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| The group poses for a picture before entering the WW II Memorial |
The World War II Memorial opened to the public
at the end of April in 2004. We are losing our WW II veterans at a rate of over
1,000 per day, and a physician assistant and retired Air Force officer named
Earl Morse realized that many of the veterans would never have the opportunity
to see their memorial. So in August of 2005, Mr. Morse organized a flight of
six private aircraft to fly a dozen vets to Washington to see the memorial.
From that initial flight an organization named Honor Flight Network was
born. The organization has thirty-nine state organizations across the country
today. Their goal is to get as many WW II veterans to the memorial as they can.
The veterans’ trips are arranged and paid for by the organization.
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| Ken Morgan stands at the entrance |
My father is a WW II veteran who piloted B-17’s
out of England. In March of this year Honor Flight Arizona contacted him with
the offer of a trip. Obviously, the veterans are all in their late eighties and
nineties. To help get them around “guardians” also go on the trip. (Guardians
pay their own way.) My father invited my sister and myself to go along as
guardians; my sister served as guardian for Dad, and I went as guardian for a
friend of my father’s, an Army veteran.
In addition to the WW II Memorial, the group
toured the Capitol Building, the Viet Nam and Korean Memorials and the Tomb of
the Unknown Soldier. To describe everything the veterans did on the trip would
take too long for a single post, but some things and highlights of the trip are
well worth mentioning. There were twenty-nine veterans in our group. The
youngest was 86 years old; he signed up when he was sixteen. The oldest vet was
a former Marine, almost 97 years old. There were vets from the Army, Army Air
Corps, Marine Corps and Navy.
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| People lined up to thank the vets |
Everywhere the vets travelled, people randomly
came up to thank them for their service, many of them were teens. In one
instance a man at the airport shook a vet’s hand and the veteran commented he hadn’t
done anything special. The stranger replied, “No, not much. You guys just saved
the world.”
At the WW II Memorial, groups of tourists asked
the vets to pose with them for pictures. After several groups in a row, one of
the vets cracked that they should start charging a dollar a picture. I think they
could have gotten it.
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| In honor of his lost friends |
The most poignant moment came when we stopped at
the Iwo Jima Memorial. One veteran had a bottle of sand from the beach at Iwo
Jima where he fought and his friends died. As we watched, he threw the sand up
on the memorial in honor of his lost friends.
Honor Flight operates with volunteers, using donations to pay for the
veterans’ airline tickets, meals and lodging. If you would like to know more
about Honor Flight, or would like to volunteer, donate, or nominate a veteran,
visit their web site at www.honorflight.org
(Be aware there are dot-com sites with honor flight in their URL’s that are not
associated with the Honor Flight Network. Those operations charge fees to the
veterans.)
