Remembering the fallen

MOSES LAKE — It was a solemn Memorial Day gathering under a hot, Central Washington sun. And a simple one.

“Today is not a day for celebrations, but for remembrance,” said David Degerness, an Air Force veteran who currently works as an airplane mechanic in Moses Lake.

Degerness carried with him a flag folded up in a case — the one from his father’s military funeral — along with a photo of his father’s unit in World War II.

And he placed it against one of the basalt pillars in the memorial at the Port of Moses Lake to the U.S. service members who died when their C-124 Globemaster II transport plane crashed right after takeoff on Dec. 20, 1952.

Prayers were said. Short, heartfelt speeches made. Aging veterans saluted the flag. An American Legion honor guard fired a 21-gun salute.

The “87 Forgotten Heroes Memorial,” built on a tiny rectangle of land just a stone’s throw from the Grant County International Airport terminal, commemorates the crash, which took the lives of 87 servicemen homeward bound on leave, winners of a special lottery to get a free trip home during the Korean War. While most were in the Air Force, a few sailors and soldiers were present as well.

Their names carved into granite.

“They become heroes, names on a monument, but when that happens, they lose their humanness,” said Ann Mix, who recalled the memory of her own father’s death in Italy during the last days of WWII.

Mix, who was only 4 when her father died in 1945, said she went on help create a network of people who had been “orphaned” by the war because of influence her late father had — and still has — on her life.

“That empty place where your father should have been, that ghost father, influenced me a lot, about how I feel about life, and how I feel about the country,” she said.

Because of that, Mix said she has done as much research as she can on each of those names on that granite memorial, in order to make them more human.

Steve Creviston, one of the founders of the memorial, told those assembled to remember that the memorial includes the names of the 28 who survived the crash. And that while not all of the young men who perished that day may have served overseas in Korea, they were all heroes because they had signed up to serve.

“What is a hero?” Creviston asked. “A hero is any willing to sign their name, take a pledge to uphold the constitution. Each of these men are heroes.”

As the ceremony was getting under way, a handful of Job Corps students quietly joined.

“We heard there was a memorial,” said Lela Kassem. “We wanted to pay our respects.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.