Donald Beers and John Furek were among 67 veterans who were part of the 139th Mission to depart from John Glenn Columbus International Airport and fly to Washington D.C. to take part in Honor Flight Columbus.
The mission statement for Honor Flight Columbus reads, “To honor America’s senior veterans with a trip to Washington D.C. to visit the nation’s memorials. To help them share their stories. To celebrate and affirm their service and homecoming.” Since the inaugural flight, which took place in May of 2005, Honor Flight Columbus has given 10,240 senior veterans this once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Honor Flight Columbus welcomes applications for consideration from senior veterans who are 65 and older and have served on full-time active duty or over 20 years in the Guard/Reserves. Beers and Furek applied last spring for the opportunity to go. They are both members of the Dresden VFW and have deep roots in Dresden, so it only made sense that they apply to go together. “You apply and they ask if you have a buddy that’s going to go with you, and I found a buddy,” said Furek. He and Beers both served during the Vietnam War, as were 45 others who joined them on the flight. Additionally, there were eight who served in the Korean War, one who served in WWII, four who served in the Cold War, and nine who were involved post-Vietnam.
“I was amazed at the organization of this whole thing from beginning to end,” Furek said. “The Honor Flight is obviously to give honor to veterans. I served during Vietnam. I wasn’t in Vietnam; I was in a submarine, so I was on the other coast. But the people that came back from Vietnam came back to nothing. They didn’t get a war reception. And this is kind of to make up for that. You get off the plane in Columbus, and they released us two at a time so that when we came around the corner, there were like 500 people there to greet us. I mean banners, signs, screaming, cheering. We had name tags, so they called you by name, like ‘Welcome Back’. If you have any ability to have emotions at all, you’re going to cry. I was tearing up. And it was beautiful, and they gave us our moment. And then when we went through, the other people behind us got a moment. It was done deliberately. It didn’t dawn on me until afterwards what they did. The whole thing was just so well organized, and it made you feel great.”
A trained volunteer guardian is assigned to each veteran to help with any needs the veteran may have and assist them along the trip. “They treated us like royalty,” stated Furek.
While in Washington D.C., they visited war memorials and sites around the National Mall, including Arlington National Cemetery, World War II Memorial, Korean War Veterans Memorial, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, among others.
“When we were at the Korean War Memorial, there were two veterans who had served in Korea, and the Korean Ambassadors came up and gave them medals and made them official ambassadors to Korea, and they did not expect it, none of us expected that. But somebody had planned it, we just did not know. And that was kind of cool,” explained Furek.
A friend of the Beers family, 1st Lt. Sharon A. Lane, a U.S. Army nurse (67th Medical Group, 44th Medical Brigade), was killed on June 8, 1969, while attempting to move Vietnamese patients to safety during an attack on the 312th Evacuation Hospital in Chu Lai, South Vietnam. She was the only U.S. nurse to die by enemy fire in Vietnam. Lane was just 25 years old. She was born in Zanesville, Ohio, on July 7, 1943, to John Edwin Lane and Mary Kathleen Buker. Lane was posthumously awarded the Vietnamese Gallantry Cross with Palm and the Bronze Star for Heroism. Her name is among those inscribed on the Vietnam Memorial Wall (Panel 23w, Line 112).
“We were fortunate the weather was good; it was sunny, a little bit crisp in the morning, but it warmed up. We did a lot of walking, and we got to see all of the memorials,” said Furek. “When we got to Vietnam, Don was looking for Sharon’s name, and he found it. — and they helped him do a rubbing.”
“When we did find her on the wall, they have somewhere there’s a list where you can look up the name that tells you what panel on the wall that it’s on, so we found it,” Beers explained. “And here, there was a small picture sitting on the ground below it. So someone knew something about her and had been there that day.”
Honor Flight Columbus Mission 140 is scheduled for Thursday, April 17. There are ten flights on the schedule for 2025. Visit honorflightcmh.org for more information.
