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Living memorial

Autumn is busy season for the Honor Flight Network, a nonprofit that brings World War II vets to Washington, D.C., for a day to visit the World War II Memorial. The monument’s granite basin can be an oven in the summer and a wind tunnel in the winter, but on cool, dry weekends in the fall, volunteers greet hundreds of veterans seeing their memorial for the first time.

They couldn’t do it without the wheelchairs: As soon as the buses pull up at the information center, volunteers begin unloading dozens of chairs stored underneath. They’ll be needed for the short final leg of a long trip.

By the time a group of veterans from southwest Florida arrive at the memorial Sept. 12, they’ve been traveling for seven hours. Many are subdued and low-key as they tour the site — but not Ray Jacobs, taking pictures with his daughter by his side and a cigar between his teeth.

“It’s an absolutely beautiful monument, and very deserved,” said Jacobs, who taught infantry tactics in the Army from 1943 to 1946. “The thought and the location of it, I think, are absolutely phenomenal.”

Jacobs’ daughter, Chris, helped to make the trip possible through her medical supply company, Theragenics, which is sponsoring 10 Honor Flights this year.

Navy veteran Carl Hill, pushing a wheelchair to keep his balance, sets off to find the “Kilroy was here” graffiti he’s been told is somewhere on the monument. ”Anybody know where Kilroy is?” he asks a passing tourist. “I’ve been looking for him all my life too, sir,” the man laughs. Hill eventually finds the cartoon — ubiquitous during the war — behind a column and takes a photo there and at the engraved words “War’s End” on the Pacific side of the memorial.

“I was aboard the USS Lexington when the war ended,” Hill, a gunner on a torpedo bomber, explains. “Just happened to be right over Tokyo when they gave us the word to come back and drop our bombs in the ocean. Later on, they ... took all the camouflage off the prisoner-of-war camps, and we flew in and dropped supplies to the prisoners of war.”

Most veterans take their Honor Flight as matter-of-factly as they went to war, says retired Command Sgt. Maj. Eric Haney, one of the founding members of Delta Force, who traveled with the group as a spokesman for Theragenics.

“I’m often asked, ‘Are they giddy?’ I say, at this time of their lives, you’re not going to impress these guys with a whole lot,” said Haney, who was on his sixth trip. “They’ve seen a lot of things in their life. They enjoy it, but it’s not like it’s a bunch of college freshmen.”

More often, it’s passers-by who get emotional, he says.

“Anybody that hears anything about [the flight] in the airport comes rushing to see these people,” Haney said. The veterans “are always surprised by it. What the heck is this? Who are these people? Who are they clapping for?”

After an hour or so at the memorial, the veterans board the buses for one last stop before heading to the airport and their flight home: the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery.

As they gather to watch the changing of the guard, a soldier announces: “In keeping with the dignity of this ceremony, it is requested that everyone remain silent and standing.”

Several veterans in wheelchairs struggle to their feet — until another soldier breaks his pose of rigid attention with a gesture, as if pushing them back down: “You may remain seated.”