A Heady Day for Fliers

Memorial Dedication Gives Air Force Vets Chance to Tell Their Side of the Action

Frank Brandon, 86, left, a World War II glider pilot, talks with retired Lt. Col. Span Watson, 90, a former Tuskegee Airman during the dedication service in Arlington. The memorial, which comes nearly 60 years after the Air Force's founding, will open to the public Tuesday. (By Lucian Perkins -- The Washington Post)

They all came yesterday, the avionics guys, the swaggering pilots, the military brats in shirts featuring a photograph of their dad in Guam, and those who flew everywhere from the Russian coastline to the Persian Gulf.

Frank Veale Jr., 73, who joined the Air Force in 1950, arrived with an uncle on his mind, a captain in the old Army Air Corps who died after being captured in the Philippines. Just a few feet away, Walt McGinnis, 79, from San Antonio, and his son, Kevin, 46, talked in jest about how the elder McGinnis could have easily lost it over Korea.

"He got shot at a few times," said Kevin McGinnis, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel.

"You're never scared," the elder McGinnis said, reflecting on the moment and looking at his son. "You're just busy."

Under a blue sky pierced by a triumvirate of curved spires soaring more than 200 feet in the air, thousands of veterans and family members armed with well-traveled war stories came to an Arlington promontory and a Pentagon parking lot for the dedication and official unveiling of the U.S. Air Force Memorial. For the Air Force, which had been the only military branch not to have its own Washington memorial, the dedication completed nearly 15 years of effort to build a monument in the capital region to more than 54,000 airmen killed in action.

The dedication ceremony, which included speeches by President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, came nearly 60 years after the Air Force's creation as a separate service. Up by the memorial, hundreds of VIPs joined current and retired Air Force brass underneath the dizzying monument. They milled about its wide base, read inscriptions on adjacent granite walls, heard from dignitaries and watched the U.S. Air Force Band and Honor Guard perform.

Down by the Pentagon's parking lot, where the jutting spires could be seen in the distance, other former airmen and their relatives toured military aircraft and visited information booths. Mostly, they ambled around, sharing old stories filled with talk of B-29s or C-141s and reminiscing about the mundane tasks they just happened to perform on historic days.

Seaton Phelps, 84, from Edenton, N.C., sat in the parking lot in a back row seat, facing the distant memorial. He was part of the Air Force's predecessor, the Army Air Corps. He served in England during World War II.

"I helped prepare the planes for the paratroops on D-Day," he said. "We didn't know what was going to happen. We just helped get the planes ready -- C-4 gliders and C-47s."

When asked what he thought of the memorial, he smiled. "I don't know how to express it," he said. "It's just nice."

Nearby, Frank Veale Jr., an aircraft radar specialist during the Korean War, said he came to the dedication to remember his uncle, an Army Air Corps captain who died as a prisoner of war. "He lived through the Death March, but then he died on a POW ship that sank," he said as he walked by a booth hawking Air Force pins and hats. "He was my favorite uncle."

Then, Veale told some stories of his own, with a brash wit and carefree attitude common among airmen. There was one about how he withstood ceaseless monsoons in Okinawa while living in flimsy tents. "But we had a Quonset hut where we went for chow," he said. "That was the one good thing about the Air Force -- good chow."