'Hometown Headliners' Q&A: Whiteside County Honor Flight President Gary Farral

Gary Farral, 70, of Erie, is president of Whiteside County Honor Flight, and served in Vietnam with the U.S. Navy from 1966 to 1970.

After Vietnam, Farral worked in computer science and nursing, and also served in the Army National Guard, Air Force Reserve, and Naval Reserve. He retired from military service in 2002 as a staff sergeant in the National Guard.

When did you get started with Whiteside County Honor Flight?

I was there from the start, in 2009. The two gentlemen who started the idea did not want to have a leadership position. Then-Sheriff Roger Schipper took the lead and made me his assistant.

He and some of the others at the start were mainly concerned with the World War II vets. We got that pretty much accomplished, and we’re starting on Korea and Vietnam. The mantle was dropped to me, and I’ve been the president for all but 1 year.

Talk about your main responsibilities as president.

We still have to gather as many applicants as we can. It’s a trickle now, not like when we started with the World War II vets. We did a lot of fundraising in the beginning, and then the Honor Flight headquarters hooked up with Hy-Vee and had all the money they needed and told us to slow down.

Right now, we don’t publicize enough. Some may not even know we exist. When we have a flight from Whiteside County, the media will come down and take pictures, they put stories in newspapers. That’s the only time they really know we’re active.

Do you do more than just flights?

We’ve had an annual picnic in Morrison for 5 years with all of these people who’ve been on a flight. We’ve had people come and ask the vets about their experience. Sometimes the families come with them.

What’s the biggest accommodation you’ve had to make for a participant?

This gentleman I was on a flight with ... was a large man, wheelchair-bound. The lady who came with him as a nurse tried to do his blood glucose before they fed him, and wasn’t getting anything. She had forgotten that, in a pressurized cabin, you’re not going to get much blood out. So I had to do some things, as a nurse, to get enough blood so that we could test him.

How many administrative duties are there for a guardian on an Honor Flight?

There are X number of people you have to watch. Sometimes it’s one-to-one, sometimes it’s three-to-one, it depends on how mobile they are. You have to be first out of the bus, get the wheelchairs out, get the people in their wheelchairs, pick up the people you’re supposed to be escorting, get them around, get them back on the bus, get them fed and watered, put the wheelchairs away – and that’s at every stop.

What do you hope the veterans get out the whole experience?

To feel that they have been honored, respected, and acknowledged for what they have done, be it peace time or war time.

What was it like for you to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall?

The first time I saw The Wall, it was back when I interviewed for a job. We made a special stop, and I just stood there silently reading the names, board to board to board. We lost two people for certain in that era, and there was a third one that wasn’t declared dead until many years later.

I wondered about the families, and how they dealt with it. I thought about me being over there. I had gone through Counterinsurgency, Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape school, and I wrote to my folks and said, “Don’t ever assume if you get a message that I’m missing in action that I’m dead, because I will fight to the death.”