TRAER - Leonard Vorba flew on 35 missions in World War II.

He flew on one more Tuesday.

Vorba found himself on an eastbound flight from the Midwest to the East Coast - just as he was 65 years ago this week.

Back then, he and his buddies flew a brand new U.S. Army Air Force Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber to Europe, and to war.

Tuesday, he didn't fly quite as far - just to Washington D.C. His payload wasn't bombs, but something that lay much deeper in his heart and in the hearts of some 300 other men who made the trip.

It was the weight of friends and comrades in arms who never returned from the most devastating war in history.

Vorba, a retired Traer farmer who turned 90 this past week, was one of the veterans given a free flight to the national World War II memorial in Washington, D.C.

It is part of a national program called Honor Flight, started several years ago to provide free trips for aging World War II to the national memorial which opened only a few years ago.

Tuesday's flight out of the Des Moines International Airport was funded in major part by $250,000 from Hy-Vee and several other businesses. Attendees were provided food, accommodations and every other need free of charge. About 50 individuals served as "captains" to assist veterans with mobility and other health issues.

Vorba and his wife, Lois, recounted how the Honor Flight honorees, once registered, were conveyed by police escort down flag-lined streets past cheering Des Moines residents to an evening program of patriotic music at Hy-Vee Hall.

"People were lined up clapping and waving and shouting. It made you feel very important," Lois said.

With the flight limited to veterans, Lois waited in Des Moines while her husband made the one-day trip.

When the Iowa veterans arrived in Washington, they were greeted at the memorial by former U.S. Sen. Robert Dole and his wife, former U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole.

Robert Dole, the 1996 Republican presidential nominee, who was severely wounded in Italy during the war, helped raise $191 million for the memorial as its national chairman. It was dedicated in 2004.

Vorba, who had visited the memorial site prior to its construction, said the memorial seemed much larger to him in person than he had conceived.

It was especially moving to visit the memorial with so many other veterans - all of whom had the memories of deceased comrades on their minds.

"Oh boy, yeah, kinda got choked up," he said. "It brought back my own memory. There were two fellas who were on my crew. This was about two weeks before the end of the war in Europe. Part of us were done and the two fellas were behind in their missions," not yet having completed the required number of missions to have been rotated out of combat.

"They were shot down over northern Italy," Vorba said. "They were married and had youngsters that they never saw."

Vorba earned eight battle stars during WWII. He served as a radio operator and top turret gunner on his B-24 crew, in the 485th Bomb Group of the U.S. 15th Air Force, which operated in southern Europe, the "underbelly" of Nazi German leader Adolf Hitler's "Fortress Europa."

Vorba and his crew mates bombed munitions plants and transportation installations in southern France, Rome, the Balkans, the Rhineland, the North Apennines, northern France, the Po Valley and central Europe.

On many missions they were protected by tight escorts of red-tailed North American P-51 Mustang fighter planes flown by the all-African-American 332nd Fighter Group - the Tuskegee Airmen - to whom Vorba is forever grateful.

German air power in southern Europe had been largely broken by the time Vorba and his comrades arrived in late 1944. He recalls seeing only one enemy German Messerschmidt fighter plane.

"I was just along for the ride," he said But they still were often subject to heave "flak," anti-aircraft fire from German ground batteries.

He recalled a close call. A piece of shrapnel pierced the cockpit windshield, creating a "hole as big as your fingernail" and striking his pilot in the flak helmet, stunning him. The co-pilot, who had just been relieved from duty, scurried to take the controls until the pilot could be revived.

Vorba still wonders to this day about one turn of fate he experienced while still stateside, when he and a number of others were pulled out of airplane radio operators' school and subjected to a physical.

The scuttlebutt was that the Army was looking for additional men for the invasion of Normandy, to be later known as D-Day.

Vorba was misdiagnosed with a hernia and sent back to radio school. Had it not been for that one doctor's diagnosis, Vorba said he could have been saddled with "70 pounds of gear" and sent to the infantry to fight and perhaps die on the invasion beaches.

Vorba is saddened that humankind stills resorts to war to resolve differences, but he takes satisfaction at having helped preserve freedom. He marvels at his good fortune at having survived World War II.

"Four hundred thousand of us were not nearly so lucky," he said, referring to the U.S. military war dead.

For Vorba and other veterans, the Honor Flight is as much for their fallen comrades as for them.