Midwest Honor Flight vets on Vietnam, 50 years later

Yahoo

21-05-2025

WASHINGTON (KELO) — The waiting list to go on a Midwest Honor Flight trip is sizable, and when it's finally time to fly out to Washington, the journey's different stops are substantial.
'When the day come, it's kind of overwhelming,' Army veteran Lorin Kuehler of the Yankton, S.D. area said.
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85 area veterans visited the memorials of northern Virginia and Washington, D.C. on May 6 with the nonprofit organization based out of Iowa.
'Arlington [National Cemetery] was wonderful,' Army veteran Darrell Williamson of Sioux Falls, S.D. said. 'It's almost like a religious experience.'
The trip in 2025 took place just six days after April 30: the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Nearly all veterans on the trip served during that conflict's era, and the trip can offer a welcomed contrast for them.
'Seeing all the tribute and the people that say 'thank you' to you, 'thank you for your service,' 'cause we didn't get that when we came home,' Army veteran Joe Chachula of Dundee, Minn. said.
'I was also, got called up for Desert Storm, and when we came back as a unit, that was a lot nicer 'cause we were well-greeted at the Sioux Falls airport, which we never got from Vietnam,' said David Lampe of Madison, S.D., who served with the Navy during the Vietnam War and was called up as a member of the Army Reserves for Desert Storm.
For Sam Marty of northwestern South Dakota, service with the Army in Vietnam meant stepping on a landmine and surviving.
'They figured that it, why it didn't kill me is because it was planted upside down,' Marty said.
The blast left shrapnel in his head that's still there.
'I'm no hero,' Marty said. 'The heroes are the ones that didn't get to come back and have families, didn't get to become grandparents. They're the heroes.'
The Purple Heart recipient was thinking about some of them on May 6.
'Especially those two guys that, the first day I was over there, that got blew up,' Marty said. 'I think about them probably every day 'cause they, their families couldn't even have an open casket.'
The wall at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial features more than 58,000 names of lives lost or missing in action. 80-year-old Army veteran Darrell Whitmore of the Custer, S.D. area, who served in Vietnam, had rubbings made of names etched into the wall's granite: William Zemanick, a good friend, as well as Curtis Andersen, a friend whose funeral he attended, and James Wright, whose sister he knows.
'They were part of communities and families, and when they got lost in Vietnam, it affected their families for the rest of their lives,' Whitmore said while seated near the memorial's wall.
The end of the Vietnam War profoundly impacted him.
'In 1975, I sat in front of a television and watched the fall of Saigon, and I think it was the saddest day of my life,' Whitmore said.
The experience on the trip, almost exactly 50 years later, is different.
'I've had two or three people from my community that have done it, and they said it's going to be the most special day,' Whitmore said. 'And it has been.'
KELOLAND's Dan Santella, who accompanied the veterans and their guardians on the May 6 trip, published five additional reports from the journey: about a Dell Rapids couple, a Sioux Falls couple, a veteran living with Parkinson's after Agent Orange exposure, a veteran serving as a guardian for his guardian, and a Korean War-era veteran visiting Washington for the first time.
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