Calling All Vietnam Vets: Your Time Is Now
North Country Honor Flight's executive officer, Jerika Manning said, they fly from Plattsburgh, NY to Washington, D.C. to visit the Airforce Memorial, Marine Memorial, WWII Memorial, the Vietnam Wall and the changing of the guard.
The average WWII vet is just over 100-years-old. The average Korean War vet is mid-80s to early-90s. Manning said they are seeing less of those veterans as they get older. The next big group to focus on is the Vietnam War vets.
'When Honor Flight started, it was organized in a large part by Vietnam veterans who were serving the WWII veterans, and the Korean War veterans. They never thought it was their time,' said Manning.
'There never became a time where we really focused on asking the Vietnam veterans to apply and letting them know and reminding them that they have more than earned and deserve this trip, but that it's their time to start applying now.
One of those Veterans, Greg Lee, served in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969. He said that's when the war took the most casualties. Lee signed up at just 16-years-old, after he said he lied to get in. That decision, according to Lee, is something he's never regretted. He said some veterans have a hard time dealing with the whole subject though.
'A lot of these guys, I know them personally. A lot of them feel that they don't deserve to go, for whatever reason,' said Lee. 'Some of it might have to do with the treatment we got when we came home. Vietnam veterans weren't very welcomed.'
Lee admitted he had avoided seeing the Vietnam Wall for several years. It wasn't until 2 years ago that his buddies at North Country Honor Flight made the decision for him.
'A lot of the folks in Honor Flight decided I was going, so I went. I wish I had done it 10 years before that,' said Lee. 'It was a healing process.'
Lee said anybody can visit the memorials, but the experience of going with a group of fellow Vietnam veterans is unlike anything else. He urges any and all Vietnam veterans to get an application, sign up and go.
'You'll be glad you did,' said Lee.
Applications are available at North Country Honor Flight's website here. Manning said there is plenty of room for any vet that wants to go. The entire trip, including food and drinks, is free. The first flight of the season is May 17, 2025.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Los Angeles Times
2 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Americans may aspire to single-family homes, but in South Korea, apartments are king
SEOUL — For many Americans, the apartment where 29-year-old IT specialist Lee Chang-hee lives might be the stuff of nightmares. Located just outside the capital of Seoul, the building isn't very tall — just 16 stories — by South Korean standards, but the complex consists of 36 separate structures, which are nearly identical except for the building number displayed on their sides. The 2,000-plus units come in the same standardized dimensions found everywhere in the country (Lee lives in a '84C,' which has 84 square meters, or about 900 square feet, of floor space) and offer, in some ways, a ready-made life. The amenities scattered throughout the campus include a rock garden with a fake waterfall, a playground, a gym, an administration office, a senior center and a 'moms cafe.' But this, for the most part, is South Korea's middle-class dream of home ownership — its version of a house with the white picket fence. 'The bigger the apartment complex, the better the surrounding infrastructure, like public transportation, schools, hospitals, grocery stories, parks and so on,' Lee said. 'I like how easy it is to communicate with the neighbors in the complex because there's a well-run online community.' Most in the country would agree: Today, 64% of South Korean households live in such multifamily housing, the majority of them in apartments with five or more stories. Such a reality seems unimaginable in cities like Los Angeles, which has limited or prohibited the construction of dense housing in single-family zones. 'Los Angeles is often seen as an endless tableau of individual houses, each with their own yard and garden,' Max Podemski, an L.A.-based urban planner, wrote in The Times last year. 'Apartment buildings are anathema to the city's ethos.' In recent years, the price of that ethos has become increasingly apparent in the form of a severe housing shortage. In the city of Los Angeles, where nearly 75% of all residential land is zoned for stand-alone single-family homes, rents have been in a seemingly endless ascent, contributing to one of the worst homelessness crises in the country. As a remedy, the state of California has ordered the construction of more than 450,000 new housing units by 2029. The plan will almost certainly require the building of some form of apartment-style housing, but construction has lagged amid fierce resistance. Sixty years ago, South Korea stood at a similar crossroads. But the series of urban housing policies it implemented led to the primacy of the apartment, and in doing so, transformed South Korean notions of housing over the course of a single generation. The results of that program have been mixed. But in one important respect, at least, it has been successful: Seoul, which is half the size of the city of L.A., is home to a population of 9.6 million — compared with the estimated 3.3 million people who live here. For Lee, the trade-off is a worthwhile one. In an ideal world, she would have a garage for the sort of garage sales she's admired in American movies. 'But South Korea is a small country,' she said. 'It is necessary to use space as efficiently as possible.' Apartments, in her view, have spared her from the miseries of suburban housing. Restaurants and stores are close by. Easy access to public transportation means she doesn't need a car to get everywhere. 'Maybe it's because of my Korean need to have everything done quickly, but I think it'd be uncomfortable to live somewhere that doesn't have these things within reach at all times,' she said. 'I like to go out at night; I think it would be boring to have all the lights go off at 9 p.m.' *** Apartments first began appearing in South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, as part of a government response to a housing crisis in the nation's capital — a byproduct of the era's rapid industrialization and subsequent urban population boom. In the 1960s, single-family detached dwellings made up around 95% of homes in the country. But over the following decade, as rural migrants flooded Seoul in search of factory work, doubling the population from 2.4 to 5.5 million, many in this new urban working class found themselves without homes. As a result, many of them settled in shantytowns on the city's outskirts, living in makeshift sheet-metal homes. The authoritarian government at the time, led by a former army general named Park Chung-hee, declared apartments to be the solution and embarked on a building spree that would continue under subsequent administrations. Eased height restrictions and incentives for construction companies helped add between 20,000 to 100,000 new apartment units every year. They were pushed by political leaders in South Korea as a high-tech modernist paradise, soon making them the most desirable form of housing for the middle and upper classes. Known as apateu, which specifically refers to a high-rise apartment building built as part of a larger complex — as distinct from lower stand-alone buildings — they symbolized Western cachet and upward social mobility. 'Around the late 1990s and early 2000s, almost every big-name celebrity at the time appeared in apartment commercials,' recalled Jung Heon-mok, an anthropologist at the Academy of Korean Studies who has studied the history of South Korean apartments. 'But the biggest reason that apartments proliferated as they did was because they were done at scale, in complexes of five buildings or more.' Essential to the modern apateu are the amenities — such as on-site kindergartens or convenience stores — that allow them to function like miniature towns. This has also turned them into branded commodities and class signifiers, built by construction conglomerates like Samsung, and taking on names like 'castle' or 'palace.' (One of the first such branded apartment complexes was Trump Tower, a luxury development built in Seoul in the late 1990s by a construction firm that licensed the name of Donald Trump.) All of this has made the detached single-family home, for the most part, obsolete. In Seoul, such homes now make up just 10% of the housing stock. Among many younger South Koreans like Lee, they are associated with retirement in the countryside, or, as she puts it: for 'grilling in the garden for your grandkids.' *** This model has not been without problems. There are the usual issues that come with dense housing. In buildings with poor soundproofing, 'inter-floor noise' between units is such a universal scourge that the government runs a noise-related dispute resolution center while discouraging people from angrily confronting their neighbors, a situation that occasionally escalates into headline-making violence. Some apartment buildings have proved to be too much even for a country accustomed to unsentimentally efficient forms of housing. One 19-story, 4,635-unit complex built by a big-name apartment brand in one of the wealthiest areas of Seoul looks so oppressive that it has become a curiosity, mocked by some as a prison or chicken coop. The sheer number of apartments has prompted criticism of Seoul's skyline as sterile and ugly. South Koreans have described its uniform, rectangular columns as 'matchboxes.' And despite the aspirations attached to them, there is also a wariness about a culture where homes are built in such disposable, assembly line-like fashion. Many people here are increasingly questioning how this form of housing, with its nearly identical layouts, has shaped the disposition of contemporary South Korean society, often criticized by its own members as overly homogenized and lockstep. 'I'm concerned that apartments have made South Koreans' lifestyles too similar,' said Maing Pil-soo, an architect and urban planning professor at Seoul National University. 'And with similar lifestyles, you end up with a similar way of thinking. Much like the cityscape itself, everything becomes flattened and uniform.' Jung, the anthropologist, believes South Korea's apartment complexes, with their promise of an atomized, frictionless life, have eroded the more expansive social bonds that defined traditional society — like those that extended across entire villages — making its inhabitants more individualistic and insular. 'At the end of the day, apartments here are undoubtedly extremely convenient — that's why they became so popular,' he said. 'But part of that convenience is because they insulate you from the concerns of the wider world. Once you're inside your complex and in your home, you don't have to pay attention to your neighbors or their issues.' Still, Jung says this uniformity isn't all bad. It is what made them such easily scalable solutions to the housing crisis of decades past. It is also, in some ways, an equalizing force. 'I think apartments are partly why certain types of social inequalities you see in the U.S. are comparatively less severe in South Korea,' he said. Though many branded apartment complexes now resemble gated communities with exclusionary homeowner associations, Jung points out that on the whole, the dominance of multifamily housing has inadvertently encouraged more social mixing between classes, a physical closeness that creates the sense that everyone is inhabiting the same broader space. Even Seoul's wealthiest neighborhoods feel, to an extent that is hard to see in many American cities, porous and accessible. Wealthier often means having a nicer apartment, but an apartment all the same, existing in the same environs as those in a different price range. 'And even though we occasionally use disparaging terms like 'chicken coop' to describe them, once you actually step inside one of those apartments, they don't feel like that at all,' Jung said. 'They really are quite comfortable and nice.' *** None of this, however, has been able to stave off Seoul's own present-day housing affordability crisis. The capital has one of the most expensive apartment prices in the world on a price-per-square-meter basis, ranking fourth after Hong Kong, Zurich and Singapore, and ahead of major U.S. cities like New York or San Francisco, according to a report published last month by Deutsche Bank. One especially brutal stretch recently saw apartment prices in Seoul double in four years. Part of the reason for this is that apartments, with their standardized dimensions, have effectively become interchangeable financial commodities: An apartment in Seoul is seen as a much more surefire bet than any stock, leading to intense real estate investment and speculation that has driven up home prices. 'Buying an apartment here isn't just buying an apartment. The equivalent in the U.S. would be like buying an ideal single-family home with a garage in the U.S., except that it comes with a bunch of NVIDIA shares,' said Chae Sang-wook, an independent real estate analyst. 'In South Korea, people invest in apateu for capital gains, not cash flow from rent.' Some experts predict that, as the country enters another era of demographic upheaval, the dominance of apartments will someday be no more. If births continue to fall as dramatically as they have done in recent years, South Koreans may no longer need such dense housing. The ongoing rise of single-person households, too, may chip away at a form of housing built to hold four-person nuclear families. But Chae is skeptical that this will happen anytime soon. He points out that South Koreans don't even like to assemble their own furniture, let alone fix their own cars — all downstream effects of ubiquitous apartment living. 'For now, there is no alternative other than this,' he said. 'As a South Korean, you don't have the luxury of choosing.'
Yahoo
15 hours ago
- Yahoo
Man catches ‘monster' 86-pound catfish from Missouri River
WASHINGTON, Mo. – A man recently hauled in the catch of a lifetime from the Missouri River, a 'monster' 86-pound blue catfish near Washington, Missouri. Wally Klein made his impressive catch using gizzard shad as bait on a road-and-reel setup. His feat required patience, strength and skill. Wally told the Missouri Department of Conservation it's the biggest fish he has ever caught. After snapping a quick photo, Wally released the massive catfish back into the river. According to MDC, the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers are prime waters for catching large catfish, especially blue, flathead and channel catfish. Tonia Haddix found to be hiding another chimp These catfish often gather in deep water below dikes, in dam tailwaters, or in the mouths of tributary streams. In the summer, they're commonly found around submerged structures, drop-offs, rocky banks and dike tips. Blue catfish in particular, like Wally's catch, favor fast-moving water near the main channel and waterways with a strong current. The Missouri and Mississippi rivers, despite their potential, can be intimidating for anglers, especially after storms or flooding. Strong currents and deep water demand different fishing strategies than those used in smaller lakes or streams. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
TRACKING: 500 lbs. shark ‘pings' close to shoreline
[WATCH: In the video player above, swimming safety tips.] (WJW) — Researchers report that a newly tagged white shark has 'pinged' close to the Canadian shoreline. According to the non-profit OCEARCH, a ping is reported whenever an animal's tag breaks the surface of the water. Couple left baby in car to drink at bar: Police Late Sunday night, 'Jason' pinged inside Georges Bay, Nova Scotia. The more than 500 lbs. shark was tagged just four days prior in Mahone Bay. OCEARCH said efforts to track Jason is part of a larger study on white sharks during their summer/fall residency period in Atlantic Canada. 4-year-old bit by mountain lion in national park 'Atlantic Canada and Newfoundland are important parts of the white shark's range, making them essential areas for managing the western North Atlantic population. Additional tagging efforts—including satellite-linked and acoustic tags—will aid scientists and policymakers in understanding white shark abundance in the region, their distribution and critical habitats, and how their presence has changed over time,' reads the OCEARCH website. OCEARCH encourages 'facts over fear.' The non-profit helps conduct research and provides education and outreach opportunities. You can learn more about OCEARCH and their work, here. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Solve the daily Crossword
