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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2001-2022
After scanning its face again and again,
I began to scale it, picking my holds
With intense caution. About half-way
To the top, I was suddenly brought to
A dead stop, with arms outspread
Clinging close to the face of the rock
Unable to move hand or foot
Either up or down. My doom
Appeared fixed. I MUST fall.
There would be a moment of
Bewilderment, and then,
A lifeless rumble down the cliff
To the glacier below.
My mind seemed to fill with a
Stifling smoke. This terrible eclipse
Lasted only a moment, when life blazed
Forth again with preternatural clearness.
I seemed suddenly to become possessed
Of a new sense. My trembling muscles
Became firm again, every rift and flaw in
The rock was seen as through a microscope,
My limbs moved with a positiveness and precision
With which I seemed to have
Nothing at all to do.
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of
universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I
reach my hands and play with pebbles of
destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs
reading “Keep Off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive
in the universe.
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Some will find it incredible, but when you watch an old John Ford movie, he makes a point to raise the flag in a lot of his films.
It’s a flag that my immigrant grandparents earned the right to revere through sacrifice, and one that my father fought under in Europe.
I find it incredible that some idiot in a football uniform feels he can use it as a prop for his grievances. What he wants is to make me angry; instead he pushes his cause further away and essentially belittles himself and his organization.
Bravo, Casey, and thank you, Gerard.
After poverty, polio, homelessness, and an endless list of discoveries and disappointments, after art and beauty and pain and fifty years of “feminism,” I’m still coming. All I have left of the father I never met is a few photographs and the 48-star flag that graced his grave in France.
God Bless America.
Thank you Rob for the inspirational paragraph.
God Bless America
Happy 243rd Birthday, U.S. Army. And Happy 72nd Birthday, Mr. President.
And may God continue to bless America.
Yes, what PA CAT said above. The video brought a tear to this old Marine’s eyes.
My favorite rendition of my favorite song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ETrr-XHBjE
My second favorite:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8C7i9kdEf8
From Marc Leepson’s splendid book “Flag: An American Biography.”
The American flag proved to be an unequivocally positive symbol during the Vietnam War to the men held as prisoners of war in Hanoi. The U.S. Navy pilot Michael Christian, who was shot down in North Vietnam and taken prisoner on April 24, 1967, was perhaps the most devoted to the flag. When he was held in the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison camp, Christian fashioned an American flag out a few ragged bits of red and white cloth that he sewed into the inside of his prison-issue blue pajamas with a bamboo needle.
“Every afternoon we would hang Mike’s shirt on the wall of our cell and say the Pledge of Allegiance,” said U.S. Sen. John McCain, a former navy pilot who was held with Christian. “For those men in that stark prison cell, it was indeed the most important and meaningful event of our day.” When the prison guards discovered the flag in 1971, they beat Christian mercilessly, battering his face and breaking his ribs. While recovering from his wounds, Christian secretly made a replacement flag.
A few days after the beating, “Mike approached me, He said ‘Major, they got the flag, but they didn’t get the needle I made it with. If you agree, I’m making another flag,’ ” said Air Force colonel George “Bud” Day, a Medal of Honor recipient held at the Hanoi Hilton from 1967 to 1973. “My answer was, ‘Do it.’ ”
It took Christian “several weeks” to make that second flag, Day said. After he finished it, “there was never a day from that day forward that the Stars and Stripes did not fly in my room, with forty American pilots proudly saluting.”
Al Kroboth, a U.S. Marine Corps A-6 navigator, was shot down July 7, 1972, over South Vietnam. Severely wounded, he was forced to march to the Hanoi Hilton where he was held until March 27, 1973, when the North Vietnamese released him and the other American POWs. When he saw the U.S. Air Force transport plane land in Hanoi to pick up the POWs that day, Kroboth said, he did not feel emotional until he noticed the large American flag painted on the airplane’s tail.
“That flag,” he told the novelist Pat Conroy, a college classmate. “It had the biggest American flag on it I ever saw. To this day, I cry when I think of it. Seeing that flag, I started crying. I couldn’t see the plane; I just saw the flag. All the guys started cheering. But that flag … that flag.”
Oh, that Old Glory made with Stars and Bars and Field of Blue, yes, with blood and tears and fears and with Courage too.
Long may you wave gracing the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, and may we be worthy of You.
The music:
Fanfare for the Common Man by Aaron Copland
Played by the “The Presidents Own®” U.S. Marine Band®
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=32&v=0KxMc_tyQBo
I traded a Marine for a very large American flag some years ago. 9×17. Used to fly on a Navy ship. Wonder if the HOA will let me put up a flag pole large enough to fly it.
1950 my father placed a 12×12 American flag on the wall in front of my crib.
1968 I took that flag to Vietnam as a machine gun team member with the 2nd bn. 9th marine regiment.
June 1969 my unit secured and held a small hill located near the Ho-chi Minh trail rt. 922.
The flag was tied to a broken tree over my teams fighting hole with some com wire. We had a visit by the division commander and his Sgt major with the usual flunky reporters and they took pictures of the piled up bloting NVA dead and got in our way as we policed the battle field.
The Sgt major told us to take down the flag because we didn’t have a South Vietnamese flag to fly along side old glory. We did as we were told being the good snuffies trained to not ask why. Along with the entourage there was a full bird ARVN you readers connect the dots.
09/11/01 I again placed the same flag on my office door resting in a plastic sleeve. I was asked to take it down by a liberal physician who ran the clinic I worked at.
I look at the fading color of this old flag I see blood stains spattered on its stripes. From Sgt Gonzalez’s bleeding all over me and Floyd Fuller as we placed him on a medivac.
I want this flag folded correctly placed inside my suit coat over my heart when they intern me at the national cemetery in Arizona.
FINALLY there will be no voices to say take that flag down.