Honor flights
make sure I knew the medics gave their lives.
It wasn’t just James Benson gently leaning forward in a wheelchair at the Freedom Wall at the War World II Memorial and reading aloud the inscription, “Here We Mark The Price of Freedom” that made me wipe tears so I could continue to take photos.
Instead, goose bumps spread like a wildfire in a spring wind when Benson, of Idabel, closed his eyes and said, “I can see him.”
Benson saw a tall, slender bushyheaded, blue-eyed young man named Ed Stripling, his childhood buddy from the logging camp called Clebit in northern McCurtain County.
He went back to the days they navigated the pines while hunting squirrels and rabbits. He went back to when he went to the Navy and Stripling to the Army.
Benson went back to the day, several months after the tragic fact, when he learned that the stringy southeastern Oklahoma kid had been killed at the section of Normandy beach code-named Utah.
This was within days of the 70th anniversary of D-Day, and tears still trickled from Benson’s closed eyes.
It wasn’t just that retired U.S. Army Col. John R. Burks, of Pauls Valley, had been through three degrees of hell — World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam — that made me wish I’d known him my whole life.
What made me take a deep breath came when the wheelchair lift softly lowered the legally blind Burks to the sidewalk on a beautiful October afternoon at the World War II Memorial. Waiting for him was retired U.S. Army Brig. Gen David L. Cole, who had been assigned to Burks in the mid- to late 1960s at Fort Carson, Colo. Their families had become close. On that afternoon in Washington, Cole leaned over and hugged Burks and said, “I love you” and Burks replied, “I love you more.”
Chris Casteel
There are many little things I will always remember about the Honor Flights veterans. Their hands. I was sometimes afraid to shake them. They seemed fragile. Like the men, though, they were gentle but strong.
And there were a couple of things common to the flights that I really loved.
•One was when family members — children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews — came to the World War II memorial to surprise a relative who was participating in the flight.
At the very first flight, the sons of Woodrow Wiltse came from Tennessee and South Carolina to surprise their 92-year-old father.
No one was probably more surprised than James Mason, of Spencer, who was part of the flight in October 2013.
His grandson, E.J. Mason, then a U.S. Air Force captain deployed in Yemen, made it to Washington for the flight.
From my story: “As the elder Mason toured the memorial on Tuesday as part of the Oklahoma Honor Flights program, he walked right past his grandson, who had seen him and hidden.”
•The other thing was the way school groups or smaller clusters of kids visiting the World War II Memorial were drawn to the veterans.
From a story I wrote on June 6, 2012:
“On Wednesday, Joseph Rogers, of Oklahoma City, found himself surrounded by a group of kids who wanted to know what battle he fought in.