The first time Honor Flight Boise sends veterans to Washington, D.C., it will be a small group with an oversized weight of history. About 25 veterans — men and women who served anywhere from World War II through the Vietnam era — are scheduled to make the organization's inaugural journey on Oct. 3-5, 2026. For a nonprofit that did not exist a few years ago, and that operates on donations rather than government money, the trip represents both a beginning and a debt being paid.
The idea behind Honor Flight is simple and stubborn: take the veterans who fought America's wars to see the memorials built in their honor, and charge them nothing. The national Honor Flight Network traces its origins to a physician assistant and retired Air Force captain named Earl Morse. After retiring from the Air Force in 1998, Morse went to work at a Department of Veterans Affairs clinic in Springfield, Ohio. In May 2004, the National World War II Memorial was finally dedicated in Washington — 59 years after the war ended — and it quickly became the topic of conversation among Morse's elderly patients. He asked them, again and again, whether they would ever go see it. Most assumed they eventually would, with a family member or a friend.
But as the months passed and the same veterans returned for follow-up visits, Morse asked whether they had made the trip. Reality had settled in. Most were in their eighties; the journey was neither physically nor financially possible for them, and their families lacked the time and resources to make it happen. So Morse did something about it. In May 2005, six small airplanes flew 12 World War II veterans from Springfield to Washington to visit their memorial. The waiting list exploded. By August of that year, the effort had shifted to commercial airlines to accommodate far more veterans, and a partnership with a group in Hendersonville, North Carolina, gave rise to the Honor Flight Network. Since then, the network reports it has flown well over 244,000 veterans to the capital, operating through more than 130 local hubs across some 45 states.
Honor Flight Boise is one of the newest of those hubs, and one of three in Idaho. Its executive director, Julie Crider, came to the work from San Diego, where the military is woven into the fabric of daily life. Her husband, Clark, served 20 years in the Army, and she spent a decade and a half watching honor flights depart and return there. When the couple moved to Idaho in 2025, she decided the state's southwest corner ought to have its own. "I've watched honor flights in San Diego for 15 years, and I've seen many military homecomings," she told the Idaho Capital Sun. "I became interested in the Honor Flight program when I was there, and I thought it would be good to start one here when we moved in 2025." She has described the effort as "a labor of love," and said she will be thrilled when the first flight finally leaves the ground. "I think it all will be easier after that."
The organization serves veterans across eight counties in Southwest Idaho, and its focus is squarely on the generations whose numbers are thinning fastest. Crider has noted that those eight counties are home to more than 20,000 Vietnam veterans alone — a population that, in many cases, never received the homecoming it was owed. "A lot of them did not receive any signs of gratitude when they came home, especially Vietnam veterans, as most people are aware," Crider said. That absence of gratitude is part of what the flights are meant to repair. Photina Haumschilt, who leads the Eastern Idaho Honor Flight based in Pocatello, has spoken of veterans who were reluctant to take part precisely because of how they were treated decades ago — including one who still remembered the smell of being pelted with rotten tomatoes and having a head of cabbage thrown at him. The reception on an honor flight, she said, is a different thing entirely.
For the inaugural Boise trip, the most poignant passenger may be Patrick Teixeira, a 97-year-old Army veteran who, according to Honor Flight Boise, will be the only World War II veteran aboard. Teixeira was 12 years old and living in Hawaii when Japanese aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. He watched from a mountainside, and what registered in that moment was not the magnitude of history but the spectacle of the flames. "I was thinking, 'Whoa, look at the fire,'" he recalled. At 15 he tried to enlist and was turned away for being too young. He took a civilian job at Pearl Harbor instead, and successfully enlisted at 17 for a three-year stint, serving until his honorable discharge in 1949. For most of the decades since, he said, he gave little thought to rewards for his service; his attention went to raising five children, all of whom are living. Now, he believes he has earned the trip. "People should remember World War II," he said. "I don't think there is anybody who is left from the World War II era who say were there at the beginning and cleaned up at the end."
The "beginning" and "end" he refers to are Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima — a span that took him from a boy on a Hawaiian hillside to a soldier present at the closing of the war. It is a distance that few Americans alive today can claim to have traveled, and it is the kind of distance the memorials in Washington were built to mark.
None of it comes cheap. Crider estimates the Boise trip will cost around $100,000, covering airfare, lodging, meals, and ground transportation for every veteran, all of it free to the traveler. Honor Flight Boise receives no government funding; the money comes from individuals, businesses, and community partners. In July 2026, the Idaho Community Foundation and KTVB's 7Cares Fund selected the group for "The 208 Way," a monthly micro-giving campaign that spotlights a different Idaho nonprofit, with donations matched up to $2,500. The campaign raised nearly $5,900 toward a $7,000 goal. The Idaho group is not alone in scrambling for funds: the Eastern Idaho Honor Flight, whose own inaugural trip was set for Sept. 1-2 with nearly 50 veterans, has had Anheuser-Busch cover its veterans' flights and leans on private donations and an annual "Legacy of Honor" fundraiser. The Inland Northwest Honor Flight, based in Spokane and serving North Idaho, has been flying since 2009 — more than 3,000 veterans in that time — and supports itself with a golf event and a casino-night gala. Linda Peters, its board secretary, put the rest of the strategy bluntly: "We beg for it … we have amazing volunteers."
Peters has been on about a dozen flights herself and describes the experience in terms that suggest it changes the volunteers as much as the veterans. "I love it. My heart is in it," she said. "It's such a humbling experience, and such a pleasure to tell them what they have done and what their service has meant to us."
The timing of the Boise flight lands it in the middle of America's 250th birthday observances, a coincidence that lends the trip an extra layer of meaning. The veterans making the journey are drawn from conflicts whose survivors are dwindling — the World War II generation most of all — which gives the inaugural flight a quiet urgency. There will not be many more chances to do this, and everyone involved seems to know it. Crider's hope is that the first flight is the hardest and that a tradition takes root. "It's a labor of love for me," she said, "and I will be thrilled when we make this first flight."
For the roughly 25 veterans boarding in Boise, the trip is a chance to stand before the memorials that carry their war's name, to be surrounded by people who understand without explanation, and — for some, for the first time — to be welcomed home.