By Ian Shapira
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 15, 2006; C11

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."

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.