I want to take one more — and final — pass at explaining why the recent Honor Flight I joined meant so much to me. Here goes, then I’m done with telling this tale.
Upon our return from a two-day whirlwind swing through Washington, D.C., our group of 45 military veterans and our guardians received the greeting to end all greetings. Honor Flights are intended to enable citizens to express their gratitude for the service that veterans perform on behalf of our great nation. I was inducted into the U.S. Army in 1968 and served exactly two years before separating in 1970 from the military.
My service was nothing worthy of boasting. In a sense, the gratitude I received personally seemed a bit overdone. That’s beside the point.
The point I seek to make here is the greeting we got when we arrived at Love Field. We heard a Scottish bagpipe band, we walked from the plane to a greeting from about 1,000 folks. We had a lengthy rank of high school ROTC cadets standing at attention, frozen in a hand salute.
Then there were the signs. They said, “Welcome home!” For those of us who served in Vietnam, seeing a sign welcoming us home is far more impactful than a “Thank you for your service.” When I hear that latter greeting these days, to be honest, it sounds a bit like a cliche.
Every now and then, if I am wearing a ‘Nam vet gimme cap, I’ll get a “Welcome home, brother” from a fellow who is as old as I am. Those greetings mean more to many of us, I feel confident in expressing, than a “thanks for your service.”
We didn’t come home back in the day to marching bands and flag-waving crowds. I didn’t get abused by some Americans who heaped verbal scorn on vets returning from the war. However, the difference between what we saw just the other evening at Love Field reminded many of us of the cold shoulder we once received from a public that simply shrugged and looked the other way.
