About 1,000 American World War II veterans died April 17, the day Ozark Baptist Church members Jesse Sharpe and Bill Easterling flew to Washington.
That’s the statistic everyone brings up, the one on the Honor Flight Network website, www.honorflight.org. One thousand each day.
That’s why more and more of the guests on the free flights to the National WWII Memorial in Washington are the young ones who didn’t see much action.
And it’s why Sharpe, 81, is so passionate about the Honor Flight program — about getting as many of the Greatest Generation’s members as can be found in Dothan, Clio, Enterprise, Ozark and anywhere within driving distance of the Wiregrass on that 737 jet, flying them up to the monument and back home to the hero’s welcome they deserve.
“There were about 15 million veterans of World War II,” he said. “There are only about 5 million left.”
Sharpe, like a lot of them, fudged his age and joined the Navy right out of high school, but two months later, the war was over and at 17, he was technically a veteran.
Last May, Sharpe made the first flight offered by the Wiregrass chapter of the Honor Flight Network.
Even with only two months of war under his belt, he was nearly brought to tears “because of the real heroes, the guys really on the battlefield.”
That’s why Sharpe was determined for Easterling, his former Sunday School teacher at the Dale Baptist Association church, to experience the same thing, to look on the huge bronze eagle and fountain of the Alabama column of the memorial representing the victory at sea he helped his country earn as a merchant mariner.
Easterling, 85, was drafted into the Army at 18 and volunteered to serve as a paratrooper but was given a medical discharge for health reasons before basic training. It was then that he volunteered for the Merchant Marine, which took him despite his physical problems. (Congress has declared merchant mariners to be World War II veterans. Percentagewise more members of the Merchant Marine died in the war than those in any other service branch.) He served in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Easterling went on to serve as pastor of Ariton Baptist Church and Pleasant Ridge Baptist Church, Ozark, both in Dale Association, in the 1960s and currently owns a fish hatchery in Clio.
He was one of the 90 area veterans who flew from Dothan Regional Airport to Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport on April 17 for a tightly scheduled day of remembrance and respect, including a stop by the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
Statewide more than 2,500 WWII veterans have made this trip since 2007, being flown by Honor Flights leaving from Dothan, Birmingham, Huntsville, Covington County, Tuscaloosa, Mobile and Montgomery.
Sharpe accompanied Easterling as his Honor Flight guardian, or chaperone.
“I knew it’d be a once in a lifetime experience for him,” Sharpe said.
He was right.
“That trip brought back some precious memories of serving and of the ones who served during that period of time,” Easterling said. “It was great fellowship but it also showed the tremendous respect on the part of the people (who organized the Honor Flight) to show this much interest in the men that were willing to risk their lives for the defense of our country.”
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