- Messenger photo by Bill Shea. Three members of the Webster City High School Class of 1965, from left, Jim Walker, Jerry Peterson and Roger Lyons, waited Wednesday morning to board the Brushy Creek Area Honor Flight. All three had volunteered for the draft together, entering military service on Valentine's Day 1966.

FORT DODGE — Almost 60 years ago, three Webster City men volunteered for the military draft, becoming Army soldiers.

On Wednesday those three men — Roger Lyons, Jerry Peterson and Jim Walker — were together again for a trip to Washington, D.C., designed to thank them and other veterans for their service to their country.

The trio, members of the Webster City High School Class of 1965, was among the roughly 130 veterans who traveled on the 23rd Brushy Creek Area Honor Flight. The voyage took them to the nation’s capital to see the war memorials.

The flight aboard a chartered 737 left Fort Dodge Regional Airport at around 7 a.m. Wednesday. It was scheduled to return to Fort Dodge late Wednesday night.

There was no such thing as an Honor Flight when Lyons, Peterson and Walker were inducted into the Army on Valentines Day in 1966.

Walker said they would have been drafted anyway so volunteering for the draft “just speeded up the process.”

“If you were healthy, you were going,” Peterson said.

Recalling his time in basic training, Lyons said “The first couple of days you wondered what you had done.”

He became an artillery surveyor in a field artillery unit.

Peterson became a clerk in a headquarters unit of the 24th Infantry Division in the former West Germany. He joked that he may have made some expensive mistakes in that role.

“I cost the taxpayers thousands of dollars,” he said.

Walker became a member of the 547th Engineer Battalion. He was also assigned to West Germany, but was on the opposite side of the country from where Peterson was stationed.

Also during his Army career, he was assigned to Fort Belvoir, in Virginia. Thanks to that assignment he had been to Washington, but he was looking forward to seeing it again with his fellow veterans.

Army veteran Phil Turner, of Fort Dodge, agreed that seeing the memorials with other veterans would add significance to the visit.

Turner, who handled supplies for the 54th Field Hospital, said he has “passed through” Washington before. He said the World War II Memorial had not yet been built the last time he was there.

Army veteran Bill Siglin, of Denison, and Navy veteran Jerry Goetzinger, of Charter Oak, were among the first veterans to arrive at Fort Dodge Regional Airport Wednesday morning. They came to Fort Dodge Tuesday and stayed overnight.

Siglin said he applied for a seat on the flight because “I got tired of everyone yelling at me for not going.”

Neither of them had been to Washington before.

Asked what he was looking forward to seeing, Goetzinger said “just everything.”

Full schedule awaited Honor Flight veterans

The Brushy Creek Area Honor Flight that departed from Fort Dodge Regional Airport traveled to Dulles International Airport in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.

There, the veterans boarded buses that took them to the Lincoln Memorial, World War II Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the United States Navy Memorial, the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery and the Air Force Memorial.

The flight was scheduled to return to Fort Dodge late Wednesday night.

“We’re very proud to be able to take them all and bring them back safely,” said Ron Newsum, the founder and president of the Brushy Creek Area Honor Flight Committee.

“It’s been a lot of work, but a lot of fun,” he said.”It’s been very, very gratifying.”