The young college graduate had not planned to be at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport last weekend, waiting for an old man he’d never met. A few weeks earlier, though, a friend’s stray remark had lodged in his mind. On impulse, he had sent an inquiring email. A positive message had come back, and now here he was, walking across the gleaming floor toward a row of unsmiling security personnel and lines of scanning machines.
A moment or two later, he was through to the arrivals area — and that’s when he heard the applause. A group of Korean War vets from northern Alabama was moving through the crowds of commuters, but not very quickly, because so many people wanted to thank them.
“Everyone was stopping and clapping and shaking their hands,” the young man told me. “It was really moving to see, in a place as partisan as D.C., and you could tell from the faces of the veterans that they were surprised.”
Amid the throng, one of the elderly men raised his red-and-white hat, and waved it. This signified two things: One, that even on Veterans Day weekend his dearest allegiance was evidently to Alabama’s Crimson Tide football team; and two, that he’d seen the young man waiting for him.
They greeted each other warmly, total strangers and yet already friends. The younger man’s grandfather had served during the Korean War, but had died in 2006. “I was kind of thinking: How would I want someone to treat my grandfather?”
So began an amazing, amusing and moving day for 114 retired servicemen and one woman, and the young escorts assigned to them. For many of the veterans, the day had begun before dawn so that they could catch the first “Valor Flight” leaving from Huntsville. The nonprofit organization (www.valorflight.com), which in a previous incarnation brought World War II vets to Washington, has now shifted its attention to those who served in the “Forgotten War” on the Korean Peninsula.
Soon the veterans and their guardians were ensconced in buses and headed toward memorials and monuments that the visitors had never seen. To their young companions, this was striking in itself.
“We build these memorials for them, for their sacrifice and the sacrifice of their families,” the young man said later, marveling. “And living here in D.C., you kind of forget that these monuments were actually built for people, many still living and still relatively young.”
Over the course of the day, the group visited the Korean War Memorial, the Women in Military Service for America Memorial at Arlington, and later the Iwo Jima Memorial. It was there, in the shadow of the bronze Marines struggling to raise a bronze American flag, that the veteran surprised the young man.
“Yeah, Iwo Jima really looks like that,” he said.
“But, er, wasn’t that in World War II?” the younger man asked cautiously.
Sure, said the other, but en route to South Korea six decades ago, his Navy ship had passed right by the island. It really was as craggy and bare as the memorial suggests, he said, and the masts of ships sunk only a few years earlier were still sticking out of the water.
“It was such an interesting link to World War II, because people in my generation don’t have those links,” the young man told me later.
Deena Edwards, who coordinated the escorts for the Valor Flight veterans, told me that lives were genuinely changed last weekend. One veteran in particular came back almost a new man.
He’d been pelted with tomatoes when came home from Korea. He’d come to view his military service with shame and hatred.
Then he took the Valor Flight to Washington and was greeted with joy by total strangers. And when the flight returned to Huntsville that night, he and the other veterans found themselves welcomed home by a cheering crowd of six hundred people. It was the welcome he’d never had, he said, and it made him so happy.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
