The plane was built in 1993. In its life, it refueled fighter jets patrolling the no-fly zone in Iraq before the 2003 invasion, and later it ferried troops and equipment into and out of the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, assignments that meant using rutted runways in dusty locales, according to records and photographs taken of it over the years.

Alan Stinar, a former marine mechanic who worked on this and other KC-130’s, and who is a historian of the model, said it also took part in at least two missions in Africa.

“These things are workhorses that can do almost any job the Marines need them to do, and during the war they were very, very busy,” Mr. Stinar said.

According to federal aviation records, the plane was damaged in 2004, when a wind storm tipped it sideways onto one wing, while it was on the ground in Fort Worth. In 2010, a storm piled so much snow on the plane that it tipped back, its nose in the air, Mr. Stinar said.

Six of the people killed were members of the Second Marine Raider Battalion, based at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, and one was a Navy medical corpsman assigned to that battalion. The other nine belonged to the Marine Reserve squadron at Stewart, General James said.

The military has not yet identified any of the dead, but in social media posts and private conversations, people in the towns around both Stewart and Camp Lejeune are searching for clues and sharing unofficial word about victims.

At Stout’s House of Pain, a tattoo parlor in Jacksonville, N.C., that is popular with Marines from nearby Camp Lejeune, one of the artists, Sabrina Cruz, said she had been trying to learn if she knew any of the victims. After years of war, there is a grim familiarity to her questions, and to the wait for answers.