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My Stepfather’s Flag

  • haybron
  • Jul 4
  • 6 min read

By Ron Haybron. Published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 23, 1997


Ron with his stepfather, Don McLean
Ron with his stepfather, Don McLean

My stepfather’s flag is stored in a box, wrapped in clear plastic, still in the honor guard’s triangular fold as it was when they handed it to my mother. She’s dead now too, and the flag is mine as are all the memories it brings back to me.


He’s buried in an old cemetery in Zanesville, on a hill from which you can see a bend of the Muskingum River if you stand at just the right spot. As befitted his twenty years of honorable service in the U.S. Navy, he was buried with full military honors.


It wasn’t so easy to find a bugler in Zanesville who could blow taps, but the American Legion found a W.W. II vet who stood uneasily in the hot August sun and struggled his way through the somber notes. I can still remember the brassy echoes ringing back from the ranks of gravestones commemorating the fallen of other times and other wars. His marker is a flat brass plaque, standard issue from the Veteran’s Administration, and just what he would have wanted. He was old-time military all the way and wanted everything “shipshape and  Bristol fashion”.


My stepfather joined the Navy in the depression years. An orphanage boy, he had little chance to make a living in any other way. But he was bright and energetic and he found a home in the Navy. Since he was good enough for the best, he spent most of his career in submarines.


When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, they also hit the Philippines where my step-father’s boat (submarines are always “boats” to submariners ) was docked and under repair. He told me that the sub next to them was sunk by a bomb and his boat fled to sea with one diesel engine torn down for rebuilding. They reassembled it on the fly, and for the next few months hopped from one American stronghold to another. “We never knew when we inspected a base through the periscope before going in whether we’d see our flag or the red ball.”


His war continued in the Pacific until May of 1945, when he was transferred and got leave to come home. But before that, he had served on ten patrol runs. These were combat missions. The submarine would load up with torpedoes and food and spent up to three months in enemy waters, seeking out and sinking Japanese ships. My stepfather never talked about his combat experiences until a few months before his death, so I don’t know many details of what he had been through.


After the war, we sometimes lived on Navy bases, in dependent housing and the flag was an integral part of every day. I can remember mornings when my step-dad and I were leaving home just as the base flag was run up its pole. He’d stand ramrod straight in his crisp, creased khakis and salute. I would be beside him with my hand over my heart, and in that brief communion I felt tied in to something powerful and enduring. This man beside me was part of the team whose job it was to go and fight if the country needed it and I was proud to stand beside him.


When he retired and went to live in Zanesville, there were no more base flags to salute in the morning, and he never flew a flag on holidays. Once I asked him why he didn’t display a flag. After all, if anyone in the country had the right, it was him.


The question made him uneasy. He was a man of action, not words, and it was often hard for him to express his feelings. For his generation, it wasn’t that common for a man to even admit he had them.


He told me he didn’t feel comfortable with so many flags flying from porches and standards all around the neighborhood to add one more to the display. To him, the flag was a battle standard, and you just didn’t show off such a powerful and important symbol carelessly. You should go to a special place and stand in a special way to revere the flag. It shouldn’t be too easy, too casual.


So, even though its near the Fourth, a time to show the flag if ever there is a time, I am still reluctant to put one out, because of the memory of my step-father’s words. But I can’t stop thinking about the flag, because of all the talk about amending the constitution to protect it from physical desecration. And I wonder how my stepfather would have reacted to the proposal.


For myself, amending the constitution to protect the flag would be a mistake. If the founding fathers had believed it was proper to protect the flag that way, they would have written it into the constitution.


They were not amateurs at the business of creating a nation. Most of them were well schooled in the history of earlier governments of all kinds, probably more knowledgeable than most of today’s elected officials and thus better qualified to tinker with the fundamental machinery of our government. They were well aware of the existence of, and importance of, symbols such as national flags.


But they did not offer any provisions to protect a flag. So, for advocates of a constitutional amendment who also are concerned with staying close to the intent of the founders, I would suggest reflection on this point.


The second reason that I am against an amendment to protect the flag is that it can never accomplish what advocates want. The Flag we revere is not the scrap of red and white and blue cloth that can be purchased at any hardware store. The Flag we love is what Francis Scott Key saw in the War of 1812. The banner that flew at Gettysburg, that went up the mountain on Iwo Jima. It is the Flag that is proudly draped over our dead warriors.


And that Flag can’t be protected by a law, because it is not a physical thing. It can’t be desecrated when it is burned by a protestor. It is not sullied if a mob in another country disfigures it. These are only angry people, who try to show their disrespect for the U.S.. They can kindle a fire with the cloth, but never with the Flag.


When I asked my step-father about the flag many years ago, he said,” I don’t need to show it...its here.” And he put his hand on his heart. He felt that respect for the flag was shown by serving it, by obeying the law and the constitution, by being willing to fight for the country, by being a good citizen.


To protect the flag, we need to protect the things for which it stands, not the physical object. That object is used in every conceivable way to promote commercial products, sewn on the seats of blue jeans, used as a scarf, waved to sell automobiles. Why is this not desecration, if the burning of a flag by a political protestor is so regarded?


From what I know of the Constitution, it provides protection for both activities. I am just as repelled by the one usage as the other, but I am duty bound to protect the right of these people to do these things, because that is just what the first amendment requires.


The main point of our constitution is to provide protection to the individual against the power of the state and the passions of the mob. But it won’t be worth anything if all it protects is the people who agree with us. The real test is whether it preserves the freedom of those we don’t like, of those who perform repulsive acts, who espouse notions we find utterly repugnant.


My stepfather’s flag will stay in its plastic jacket, to be passed down in the family as a reminder of where our freedoms came from and the sacrifices it sometimes takes to keep them. I don’t intend to wave it. I don’t have to, if I do my duty as a citizen. We honor Old Glory most when we work to preserve the freedoms and rights of those who seem to deserve it least.

 
 
 

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