WASHINGTON, D.C. - Herman Parks, 82, of Clinton was not quite typical of the veterans on Wednesday's HonorAir flight to visit the National World War II Memorial commemorating the Greatest Generation's triumph and tragedy that saved the world 60-plus years ago.
The flight from Knoxville to Washington with 111 World War II veterans aboard was Parks' first airplane trip. Ever.
He got to the war as an Army engineer in 1945 via ship. All of his military travels, he said, were on water, never in the air.
In 1945, Parks was poised on a battleship off the coast of Japan, preparing for the invasion of that country. His shipload of troops was to be the first to land in Japan, he said, when the war's end was hastened Aug. 6, 1945, with the dropping of the "Little Boy" atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
He returned home after the war and settled down to life in Clinton.
On Wednesday, he was like a wide-eyed child at the World War II Memorial in Washington, dedicated in 2004 to the 16 million Americans who served in the U.S. armed forces and to the more than 400,000 who died. Of all the structures on the National Mall's central axis, the memorial, on 17th Street, between Constitution and Independence avenues, is the only one commemorating a 20th-century event. The World War II Memorial is flanked by the Washington Monument to the east and the Lincoln Memorial to the west.
Parks and his fellow veterans on HonorAir's spring trip said it was a journey of a lifetime.
His was just one of the hundreds of stories on board a US Airways flight, free to the veterans and made possible by Prestige Cleaners of Knoxville, with financial support from Covenant Health and Home Federal Bank.
The veterans were met at McGhee Tyson Airport by a military honor guard and hundreds of people before the takeoff.
Everywhere they went Wednesday in Washington aboard three tour buses - designated red, white and blue and escorted by police cruisers - the veterans were hailed by vacationing schoolchildren and people waving and clapping for them.
At Washington's stunning granite-and-bronze memorial to World War II, former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, himself a severely wounded war veteran, spoke to East Tennessee's old soldiers, many of them pushed in wheelchairs by their guardians, and one tethered to an oxygen bottle.
At lunch in a large tent set up in front of the memorial, Tennessee's two Republican senators, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, stopped by to chat with the veterans.
A log of the veterans on the trip reads like a who's who of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines of World War II. All branches of the service, including Seabees and the U.S. Coast Guard, were represented for both the European and Pacific theaters of the war.
No war story or memory was better than any other.
But Burley Duncan, 85, of Oliver Springs seemed especially moved at the memorial. He was a member of the 82nd Airborne Division, serving in Normandy, other parts of France, and Germany.
As he stared at the memorial in serene silence, a woman, he said, asked him what he did in the war.
"Killed people," was his response.
He had been in Sicily, Italy and Holland as well, and along the way earned Bronze and Silver Stars. He also fought at the famed Battle of the Bulge.
How he got through all of those campaigns, he said, is anyone's guess.
"Lucky," he said.
Richard Quinn Phelps, 88, among the oldest veterans on the flight, was with the 95th Infantry Division at the Battle of the Bulge.
One of his poignant memories in the battle was fighting on ground covered by snow.
"All you could see was white," he said. "My feet were so cold that when I jumped down out of the back of a truck, I couldn't feel the ground."
Phelps was a replacement troop for the Bulge. He was an infantryman and an especially good shot. He had hunted rabbit, quail and squirrel growing up in Louisville and transferred that talent to his days in combat.
In fact, he went rabbit hunting one day at the Bulge.
"There was a lot of fog that morning, so I started out after this rabbit. The fog lifted, and all of a sudden, the snow began to bounce up around me. Germans were shooting at me," he said.
That ended his rabbit hunting that day.
The HonorAir flights were started last year by Eddie Mannis, president of Prestige Cleaners. Last year's fall flight was the first for Knoxville. Mannis said he already has enough veterans on the rolls for two flights this fall, but rising expenses are creating concerns.
"The first flight was about $72,000, and this one was $80,000," he said. The increase, he said, was because of fuel cost. HonorAir hopes to find more sponsorships.
Several veterans who signed up to take the spring trip could not go. America's World War II veterans are dying off at a rate of about 1,200 each day, and inside of a decade, that generation will fade away.
Retired Senior Writer Fred Brown may be reached at brownf08@gmail.com.