Antioch resident to go on Honor Flight
For Norman Goone, reminiscing about his time as a soldier in World War II is filled with good and bad memories.
Whether it was his humorous first day of enlistment into the Army or the hardships he faced during the Battle of Okinawa, it was a time the 84-year-old Antioch man can’t forget.
And when Goone leaves Tuesday, June 7, on an Honor Flight Chicago trip to Washington, D.C., to see the war memorials, he expects many of those memories to come flooding back.
Still fresh in his mind is his first memory of the service.
“They asked me when I was drafted, ‘Do you want Army or Navy?’ So I was thinking to myself, ‘Well, the Navy eats good, sleeps clean, I’ll take the Navy,’” Goone said with gleam in his eye. “And he said, ‘Hold out your hand,’ and he stamps Army. And I said, ‘Excuse me, I asked for Navy’. He says, ‘I know, but you’re getting the Army’. I said, ‘Well, why did you ask?’ He said, ‘We gotta ask.’”
There were plenty of bad memories, too, including fighting in the Pacific on the island of Okinawa, where thousands of soldiers were killed.
“I was in Okinawa and it was not too pleasant. I was lucky to come home alive, actually. It was a pretty big battle,” he said.
Goone was just 18 when he went to war. He served a part of the Seventh Infantry Division for a little more than two years.
His trip to Washington will include visits to the World War II, Lincoln, Korean and Vietnam memorials. If time allows, he and the other veterans on the trip also will have the opportunity to visit the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
The all-expense-paid trip is courtesy of Honor Flight Chicago, a nonprofit organization started in February 2008 that has brought more than 2,100 veterans to Washington.
Goone is a retired insurance agent and broker of 52 years at his own agency called Goone Insurance Agency. A woman Goone worked with told him about the Honor Flight program and gave him the phone number to call.
A few months later, he was chosen to make the trip.
“I’m feeling pretty good about it,” he said. “It is really something else that is different than most things, and I’m really looking forward to it.”
He’s also looking forward to making new friends and meeting old ones on the trip.
“I will probably be friends with everybody before it’s over,” Goone said.
About 97 veterans will attend the June 7 trip to Washington, D.C., which normally turns out to be a moving day, organizers say.
“I call a plethora of the vets after the flight,” said Jody Kopsky, vice president of Honor Flight Chicago. “We have people tell us short of the day they got married and the birth of their children, that it’s the best day of their lives. So it’s a big deal.”