A Heady Day for Fliers

Lest he forget any close calls -- many airmen have them, and it doesn't take much to get these guys going -- Veale recalled a perilous trip from a military base in Florida to England.

"We were going over the Atlantic, and I happen to look out the window, and I see that one of the propellers had stopped," he said. "This guy yelled at me and said, 'The propeller's out.' And I said, 'Don't worry, we got three more.' But right as we landed, a second propeller had feathered out, on the same side. We would have been in the Atlantic had we not been landing."

At the ceremony, Ross Perot Jr., son of the former presidential candidate and chairman of the Air Force Memorial Foundation, told the audience, "This has been a labor of love." Indeed, the memorial once was designed as a five-pointed star to be located near the famed Iwo Jima statue, but the Marines protested the encroachment on their memorial, and the plan was thrown out. Perot, an Air Force veteran, said 140,000 people helped donate money to the $30 million memorial.

The veterans were not the only ones feeling proud. Spouses and children were there, all bound by a life that they inherited and a military perspective that they cultivated as their own. Maryruth Ormsbee and Anneliese Hollis, who traveled from Fort Worth with their husbands, Clyde and Kenneth, showed pride merely by saying what their spouses did. "My husband was in explosives ordnance," Ormsbee said of Clyde. "He put bombs on airplanes. Took them off. Blew them up."

"My husband was in radar and then in simulators," Hollis said.

"We really wish that more wives would be with their husbands. Not many of them travel with them anymore," Ormsbee said.

"I second that," Hollis said.

By the ceremony's end, Air Force Capt. Erica Rabe, 32, was standing beneath the spires, anticipating the famous "bomb burst" maneuver by five F-16 jets known as the Thunderbirds. "We don't have as much history as the other branches, but we have the same amount of courage, professionalism, dedication and patriotism, so it's about time," said Rabe, who added that her father was an Air Force pilot who recently died. "He would have loved to have seen this."

Just then, directly above the spires, four F-16s screamed across the sky, zoomed upward and curved outward, before a fifth jet rocketed straight through the middle, twisting in endless corkscrews.

The memorial officially opens to the public Tuesday.