Honor Flight Heroes
Their uniforms may be long put away, but the values they learned in service never left them. Years later, they received the invitation to participate in the Honor Flight: a single day in Washington, D.C., filled with memorials, mail call, and long-overdue thank-yous. Around a table in Independent Living at Park Place of Elmhurst, they shared those memories with humor, humility, and the steady clarity of people who have seen multiple changes in their lifetimes.
“Find an apartment, I’m coming.”
For Army veteran Leo Kubowitsch, the story starts with a draft notice.
He was nearly twenty-five when the Army drafted him, already married with a baby on the way. From 1963 to 1965, he served stateside at first, held back from shipping out to Germany until his child was born. Then his orders arrived, not for Europe but for Hawaii.
It was beautiful and expensive, and his wife stayed behind working while coworkers teased her about “those hula girls.” Eventually, she’d had enough.
“She wrote me, ‘Find an apartment, I’m coming,’” Leo said. He told her they couldn’t afford it. She insisted, “I’m coming. Just find the apartment.” So, he did.
They tried living off base in a small Hawaiian town, but it proved tougher than expected. When Leo was sent to the Big Island for maneuvers, his wife decided to return home.
Leo finished his service, came back to Illinois, and went straight to work as a Volkswagen mechanic before eventually opening his own gas station.
Years later, he would take not one, but two trips to Washington, D.C., as a veteran. First, in 2018, on a four-day “Vets Roll” bus trip, where they treated the veterans “like kings” and rolled out of town with a police escort at the state line and a motorcycle escort all the way to D.C. Then, in 2021, he joined an Honor Flight out of Chicago.
In Washington, he met his guardian for the day, a woman who shepherded him around the memorials, took photos, and later mailed him a little book of memories. They still exchange Christmas cards, and Leo sends her a Kringle cake every year. It is his way of saying thank you for a kindness that has lingered long after the flight home.
Navy veteran Clay Klein shared a milestone with the group, “I went into the Navy seventy years ago yesterday.”
He began in Newport, Rhode Island, in an officers’ candidate program, then went on to Aviation OrdnanceSchool in Jacksonville, Florida. He volunteered for East Coast duty. The Navy gave him the West Coast instead.
“I was assigned to a fighter squadron out of Moffett Field in California,” Clay said, “but when I got there, the squadron was not at Moffett. It was on a cruise in Japan.”
He flew by propeller plane to Japan, to Yokosuka, to catch his ship. When he arrived, his squadron was not on the ship either so he climbed onto an overnight train.
Clay said, “I was young, and I did not know what to expect.”
When he caught up with his ship, his first assignment was the Liberty Boat. “I had never been on a boat in my life,” he said. “I was from the farm. No boats. Then I joined the Navy.”
One night, while loading sailors onto the boat, he saw someone who did not look well and told them to put the man on board carefully. Clay said, “It was someone from my hometown in Indiana.” Halfway around the world and he found a familiar face at a foreign port.
After the war, Clay moved to California, when the valley was still covered in orchards. He put down $300 on a house he was not sure he could afford. Today, that same little house sits in the shadow of Google and Silicon Valley. After 70 years, he’s back in Illinois.
On his Honor Flight to Washington, what struck him most was the people he met. He said he was overwhelmed by how many took the time to show up at the airport, at both ends of the trip, just to stand, clap, and say thank you.
“I thought they had forgotten,” he admitted. “Honor Flight reminds people of what happened, and what it cost.”
Fixing engines, flying twice
Bill Tauber served twenty years altogether in the Navy, with what he calls “broken service.” He spent eight years on active duty, left the service, and then returned after a group of friends at a wake encouraged him to reenlist. He returned as an engine mechanic at a naval air station, where the quality of his work mattered greatly.
“If they made car engines the same way they make airplane engines,” someone said at the table, “mechanics would almost be out of work.”
Bill talks about flying out of Midway on his Honor Flight, heading for D.C., and being invited up to the cockpit for a photo. He likes big airplanes and, judging from the pictures he spread out on the table, big groups of fellow veterans, too.
The photos he brought that day were from a previous group he traveled with out of Sun City Huntley, where he used to live. They show men in front of monuments, arms linked, flags waving in the background.
At one point, the conversation turned to the most critical part of an airplane.
“The pilot,” someone offered.
“The engine,” another said.
A third voice chimed in from down the table. “The parachute.”
Leo Kubowitsch chimed in with a story. He heard about a private restorer in rural Illinois who is rebuilding an old B-29 in his own pole barn, making his own parts, scrounging pieces from crash sites around the world. It is the sort of thing that makes every mechanic nod.
The corpsman who liked boot camp
In a later private discussion, another Navy veteran sat with his wife at his side. Dr. Bill Kort did not come to the Honor Flight as a pilot or a maintenance officer. He came as a former Navy corpsman, a dentist, and possibly one of the few men who will admit he actually liked boot camp.
He served almost 5 years in the Navy during the Korean War. His path took him through the Great Lakes, to Corona, California, to the USS Luzon, stationed twice at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, to San Diego for school, then on to Camp Pendleton, where he served as a dental technician to the Marines. Somewhere in there, the food agreed with him.
“He went in at about one hundred twenty pounds and came out at over 200,” his wife said. “Boot camp is supposed to work the other way.”
After his service, Bill used his benefits to finish his education. He went on to the University of Illinois College of Dentistry, graduating in 1961. He opened a practice in Westchester and later served as a associate professor and teacher at the dental school. For 17 years, he taught future dentists while caring for his own patients.
Bill and his wife married on June 16, 1956.
“That is one of those dates you do not forget,” he said. “You get in trouble if you do.”
They have two children and three grandchildren. The Williams family line runs like a point of pride. Bill is William B. Their son is William C. Their grandson is William D.
“He walked right through the alphabet,” his wife explained.
His Honor Flight invitation came as a surprise. By then, the Honor Flight program had expanded from World War II veterans to those who served in Korea, and his name rose to the top.
He and his guardian flew out of Midway. From the moment the plane left the gate, he was impressed. Out on the tarmac, when they landed, the fire department created a water arch to welcome them. Every veteran on the flight had a guardian. Bill’s guardian was a young woman who worked in a laboratory field and lived not far from where he and his wife used to live in Westchester.
“We had something to talk about,” Bill said.
In Washington, he visited the major memorials, especially the Korean War Memorial, the Air Force Memorial, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
What stayed with him most, though, was not what he saw but how he was welcomed.
On the way home, when they came back through Midway, the concourse was lined with people. Two bands were playing. A high school bus from central Illinois had brought a whole group of students. Veterans were wheeled and walked past rows of strangers, shaking hands, being waved at, hearing “thank you” again and again.
“I have been thanked for my service,” Bill said, “but not by that many people. Not all at once.”
“Fire for effect”
Michael Harrington joined the Army through ROTC. He graduated from Loyola University in 1958 and received a commission as a second lieutenant. That same year, he boarded a train from Chicago to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for artillery school.
As an officer, he had to learn to drive almost every vehicle the Army had. Jeeps, half-tracks, tanks. At this point, Bill Tauber could not resist jumping in to say that, after they drove them, he was the one who had to fix them.
Michael also had to learn to fire every weapon he would later supervise. He trained with a .45 pistol, carbines, machine guns, and .50 caliber weapons. He learned to throw grenades in sandbagged pits, then later served as a safety officer while others did the same. And there were no earplugs back then.
His training also brushed against the dangerous reality of forward observers, the men who went out ahead to direct artillery fire in combat. In Vietnam, he said, their life expectancy was painfully short.
Michael spent many years afterward in the reserves, training at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin, where he served as a fire control officer. His job was to make sure the guns lined up where they were supposed to, not 60 or 100 degrees off target. It was vital work, a reminder that every job matters.
On his Honor Flight, Michael took seventy-two photos, which he later turned into a slideshow for the community’s Veterans Day luncheon. The most powerful moment of the trip for him, though, was not one he captured with a camera.
At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, he went looking for a friend. A helicopter pilot. A former captain of his university basketball team. A good man who never came home.
Using the paper index near the wall, Michael looked up his friend’s name, found the panel number, then traced the row and line until he found it engraved in the granite. He remembers the feeling of seeing that name among thousands of others. At the base of the wall, small personal items and patches lay in neat little clusters.
“It gives you chills,” he said.
He also talked about the statues, life-sized figures of soldiers on patrol, and the newer statue that honors women who served in Vietnam. He described the Changing of the Guard at Arlington, the wreath ceremonies, and the quiet white stones that go on and on. These places make the reality of war impossible to brush aside.
“It was all combat.”
Leo Harty served as a company commander in artillery in Korea. He was about twenty-two or twenty-three when he went in. He flew from the United States to California, then to Hawaii, then to Japan for more training, then finally took a ship to Korea. Every leg of the trip, he likes to say, the accommodations got a little bit worse.
Once he reached the front, there were no barracks. No heated buildings. He and his men moved into the mountains of North Korea and built their own huts and their own outhouse. They slept in sleeping bags and were grateful if they could get a second one. Winters were freezing. Summers were not much easier.
They ate C rations. The food was filling, if not exactly nutritious. One of Leo’s favorite stories from that time was about catching a live chicken. They fed it C rations to fatten it up. There was only one bird for many men, but every bite felt like a luxury.
Leo’s work as an artillery officer included time as a forward observer. He and his men became so accurate at charting enemy positions that opposing soldiers refused to come out during the day. Instead, they slipped out at night, hoping to move unseen. The artillery answered with what Leo calls “a party” that no one would ever want to attend.
Sometimes locals would seem like friends. Sometimes they turned out to be enemies. Asked how he could tell the difference, Leo gave a simple answer.
“That was easy,” he said, matter-of-factly. “They would shoot at us.”
He received the Bronze Star for his service. After four years, he was invited to stay but said no. His fiancé had waited for him to come home to marry, and he wanted to return to her and the life they had put on hold.
Even so, he says he is proud that he survived and can still, all these years later, sit at a table and tell the story for the men who cannot.
Life after service, life together
Sometime after the war stories and Honor Flight memories, the talk at the table shifted to life after service, to families, and to the long, ordinary faithfulness that rarely makes it into history books.
“We came over in different ships.”
When the conversation turned back to Honor Flight, everyone at the table had something to add.
They talked about flights out of O’Hare and Midway. They talked about arriving at the airport at three thirty in the morning, getting through security, and boarding the plane before sunrise. They talked about a long day in Washington, walking past monuments and memorials, and about the Chick-fil-A meal waiting for them at the gate before the flight home.
They all agreed on two things.
First, the sheer amount of work that goes into Honor Flight. The fundraising, the logistics, the volunteers. There are hundreds of people behind each trip who may never meet the veterans they are serving.
Second, the way Honor Flight changes the way they feel about their own service.
For some of the men, there was very little gratitude when they first came home. They remember a time when uniforms were not welcome and when no one said “Thank you for your service” unless it was with a bitter edge.
Honor Flight rewrites that memory a little.
They described crowds at the airport, volunteers lining the corridors, families with small children waving flags and clapping as they walked past. Mail call on the plane, where each veteran receives a bundle of letters from family, friends, schoolchildren, and strangers, left many of them with tears in their eyes. Clay remembered a fellow veteran who opened mail with three veteran sons at his side. Leo remembered reading note after note, thinking he had never seen anything like it.
One of the men received fifty to a hundred birthday cards at home afterward from people he did not know.
“It is easy to forget,” another said quietly. “Honor Flight helps people remember.”
They agreed that every role in the service matters, from private to general, from mechanic to maintenance officer, from corpsman to artillery, from the cockpit to the engine shop.
Clay looked around the table and summed it up for all of them.
“We came over in different ships,” he said, “and now we are in the same boat.”
The men around him nodded. They came home from different wars, at different times, into different lives. Today, they share the same location at Park Place of Elmhurst, the dining room, the hallway walks, and friendly waves.
They are still here.
And we are all grateful that they are.
