23 when
the DeHavilland RC7 reconnaissance plane she was piloting crashed into a
mountain in southern Colombia. The Pentagon says there is "no evidence" that
narco-guerrillas shot down the plane, but adds that the investigation is
continuing.
In any event, the five-member crew constituted the first U.S. military
personnel to be killed in the war against the drug-financed, leftist
insurrection subverting Colombia. Jennifer Odom is an unsung heroine in an
unknown war.
The non-stop propaganda machinery during 78 days of bombing Yugoslavia was
mute about the death of Odom, the first American woman pilot killed in
action. The Clinton administration says as little as possible about Colombia.
It never wanted to get involved there, but has been dragged into a conflict
it deplores, and still presses for a negotiated settlement with the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. If Kosovo was a liberal's
war, Colombia certainly is not.
Thus, the nation and even most of Congress were unaware that the United
States dispatches aircraft on hazardous duty over FARC-occupied Colombia.
U.S. planes have been on such missions for years, but what is new is the
DeHavilland RC7s, carrying signal intelligence equipment to eavesdrop on the
guerrillas' highly sophisticated communications system. "This is a very black
[secret] operation," said one military source.
A Pentagon spokesman said that the Odom plane's principal mission was
"imagery" (taking pictures), but added that signal intelligence equipment was
on board and might have been used. Independent military experts, however,
contend that less technologically advanced aircraft--or, indeed,
satellites--could handle imagery. The RC7 is configured to tap enemy
communications (as it did in helping Peru's government in 1997, when
terrorists seized the Japanese embassy in Lima). But the lid has been placed
on Odom's outfit, the 204th Military Intelligence Battalion in Fort Bliss,
Texas, to bar conversations with the press.
Similarly, military sources questioned the likelihood that Odom's death was
accidental. The RC7's navigation equipment is so sophisticated that it is
hard to imagine an experienced pilot crashing into a mountain without some
provocation by enemy forces below.
Such questions went unasked amid the news blackout of the disaster. The
wreckage was spotted July 25, but the names of the crew were not officially
disclosed until Monday (long after next of kin had been notified).
Pentagon sources speculated that the high command did not want a female
pilot's death in Colombia to interfere with the celebration of Lt. Col.
Eileen Collins' successful command of the Space Shuttle Columbia. It surely
did not. At this writing, only Newsweek, among the mass media, has published
a news report on the crash.
Thus did the first casualties of Colombia's war go unmentioned in much of the
country. In addition to Odom, they include her co-pilot, Capt. Jose A.
Santiago, as well as Chief Warrant Officer Thomas G. Moore, Specialist T.
Bruce Cluff and Specialist Ray E. Krueger. Typically, when Republican Rep.
Constance Morella took the House floor Tuesday morning to praise astronaut
Collins, there was no mention of her fellow Marylander whose remains had
arrived at Dover only hours before.
Republican Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, whose district contains Odom's hometown of
Brunswick, Md., reported that her family was frustrated by inability to get
calls immediately returned by the Defense Department, while the military
searched for John F. Kennedy Jr. Senior military officials later telephoned
Odom's mother. But President Clinton, usually adept in commiserating with
tragedy, said nothing.
Although Attorney General Janet Reno led a government delegation to honor the
slain pilot at Dover, nobody was there to represent the White House. The
omission was hardly accidental. If Jennifer Odom's death continues to be
ignored, there can be no debate about how well this war is being fought, and
little attention may be paid to Friday's hearing on Colombia by a House
investigating subcommittee headed by Rep. John Mica of Florida.
Robert Novak appears on the CNN programs "Capital Gang" at 6 p.m. Saturday
and "Evans, Novak, Hunt and Shields" at 4:30 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. Sunday.
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