NAMPA, Idaho — The Warhawk Air Museum will soon begin work on their Global War on Terror expansion. I sat down with Executive Director Carson Spear ahead of the 23rd anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks about his experience in Iraq from 2004-2005.
- The expansion is expected to be ready to receive guests summer of 2025.
- The first part of the expansion is a 22,000 square foot maintenance hangar.
- Many business and community members provided work and donated materials to the museum's expansion. You can do so here.
(Below is the transcript from the broadcast story)
Fresh off of the annual Warbird Roundup, Nampa's Warhawk Air Museum is preparing its newest expansion into a new hangar.
"Work will start gutting, expanding, and retrofitting the new 10,000 square foot global war on terror expansion with a hit time of late summer 2025," says the Warhawk Air Museum's Executive Director Carson Spear.
The expansion educating, honoring, and preserving the United States' conflicts, processing, and stories of the world's largest terrorist attack.
For Spear, the expansion is personal. Spear and I sat down in the Warhawk's first phase of the expansion, a 22,000 square foot maintenance hangar to talk about his time in Iraq.
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"We got enemy contact our first week. Then our second week in the country we were in a non-armored humvee, we welded sheet metal to the doors, Kevlar blankets, sand bags, but a direct hit caused us to flip into a ravine and almost drown," he recalls.
Spear received an ROTC scholarship in August of 2001, just one month before the World Trade Center was attacked on Sept. 11. He was deployed to Iraq three years later.
"I got shrapnel in my neck and face, my gunner got shrapnel in his leg, my driver lost his leg, and our translator got scalped, he was not wearing his Kevlar [helmet]."
A piece of that shrapnel removed from Spear now sits in the museum ready to be moved into the newest phase right next to his Purple Heart. More than 7,000 armed forces lost their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Warhawk is now hoping to help heal and bring joy to all veterans who visit.
