Saturday, I will rise at zero-dark-thirty and fly to Washington, D.C., on Badger Honor Flight Mission #57.

Honor flights, in case  you don’t know, are group excursions by veterans to view the nation’s monuments and memorials in a context of pomp, circumstance, and profuse gratitude for their military service.

I never imagined I would take part in such a thing. 

My father, an infantryman in the Southwest Pacific during the Second World War, would have qualified for an honor flight, but it never occurred to me to sign him up; and then he died. 

I was only dimly aware that honor flights were a thing. If I knew of honor flights at all, I had heard of them only as a new thing, a phenomenon of the last twenty years. 

You probably know, Dear Reader, Your New Favorite Writer is suspicious of new things.

I’m also suspicious of events which, and people who, make a big deal of military service. During my time in the Air Force, 1965-1969, I was never an enthusiastic Zoomie. I have not been active in veterans’ affairs since then. 

Going on an honor flight would have been a bizarre thought for me. 

But my friend, the late Jerry Paulsen, went. He was an Army vet. His wife, Mary, also served in the Army, so the two were able to go together on the Badger Honor Flight. It turned out to be a life-changing experience for them. 

After the Paulsens returned from their honor flight, Jerry started hounding me to sign up for a flight myself. 

But I don’t do what people say just because they nag.

So, why did I sign up? I’ll try to explain.

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“Honor” is a conspicuous word. It is the first word in the phrase “honor flight.” Maybe it’s used in the verbal sense, meaning the event is intended to honor the veterans who take part.

But “honor” also has another sense, a noun sense. It’s an old-fashioned meaning we don’t hear much about these days. Honor is a traditional virtue that was thought to be indispensable to a man’s character. 

Honor was applied to women, too, but it accrued on different accounts in the reckoning of the two sexes.

For men, honor was tied to valor and to unswerving loyalty demonstrated in battle. Though honesty and integrity are at its heart, the virtue of honor speaks with a martial accent. War is what commonly delineates male virtue, and our nation has generally provided one war per generation. 

Some men get born too late for one war, too early for the next. But most men get the opportunity to fight for their country. Some live in times when they can hardly escape it. It is not only how they acquit themselves in battle, but even how they meet the routine challenges of military life, that brightens or stains their escutcheon of honor.

Honor used to be a powerful motivator. In the Civil War, men did not rush upon one another in thousands, bayonets fixed, and perish in blood and pain because they wanted to do so or because it was fun. Everyone, as Lincoln noted, would have preferred to avoid war. But when it overtook  them, most able-bodied men found they could not stay out of it and keep their honor intact.

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates took death by poison rather than forfeit his honor as an Athenian. Socrates the philosopher explained to his friend Crito that Socrates the Athenian must obey the rulings of the city-state. If he was no Athenian, he could be no Socrates. This, although he does not use the word, was a form of honor.

The young lieutenant Ulysses Grant, convinced the 1846-1848 war with Mexico was an injustice done to a weaker neighbor to serve the political needs of the pro-slavery Democratic party, nevertheless followed orders and went. He was, after all, an officer in the U.S. Army. To withdraw on the eve of war would amount to dishonor. 

Winston Churchill—a chesty man, never known to back away from a fight—told the boys at Harrow School in 1941: “Never give in—never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.” (My emphasis.) Honor, Churchill seemed to say, would have you fight, fight, and never give in, except when honor itself happened to require the opposite.

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Since Churchill’s time, honor has been steeply discounted. 

We no longer covet honor. We no longer talk about honor. We no longer predicate our acts on conceptions of honor.

Still, there is residue. In World War II, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Desert Storm, the U.S. forces were constituted of men who answered to the concept of honor, whether or not it was stated as such. 

By the time of the Vietnam involvement, Americans no longer uniformly believed our national honor depended on fighting a war—at least, not this war—or that it was worth the effort and risk of doing so. Thousands of young men fled to Canada or went into hiding in the United States. 

I had no wish to fight in a war, or even to serve in uniform, but events gave me little choice. I was soon to be drafted, which meant I would serve in the Army or the Marine Corps.

I chose to enlist in the Air Force. It seemed like a better deal. 

At the time, widespread public opposition to the Vietnam War was just starting to get organized.

But six months later, while I was still in training at the Presidio of Monterey, California, rejection of uniformed service had become a real thing. One guy I knew lodged a belated application to be treated as a conscientious objector. Another simply ran off—deserted. Antiwar activists hung around military bases, cultivating friendships with young enlisted men and offering options for clandestine flight. 

The opportunity to simply duck out of the war had become real. It could be done. It was an option we all had to address. 

I stayed the course. Not because I was brave. Not because I was patriotic. Because, rather, I could identify with Socrates, who chose to remain an Athenian in good standing. I wanted to keep on being an American. I would not have expressed that as honor, but looking back from sixty years on, perhaps it was.

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The young men who fought the Vietnam War sometimes endured taunts and jeers when they came home. I did not experience such things, but many did.

Previously, when Johnny came marching home, he had been received with honor, even with brass bands and parades. But combatants in the Vietnam War were made to feel like inferior life forms. That war and its consequences undermined the caliber and morale of the armed services. President Nixon reached an agreement with the North Vietnamese which amounted to surrender but was termed “peace with honor.” Everybody just wanted to get the hell out.

Then fifteen years passed—a mere eye-blink—and our nation again needed well-trained, capable, and loyal forces, for operations against Iraq. Our leaders resolved that this time around, the troops would be celebrated, would be given dignity and respect. And so, by and large, they were.

There came a general rise in patriotic feeling and a restored regard for military men. These trends were bolstered by our national response to the events of September 11, 2001. All veterans, not just those of Desert Storm, basked in the elevated profile of military service. 

In 2004, a National World War II Memorial was built in Washington, D.C. Living veterans of that war were getting older, reaching the end of life; so volunteer organizations sprang up to whisk World War II veterans to Washington so they could see their memorial. This project grew into a nationwide network, which is now active in forty-five states. 

As members of the Greatest Generation slipped off to their final rewards, the Honor Flight network began including younger veterans in the trips, Korean- and Vietnam-era vets. 

I was dimly aware of all these things. But then Jerry Paulsen came back from his honor flight and began harping at me to sign up. So one day, I idly went to the Badger Honor Flight web page to see how the whole thing worked. What I saw there transformed my attitude.

The honor flight protocol assigns each honored veteran a volunteer “guardian,” a younger person at his elbow throughout the trip. According to the website, “We do this for the safety and accountability of our Veterans. The most important reason is to ensure each Veteran can enjoy their ‘Trip of a Lifetime’ to its fullest.” Maybe they want to give needed assistance to aged and infirm veterans yet do not wish to create a distinction between those and the healthier vets.

The key fact to me was that the guardian, though he or she cannot be the veteran’s spouse, can be a family member. I thought of our only child—our daughter, Katie. 

Katie is a very bright young woman, now in her late forties, with children of her own and an important job with the State of Wisconsin. Through no fault of her own, she was born after the brouhaha surrounding the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam was all over. She had never lived  in a time of war. The Gulf War and the Global War on Terror had come along, of course, when she was an adult—but they had little effect on her personally. 

If I went on this trip and took Katie as my guardian—I knew she would do that for her old man—she would receive a precious opportunity to mingle for a day, a meaningful day, with a lot of old men all focused on key events of their young lives. These men might tell stories. They might reveal how things were in those old days. 

At the very least, she would experience a certain group reverence and team spirit among a body of men and women who may not all have been in battle, but all of whom have a DD Form 214 in their pockets and know how to use a P-38 government-issue can opener. I thought that when all these guys and gals pay hushed respects at monuments and memorials to their fallen brothers and sisters, Katie might sense that something important was involved. 

She might get a glimpse of honor cherished and salvaged, by being among folks grown old in body but still engaged in vexing moments that once occupied their young lives. “. . . made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

For that alone—to give her that opportunity—it will be worth the trip. 

Have no fear of missing out, Gentle Reader: I’ll bloviate my impressions of the actual thing next week in this spot, Lord willing.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer