COLUMBUS, Ohio ( WCMH ) — Honor Flight Columbus recently provided a local veteran and grandmother the chance to visit memorials around Washington D.C. with her grandson by her side for every step of the journey.
Each Honor Flight trip is called a mission. On Mission 136 , Honor Flight Columbus celebrated taking 10,000 veterans to the nation’s capital.
“I am so honored and so grateful to meet such good people,” Suzanne Dirck, one of the veterans on Mission 136, said. “They’re good volunteers and the people that served, they’re wonderful people.”
Every veteran on the missions has a volunteer guardian they’re paired with. Dirck’s guardian was her grandson, Leopold Harden.
“He’s with me and that’s good, isn’t it?” Dirck said. “He’s 6’5″ and I’m 4’11”, so I hope I didn’t trip him up.”
Harden helped her get around Washington D.C. as they stopped at different memorials and monuments.
At the Vietnam War Memorial, she saw names of corpsmen she knew who made the ultimate sacrifice. Dirck was a Navy nurse at the Bethesda Naval Hospital during the Vietnam War, caring for amputees, burn patients, and psychiatric patients.