He was accompanied by his daughter, who served as his guardian (usually a family member or friend assigned to the traveling veteran to help him or her during the trip). His Honor Flight was a one-day trip, the standard length of most Honor Flights. More than 60 years later, Harold still carried bullets from enemy machine-gun fire in his back, a “souvenir” of his service that had caused a lifetime of health problems. Harold, my father’s friend, was 92 and a WWII vet who spent the last months of the war as a P.O.W. This is the story of their Honor Flight and homecoming.ĭad first heard about the Honor Flight program in 2011, when a friend and former co-worker of his signed up in Chicago.
Their Honor Flight trip lasted three days, and less than three weeks after their return, one of the group would pass away. The veterans ranged in age from 65 to 96. There were three women veterans, including a former “Rosie the Riveter” bomber aircraft worker, and one father-and-son duo, a man who’d served in WWII making the trip with his Vietnam veteran son. Dad was part of a group representing veterans of World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War and from all four branches of military service-Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, as well as the Women’s Army Corps. This time around, the homecoming was from Washington, D.C., where my dad went with 45 other veterans on an Honor Flight organized by the Veterans Network Committee of Northern Illinois.
#Honor flight mail call examples full
He had a bigger crowd too-including his wife, six children, and several grandchildren-and a full motorized escort in the form of a bikers club all the way back to Chicago from Milwaukee Airport. Thankfully, Dad’s second homecoming as a war veteran was in warmer days-in August 2015. My father (at center) just arrived in Korea, at a replacement depot.
0 kommentar(er)
