Honor Flight Tri-State recently brought 86 veterans to the nation’s capital to mourn the lives lost and accept overdue thanks for their service.
WASHINGTON—On a blustery, partly cloudy spring day, 77-year-old Army veteran George Walker never noticed his own reflection on the shiny black granite surface.
He was too focused on a symbolic reunification with five of his boyhood pals from Mentor, Ohio. Decades-old emotions and memories roiled inside Walker as he found his friends’ names among those of more than 58,000 dead or missing U.S. servicemembers on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall.
Tears welled up in Walker’s eyes as he told The Epoch Times, “It makes me feel good to see their names, because I really miss ‘em.” Then he paused. His voice cracked. And he said, “They were good friends—all of ‘em.”
Later, he said, “It broke my heart. That’s all I can say.”
He still can picture the youthful faces of his buddies before they headed off to war in the late 1960s. And now, decades later, that memory is coupled with images of their names etched into the wall—Army warrant officer George Hayward and Marines Robert Fatica, James Menart, Bill Dickey, and Tim Stickle.
Walker, like many other veterans, used a pencil to make a rubbing of each treasured name onto a strip of paper. Those became cherished mementoes.
Visiting the Vietnam Memorial “is not something I ever thought I would do,” Walker said, “and I’m glad I got to do it.”
The Vietnam Memorial was the seventh and final stop that Walker and fellow veterans made during an early April visit to Washington with Honor Flight Tri-State.
The Cincinnati-based nonprofit group, dedicated to honoring former members of the armed services with free-of-charge trips to the nation’s capital, is part of a nationwide network with 125 hubs in 46 states. Together, those hubs have honored more than 317,000 veterans since the group’s inception in 2005. For some elderly veterans, the honor flight could be “their last hurrah”—the final big trip they take in their lifetimes, Cheryl Popp, director of Honor Flight Tri-State, told The Epoch Times.
The group’s latest flight—its 91st—carried special significance for Walker and 70 other honorees because it preceded a historic date: the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War’s end.
By Janice Hisle
