On The Flag

One fine summer day I was driving down the highway with the windows down and Waylon Jennings turned up when I saw a big, black, truck barreling toward me in the oncoming lane. Now I was born in the Deep South. I’m not a truck hater. Hell I’ve driven a pickup truck most of my life. Even the shiny new, $200k, full custom, jacked up rigs that are popular for some reason here in Southeast Massachusetts kind of blend in to the background, but this one was different. This one caught my eye. Bolted onto the trailer hitch in the back was a custom made flag pole and flapping violently in the wake of the truck was the red and white stripes and star covered blue field of the American Flag. And I immediately thought, “Welp, there goes a motherfucker who would shoot me dead.” There was no conscious thought. No consideration. No internal debate. I looked up. I saw the flag of the United States flying from the tailgate and I immediately thought, DANGER! ENEMY!

Maybe I was heading to the Walmart that day. There’s a car that’s always parked there, always in the front row. It’s a sagging and rusty old black SUV. Something off brand. Like a Mitsubishi copy of a Ford Explorer from the 90s. In the back window are a pair of stickers. One says “1776.” The other is just the roman numeral III with a percent sign, the logo of the Three Percenter Anti-Government militia. I assume the car belongs to an employee. I’ve never seen it’s owner, though I once saw a tall, thin, stringy haired blond woman in a different grocery store nearby wearing III% merch. Either way I see “1776” on a vehicle and it’s like hearing a rattle snake buzz in tall grass. I’m not scared. I don’t panic. I just think “DANGER” and I move real slow and carefully keeping my eye out.

I was at a concert in Boston, Turnpike Troubadours and Cody Jinks. An old boy sat down in front of me wearing a green t-shirt with Infantry cross rifles on the shoulder. On his right arm he had a sleeve tattoo, good work, black and gray realism of Chinook helicopters flying off into the sunset. I couldn't help but make note to avoid him when we left and make sure I didn’t accidentally bump his seat when I got up to get a beer. I have the same reaction when I see “We The People” in the back window of some officers Audi in the VA parking lot. I have the same reaction when I see a thin blue line sticker, or a morale patch on a camo ball cap, or a unit crest, or blue lights on a porch, or any black flag I can’t read from a distance. I pass “Don’t Tread on Me” and “An Appeal to Heaven” flags here in New England and I have to wonder “are they really into colonial history or do they want to murder my friends?”

I wish I knew when the switch flipped in my head. I wish I could point to the moment when these symbols of our nation started making me nervous. Maybe it started in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. Maybe it was when I worked in the jail and started having to interact with Hammerskins and Aryan Brotherhood thugs. Maybe it was when I moved to patrol and I had my first encounter with sovereign citizens. Or when I moved to Texas and had my first run in with armed separatists, or street level Peckerwood Goons, or 1% Outlaw Biker trash. Maybe it was having to deal with the rage of an otherwise “normal” white citizen with an NRA sticker in the back window and “Don’t Tread on Me” plates when I caught them running a stop sign. Maybe it was hearing “friends” defend the Bundy Ranch standoff even after some cops in Vegas got killed. Maybe it was finding an Infowars Magazine in the private, employees only, waiting area of a Texas DAs office.

Maybe it was in the aftermath of Ferguson and Trayvon Martin. Maybe it was Mahler. Maybe it was Berkley. Maybe it was Charlottesville. Maybe it was Portland. Maybe it was the armed goons who came to New Orleans to “defend” the confederate memorials. Maybe it was the friends I watched slowly get radicalized until a Field Training Officer tried to recruit me into a three percent militia and a sergeant I thought of as a mentor told me he thought Barrack Obama would appoint himself dictator. Maybe it was a gun shop in town hanging up Oath Keepers banners. Maybe it was watching Army Colonels go on anti-government rants and sharing racist memes on Facebook. One day I woke up and I was afraid of my countries flag. I was afraid of mentions of the constitution. Patriotism made me nervous.

That isn’t me. I grew up in a conservative family in the deep south. On one side of my family was a history of military service. On the other was the Southern Baptist Church. I was very literally raised on Jesus and John Wayne. I believed that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and could never tell a lie. I believed that Thomas Jefferson thought all men were created equal. I believed in American Exceptionalism, that we saved the world in World Wars One and Two. That we fought a flawed, but necessary battle against communism in Korea and Vietnam. I believed that the United States was a shining beacon, a city on the hill, something people aspired too. I believed in long since worn out cliches like truth, justice, and the American way. I believed you never let a flag touch the ground and you always take it indoors in inclement weather. I believed you cover your heart and watch the colors as they pass. Sure, I joined the Army for adventure, but deep down I also joined because I thought I was defending something precious, something important, something represented by the flag.

But I’m no moron. I’ve traveled the world. I learned. I know now that same flag flew over the 3/5ths compromise, slavery, and Jim Crow. I know that flag, our flag, flew at the head of columns of federal Cavalry that slaughtered and imprisoned indigenous men, women, and children. It flew over the columns that raided deep into Mexico. It flew over the formations that did dirty work for fruit companies in Nicaragua. It flew over the invasion of Cuba and the oppressive “counter insurgency” of the Philippines. It flew over My Lai and dozens, hundreds, thousands of other massacres. That flag, our flag flew over the concentration camps we herded Japanese into in the winter of 1942. Bull Connor’s goons wore it on their right shoulder when they turned the dogs and the fire hoses loose in Alabama. The border guards who forced thousands of Spanish speaking citizens into Mexico at gunpoint during Operation Wetback wore the flag on their shoulder too. I know to some folks that flag and the country it represents are not positive and I understand.

But it also flew over 20th Maine in Gettysburg when a regiment of immigrants fought Confederate slavers to save the Union and end the institution of slavery. It flew over the invasion beaches of North Africa, Sicily, Anzio, and Normandy as we crushed German fascism. It flew over Guadalcanal, Mindanao, and Mount Suribachi as we defeated brutal Japanese imperialism. It flew over the 101st Airborne Division and Federal Marshals as they forced integration at bayonet point. It flew over the FBI as they crushed the second Klan. For every horrible historic wrong that flag represents there’s a historic right, or at least an attempt at a historic right, that it also represents. The former slaves of the 10th Cavalry recognized this. As did the Harlem Hellfighters of the 369th Infantry who fought valiantly in France for a Nation that treated them with contempt. So did the Tuskegee Airmen who protected white pilots that wouldn’t drink from the same water fountain or swim in the pool with them and the men of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team who fought Nazis in Italy while their families were imprisoned at home.

To me and millions of others, native born, immigrant, or just ally, the flag of the United States of America represents an ideal. One that we have never and may never achieve but one we have worked toward in fits and starts since this nation was first conceived. That’s why I joined the Army. That’s why that flag, our flag, the American flag was on my right shoulder when they cut my uniform off of me as I lay bleeding to death in the cold desert of Uzbekistan. That’s why, even after all that, I put on a uniform again. That’s why I wore our flag pinned above my name tag when I was working 12 hour shifts for weeks straight during Hurricane Gustav. That’s why I had that flag, our flag, velcroed to my body armor the night we ran into a burning apartment building to evacuate people. Because I wanted to try to live up to an ideal, to do something good and decent. Because I believed in those things and that flag even if I, and our country, never managed to live up to them

Yet somewhere along the way something changed. Maybe I finally sensed something others had known for a long time. I was already burnt out by toxic and phony, “thank you for your service" culture and maybe that's where it started. In the days of yellow ribbons and American flag cakes and "You're either with us or against us" rhetoric from folks with no skin in the game. When they paint the flag on cars and use red, white, and blue for corporate logos, when the flag becomes marketing for mediocre country singers, it loses a little something. Maybe I got tired of the politicians wearing it on their lapels and then voting against the freedoms I'd been taught it stood for. It didn't help that I could turn on the news and see people calling themselves “Patriots” waving around guns and threatening to destroy the country in defense of some vague interpretation of the constitution. Maybe it was realizing that those “patriots” cared far more for the guns than the constitution they were waving around. One day I wore the American flag on my sleeve. Then I wore a smaller one on my chest. Then I wore a patch on my body armor, close to my heart but hidden away. Then, one day, I stopped wearing it at all. Then I was driving down the highway on a warm summers day with the window down and country music on the stereo and a truck drove by flying the American flag and I realized I was scared of the sight.

For a long time that realization made me very sad. Then yesterday I got mad.

Yesterday, I realized I'd surrendered something that was important to me and I got pissed the fuck off. I got mad as hell, and I’m still fucking furious today. I’m mad at Donald Rumsfeld and Pete fucking Hesgeth. I’m mad at Timothy McVeigh, Ammon Bundy, Stewart Rhodes, and Joey Biggs. I’m mad at Michael Savage, Alex Jones, and Joe Rogan. I’m pissed off at every half assed fucking Southern Baptist deacon and “would’ve served but” small town car dealer. I’m mad at Navy SEAL podcasters monetizing their service and POG dipshits too ashamed to admit they spent the war filing memos at Bagram. I’m livid at a hundred thousand American gun owners who talk mad shit online but somehow managed to sit out our nations longest war. I’m pissed at the fucking middle class, normie, dipshits who ignored every bloody second from September 2001 until the fall of Afghanistan. I’m angry as fuck at the assholes who make money selling Basic Training t-shirts with Infantry cross rifles on the sleeves to motherfuckers who don’t even know what a nine line is.

I’m fucking furious at Donald J. Motherfucking Trump. I’m livid at his idiot fucking kids and his soft handed “friends.” I’m angry at his billionaire buddies. I’m mad at all of them because they stole something more precious than they could ever fucking imagine.

My Great Uncle Lawrence fought from Normandy to Berlin and then again from Pusan to Seoul and was buried under that flag. My Pawpaw served under it as a Marine and wore it everyday as a postal carrier. Both were buried under that flag. Chuck and Ray wore it in Iraq and Afghanistan. Steve wore it in the cold north Atlantic and New York Harbor while dust and smoke still lingered from the World Trade Center. Chris wore it in Fallujah and every day since in service to this country. My dad wore that flag on his right shoulder when he left for Desert Storm in 91, and I wore it less than a decade later when I left for Operation Enduring Freedom and two years later my brother wore it as he marched into Tikrit as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. We were ALL standing there, at attention when the Louisiana National Guard fired a 21 gun salute and the bugler played “Taps” and an officer turned to my mother and handed her the folded flag that still sits on my mantle and said the most God awful words you will ever here: “On behalf of the President of the United States and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your loved one’s honorable and faithful service.”

And these craven motherfuckers shit on all of that.

They took this fucking symbol from me. They stole it from us. They wiped their collective asses with it. Then they made us fucking fear it. And I’m done. It’s my flag. I fucking bled for it. And it ain’t pretty and it ain’t perfect, and the country it represents was never as glorious as I was taught but it has never been as craven and evil as some would have you believe...at least it wasn't. Our flag may represent oppression to some but it doesn’t have to. It’s brought comfort before. It can bring comfort again. Some smart folks I know are talking about it as symbol, something to rally behind, and they’re right. Waving the flag is a sound strategy, but tonight I’m beyond all that. I’m past strategy, or propaganda, or symbolism. I’m tired of being bitter and scared and I’m fucking furious at the people who made me this way. I’m mad at myself that I allowed them to steal a symbol from me, something I cared about, something me and mine fucking bled for and I’m beyond fucking livid that they took it and tarnished it.

So I’m gonna take the motherfucker back. I’m gonna buy a flag and fly it from my front porch. I’m gonna put a flag shaped sticker on my truck. I’m gonna wear it out in public. I’m gonna wave it at protests. Because fuck them. It’s mine. My comrades and I and hundreds of thousands of good people earned it in blood and when I wear it, when WE wear it, we can make it mean something.