A Flag Day Story

In light of the Trump tantrums with the NFL, here’s an odd flag day story. 

Because it was the ‘Sixties’, and those were the times, I once asked a group of veterans, during a lunch break as we all sat on a river barge we were unloading, how they felt when someone sat or raised a fist for the anthem or burned our nation’s flag in a protest.

That particular summer, I was working in a dock warehouse, loading and unloading building materials from river barges. My uncle gave me the job so I could stay in shape for football.

Every one of the guys who worked in that warehouse was a World War II combat veteran, except one. He was a Korean War survivor. They’d served in the Army or the Marines. They’d gone ashore in the South Pacific, North Africa, and D-Day. They’d survived Attu, Tinian, the Kasserine Pass, Bastogne, and the Chosin Reservoir.

What prompted my question was an earlier conversation I’d had that day with one of them.

“It was hell,” Bob said describing that cold, snowy morning near Bastogne, France when his unit was shelled – almost to oblivion.

Bob Rauls was smoking a cigarette on the loading dock as he stared blank-eyed into the distance. But he was seeing that morning in the woods twenty-five years before.

“Yeah, it was hell,” he repeated.

Shaking himself back to the present, he took another drag on his cigarette, and looked over at me.

“Yeah, kid, bad day that day. And to top it off, I got my second purple heart.” I didn’t ask, but my face said I was open to listening.

“The damn krauts shot me in the ass as I dove over a log for cover during their counter-attack.”

We both laughed.

I was twenty at the time and a teacher-wanna-be. I was trying to get as many eye-witness stories about history as I could from the people who either made it, participated in it, or had a ring-side seat to its passing. The history told by those everyday people, like Bob, who lived it and died it, is a different story than the ones told by those who orchestrated it or, in later years, interpreted it.

They were a treasure-trove of stories and experiences.

And they were hard men. Toughened by death, deprivation, horror. Men for whom the word “team” wasn’t a half-time speech; it meant life or death.

Now they laughed at the little things in life. Tough, swaggering truckers or bulked-up barge workers with thick necks and an attitude – didn’t cause a blink. In fact, they’d look at each other with that combat veteran’s knowing look – that ONLY another combat veteran understands – and do the human equivalent of absently patting a noisy, bothersome dog’s head.

I was the only non-vet in the place, but they took me under their collective wings. They seemed committed to making me successful in the classroom, on the football field, and in life. They’d given up their youth and many of them, their dreams. They were determined that this kid would not.

I looked up from the small notebook I always carried in my pocket, and watched him field-strip the cigarette butt and tuck the paper in his pocket. Old habits.

“Think Ike and Marshall screwed up and overextended you guys in their run for Berlin?” I asked him.

“No, we always thought it was a G-2 fuck-up. Those guys at the top make decisions based on the information they get. But how reliable it is can only be determined by how many of us die executing those decisions.”

“If you guys felt that way, I’m surprised you ever moved out of camp.”

“Somebody had to do it kid. None of us were heroes. We just wanted to get the job done and come home – hopefully alive.”

With that, he stood. “Let’s get back to work. My smoke break’s over.”

No, I guess they wouldn’t see themselves as heroes. But I do. I see them every time I look at our country’s flag – each of them memorialized by the white stars that populate that blue field in the corner.

And here’s what they said that day on the barge after a rather pregnant pause. After they all did that glance that veterans do, Bob turned to this teacher-wanna-be and spoke for all of them:

“Doesn’t our flag represent the FREEDOM TO CHOOSE?”

Heroes indeed.

Food for thought this flag day.

Mac