In here, you might say every day is the Fourth of July.
Red, white and blue are everywhere inside Gulfport’s American Legion Andy Anderson Post 125. Veterans and guests share drinks at the bar under strings of tricolored lights. A little flag flickers by a small fan in a glass display case mounted on the wall. A big flag greets visitors next to the signup table.
“We’re always saluting. You’d be surprised how many guys come in that back door and salute the flag,” says Wilbur Ibaugh, a veteran of World War II. “Soon as they come in, before they even say hi, they salute.”
Ibaugh was in Pearl Harbor the day it became legend. He lost three sons to other wars. Now he’s 86, and sits among friends beneath a string of tiny foil flags shaped like hearts.
On June 22, the House of Representatives approved a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would outlaw desecration of the American flag. It is not the first time the House has passed the measure, but with post-9/11 patriotism still strong, it may be the first time the proposal goes through the Senate, which could vote on it within a month.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that flag desecration is protected as freedom of speech.
“I think this amendment should have been passed years ago,” says post Cmdr. Don Phipps.
Phipps, 65, fought in the Tet Offensive during Vietnam in 1968, a battle many say marked the beginning of the end for America’s war effort there. When he came home to the United States, it wasn’t to the grateful flag-waving he remembers seeing as a 5-year-old when his father’s generation came home from WWII. When soldiers returned from Vietnam, people spit on them. Protesters took to the streets. Flags were burned.
Phipps has never witnessed a flag burning. But if he did, he says, he would not stand by and watch.
“I think I would be very violent,” he says. “And I would probably be the one to go to jail for it, and the bad guy would get away.”
Clarence Nelson served under the flag for 22 years. He loves it and everything it stands for. Nelson, 62, is quartermaster at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 10174 — the one on the north end of Gulfport, the one some at the American Legion post call the “black” VFW. He knows the country is not perfect, particularly when it deals with race. But he loves it anyway.
When Nelson looks at the flag, he sees freedom, he says. When he watches it burn on the TV news, he sees ignorance.
“It upsets me because that’s what I fought for,” he says.
Two stars cling to an old ribbon on Nelson’s VFW uniform; a smudge marks the spot where a third star once sat before it fell off. Together they represent the four tours of duty he served in Vietnam. Unlike his ribbons, unlike him, flags don’t get old. They are burned according to strict protocol at the end of their service, when they are too tattered to fly, far from any protests, in a dignified ceremony of retirement.
“They think it’s nothing but a piece of rag,” Nelson says of people who burn the flag for political dissent. “They don’t really understand what they’re doing when they burn that flag. But they know it upsets people, and that’s why they do it.”
Degrading the flag is tantamount to degrading the country for many of these veterans. Robert Hanes, who helps out at the post, is not one of them. His grandfather served in Korea, but a missing kidney kept Hanes from ever serving himself.
Hanes, 34, also sees freedom in the flag. Including the freedom to burn it. He would never want to do that himself, he says — unless there was no other way to make a point.
“If I believe strongly enough, and I couldn’t get my representatives to listen to me, I might end up doing it,” he says. “We have those rights as American citizens.”
Hanes grew up in Washington, D.C., around hundreds of American flags. He says he is proud of what the flag represents, but doesn’t grant it the same symbolic significance as do many of his elders.
“I would believe it’s inside of us, how we feel, and it doesn’t really have to be portrayed on an object,” he says.
But many veterans see a disturbing change in how Americans treat the flag. Just look at the crowds in parades, they say.
“When you are watching a parade go by, you stand up and salute it,” says Shirley Minick, 68, sergeant at arms at Andy Anderson Post 125. “You don’t sit on your buns and say, ‘Oh yeah, there’s the flag, umm hmm.’ And that happens quite often.”
Yet some are beginning to see a return to reverence for the flag. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, may be again uniting Americans under a patriotic banner.
“[The attacks] charged them up … pulled them back as a team, like they should’ve been 10, 15 years ago,” Nelson says. “It charged them up and made them say, ‘Hey look, they can’t do this to us.'”
Two American flags fly above the Capitol dome in Washington, D.C., not far from where the Pentagon was attacked on Sept. 11, and where the right to burn the flag will again be debated. The flags are lit up at night, as all commercial flags must be, not by rockets’ red glare, but just to make sure they are never in the dark — no matter what people decide to see in them.
Back at the VFW in Gulfport, Nelson points to a flag folded on a table.
“There’s a lot of American blood in that flag,” he says. “You look at this flag right here, you see the stars, and you see the blue, and it’s a piece of cloth. But when I see it, I sorta get goose pimples, my eyes sorta get watery, you know. It’s something that … it’s sacred, you know?”
