Tag Archives: veterans

Vietnam Memorial B-52G Is Complete

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial has been under construction for a while including the restoration of the B-52G, Midnight Express that spent many years outside at Paine Field. The opening ceremony took place over the Memorial Day weekend and I went along to check it out. I wrote an article for GAR about the ceremony and, if you want to read that, you can see it here.

The article includes most of the good images from the event so I won’t duplicate it all here but instead I shall just post a couple of shots that summarize what happened.

Veterans’ Alaska 737 – Finally!

Alaska Airlines has a number of jets in special colors. My efforts to finally get the merger jet were covered in this post. One of the other jets that I never managed to catch in California was their Tribute to Service aircraft that is honoring veterans. My friend Roger caught it a number of times but I was always in the wrong place.

Alaska is, despite the name, headquartered in Seattle so their jets are regularly rotating through SeaTac. Shortly after arriving here, I saw that this jet was coming in and, since I was nearby, I decided to see if it could finally catch it. Sure enough, I got it. I would also like to point out the sun and blue skies in this shot for those of you that think I have moved to somewhere where it only rains. It’s true that it does rain but not as much as you think so far!

Veterans’ service

With Veterans’ Day upon us, the city of Chicago held a service at the Vietnam War Memorial. This is located just across the river from me and, when I saw that something was being set up, I went across to see. It is the fiftieth anniversary of the Vietnam War and there are additional elements of remembrance that are associated with that.

The mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel was speaking at the event as was an alderman who served with the Marines in Vietnam. It was not a huge event but there were plenty of people there and it was all done in a very classy yet personal way. All of the services were represented and there were many veterans in the crowd as well. I am certainly glad I found out it was going on.