For years, the veterans of central Iowa had a standing invitation they couldn't use. The Honor Flight Network, the nonprofit that flies aging veterans to Washington, D.C. to see the memorials built for their wars, works with local chapters and subgroups across the country. But central Iowa hasn't had a hub. That gap left veterans in Polk, Dallas, Madison and Warren counties sitting on waiting lists for years, watching their counterparts in other parts of the state board planes without them.
On Tuesday, Oct. 6, that changes. Seventy-two veterans from around the metro will climb aboard a police-escorted motorcade and head to a special pre-flight dinner, and residents are being asked to line 60th Street in West Des Moines between Ashworth and Westown Parkway to cheer them on. The send-off runs from 5 to 5:45 p.m. It is free, public, and open to anyone willing to stand on a sidewalk and wave.
The trip itself is the first Honor Flight to leave Des Moines since 2019, and it's being organized by Hy-Vee, the West Des Moines-based grocery chain, in partnership with the Honor Flight Network and the Honor Flight of the Quad Cities hub. The veterans fly out Wednesday, Oct. 7, spending the day at Arlington National Cemetery and the military monuments around the capital before returning to Des Moines that same evening. A second public event is planned for their homecoming: starting at 8 p.m. Wednesday, people can park at the Hy-Vee store on Fleur Drive and take a free shuttle to the Endeavor Air Hangar at the Des Moines airport, where the veterans are expected to disembark around 9:30 p.m. Attendees are encouraged to wear red, white and blue, and are asked to stay out of the airport terminal itself.
The Honor Flight idea began with a simple, stubborn observation. In 2004, Earl Morse, a physician assistant and retired Air Force captain working at a Department of Veterans Affairs clinic in Springfield, Ohio, watched the National World War II Memorial finally open in Washington — and realized that many of his elderly World War II patients would never live to see it. Morse was a pilot. He offered to fly two of them to the memorial himself. In January 2005, he pitched the idea to roughly 300 private pilots at his local Air Force aeroclub, proposing that they pay for the flights out of their own pockets and personally escort the veterans around the city. Eleven more pilots volunteered. By that spring a board had formed and money had been raised, and on May 21, 2005, six small planes carried twelve veterans to Washington for the first Honor Flight. That first year, a mix of small planes and commercial flights took 126 World War II veterans to see their memorial.
Later that same year, a dry-cleaning company owner in Hendersonville, North Carolina named Jeff Miller had a similar idea on a much bigger scale: instead of small planes, charter entire commercial jets. Miller, the son of a World War II veteran and the nephew of a B-24 pilot killed in the war, had been a charter member of the National World War II Memorial Foundation, and he worried that the veterans in his own community would never make the trip. His group, HonorAir, flew more than 300 World War II veterans out of Asheville by the end of 2006. In February 2007, Morse and Miller met in Washington at the first Honor Flight summit and merged their efforts. The umbrella organization they built reports it has flown more than 244,000 veterans to the capital since 2005.
The program was designed around a hard deadline: World War II veterans were dying at a rate that outpaced any effort to get them to their memorial. As that generation thinned, the network "naturally transitioned" its focus to Korean War and Vietnam War veterans, and to any veteran with a terminal illness. Today the Lone Eagle Hub, the national program that catches veterans who fall outside a regional hub's territory, serves those who served through May 1975 as well as the terminally ill, and it maintains a separate program for critically ill veterans with less than a year to live. Veterans who apply are placed on a waitlist served first-come, first-served, with World War II, Korean War and terminally ill veterans scheduled first.
That waitlist is exactly what central Iowa's veterans have been stuck on. The Hy-Vee flight is designed to prioritize them — the veterans who have been waiting the longest, in the counties that had no hub to serve them. Each veteran travels with a guardian, often a child, grandchild or friend, who helps push wheelchairs and navigate the long day of walking and standing. The trip is free to the veterans.
For Hy-Vee, the flight is the latest piece of a commitment that dates to 2013, when the company established its Homefront program to support veterans, active-duty service members and their families. Hy-Vee says Homefront has donated nearly $4 million to nonprofits serving those groups, and its annual register round-up lets customers donate to organizations including the Honor Flight Network, with the company matching up to $100,000. This year alone, Hy-Vee is backing Honor Flights out of Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, Dubuque, Peoria and the Quad Cities.
But the Des Moines flight is the one that had been missing. When Hy-Vee announced it in late May, the company noted plainly that central Iowa's lack of a hub had kept local veterans waiting for years. The flight is, in effect, a workaround — a grocery chain stepping in to fill a gap the national network couldn't cover on its own, and borrowing the Quad Cities hub's expertise to make it happen.
That's what makes Tuesday evening's send-off more than a photo opportunity. The stretch of 60th Street between Ashworth and Westown Parkway is an ordinary suburban road, the kind of place where a police escort is usually a nuisance. For 45 minutes, it becomes something else: a receiving line for 72 people who, in some cases, have been waiting the better part of a decade for a trip that most of them assumed had passed them by. All anyone has to do to be part of it is show up and cheer.