Deep down, these veterans are always with the flag.
Sixty-two-year-old Tommy Teal, commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 10174 in Gulfport, learned as a child to salute it. In the jungles of Vietnam, he learned what it meant and why it mattered. It has flown from a post on his lawn for 27 years. Someday, it will cover his casket, as it has covered caskets of all those who didn’t make it, all those who never got old.
Clarence Nelson, quartermaster at the VFW post, already has the flag that will drape him in death. It’s been with the 62-year-old for years, ever since the day it flew, one sunrise to sunset, on the mast of the USS America, the cruiser that took him around the world. He smiles as he lays his hand on the wood display case that holds it, folded so you see nothing but a triangle of stars.
“The flag was it,” Nelson says. “That’s what I lived for, to protect the flag.”
The flag is a friend to Teal and Nelson. A companion worth dying for.
One of every five Gulfport residents is a veteran, according to U.S. Census data — almost twice the national average. The town belonged to them in name. John F. Chase, a veteran declared to be the most wounded survivor of the Civil War, founded Veteran City in 1906. He wanted to create a haven for former servicemen to live out their years. According to Lynne Brown of the Gulfport Historical Museum, Chase’s venture failed, and the city became Gulfport by 1910. It wasn’t until after World War II that veterans would discover their city, bringing along memories from years of fighting under the flag.
Many veterans, like Don Phipps, commander at Gulfport’s American Legion Andy Anderson Post 125, can read those years on the flag, as if they were branded somewhere among the stars and stripes.
“I see an emblem that designates to us our colors of our United States of America that I fought under for 21 years,” says the 65-year-old Vietnam vet. “That flag represents everything to me.”
Many veterans also see sacrifice. They see how others went and fought and died. Especially, perhaps, in its bands of red.
“There’s a lot of American blood in that flag,” Nelson says. “There’s a lot of kids that have died. And the parents, grandparents — they’ve lost someone that was really fighting for that flag.”
Rob Hanes, a 34-year-old volunteer at Andy Anderson Post 125, knows there are things about living through war that he can never understand. He never fought in one.
“I don’t have the feelings they have at all toward it. The American flag, yes, it’s our flag and I’m very proud of it,” he says. “But I guess when you go to war and you fight for something it brings a completely different meaning. It’s something I’ll never understand.”
The flag is everywhere inside American Legion Post 125 and VFW Post 10174. This weekend, it will be everywhere else as the nation looks to it, as it does every year, in celebration.
Don Phipps has looked to it every day.
“This is what the flag is — right here,” he says, putting his hand over his heart.
