RUSH: Here’s Rob in Champaign, Illinois. Glad you waited. You’re up first. Glad to have you on the program, sir.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. I appreciate the chance to speak about Honor Flights. I had the chance to serve as a guardian in an Honor Flight from Illinois to the World War II memorial in 2011 and again in 2012. We were counseled before the flight that the World War II veterans never really spoke about what they had experienced. And so we were told to expect some camaraderie, happiness, and tears as well. The sad thing is that in the last Honor Flight, 2012, both the man to my left and the man to my right have died. There would be no more opportunity for those guys. One of the guys that I was with had served with the group that liberated the Dachau Concentration Camp. He told a story that he said he had never repeated, and that was the look, the feel, the smell of Dachau on the 20th of April, 1945. He said that he could walk through a park back home and catch a smell that would transport him back 65 years to that horror. So his Honor Flight was a way to come to terms with something that had haunted him his whole life.

RUSH: You know, the World War II memorial is an interesting thing. It was the last of the memorials to go up.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: Now, one of the reasons for that — and, you know, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was prominent. One of the reasons for the Vietnam vet memorial was this country did not honor those people at the time. The World War II vets were heroes. They were honored. And please don’t misunderstand me here. The returning Vietnam vets were spat upon, and no thanks to people like Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden. Hell, people from the sixties left traveled in the Clintons’ orb at that time. But the World War II vets, they had books written about ’em, Greatest Generation, movies made about them, about their achievements, and yet they had not had a memorial. They had seen other memorials go up.

So finally there was a memorial to the World War II vets. And the reason it became important to ’em is simply the passage of time and the changing curriculum in history. They became aware at the end of their lives how few young people really knew what they’d done, the stakes that were faced. It just, like so much of the history curriculum, had been — in this case, not bastardized, they just took the occasion, the multiculturalists took the occasion of taking out whatever there was about World War II and supplementing, replacing some other cockamamie anti-western civ course or curriculum for it. It wasn’t that World War II was bastardized and taught as a bad thing. Not that. It was just that it was ignored.

The great achievements that occurred, the passage of time was, in their minds, forgotten. So that’s why their memorial was important to ’em. And, of course, the memorial had been erected in their honor, and a lot of these World War II vets came back. They were not rich. They were not wealthy, many were wounded, and it was the last thing they wanted to do in their lives is to go see this memorial that was built in their honor. And this recent group was told “no” by the current administration and the media trying to dump that off on the Republicans who tried to get the barricades removed.