(Marine Corps League Chaplain Truitt gave this talk at Flag Day ceremonies last Friday at the Community Center.)
Across our land today, people are speaking from front steps and bandstands about what the flag symbolizes for them. I am proud to be part of that tradition.
Sixty years ago this month, I was sitting on a small, narrow-gauge railroad car gradually making its way north out of Walmi-do, on the western coast of Korea, up the peninsula toward the war.
Just that morning I had left my transport ship by climbing down a rope net into a landing craft that delivered me to shore. In a sense, I was recreating a scene from a John Wayne movie from World War II. We wore those dark green helmets and ponchos that seem so ancient now, with field packs that look too heavy for one man to carry.
I was a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps — one of those guys about whom it was said that once we got into combat, we had 28 seconds to live. I had managed to get signed up and into officer school before that piece of news reached my mother.
I had spent much of my childhood on a farm near Hobart, Ind. This was a town something like Ridgefield in the sense that serious patriotism bubbled over whenever it had the chance. Old Glory was everywhere. On Memorial Day and on Independence Day, flags flew from porches and on poles for the entire length of Main Street.
But now, back on the train, I was removed from everything familiar. I was headed for an infantry platoon, dug in near the Imjin River.
Also in the train were two groups of Marines headed to other assignments, but I didn’t know them. I looked out at an endless stream of rice paddies being tended by farmers with big hats and big hoes.
Over there was an ox pulling a plow and over here a farm truck grinding along a dirt road that followed the tracks. My reflection in the window showed a guy wearing brown camouflage dungarees. Everything seemed to be brown.
Time dragged along, but the train finally pulled into Munsan-ni, the railhead and the farthest north it could go.
I needed to make the short walk to a Marine Corps supply detachment where I would stay overnight. The next morning, a jeep would take me to the 3rd Battalion of the 7th Marine Regiment, somewhere in the hills still farther north. I made my way along narrow streets through the small town of Munsan-ni.
I passed close to a characteristic brown slab-sided Korean house with its pastel blue front door and its roof fashioned from bundles of grass. Two windows were set at each side of the front door. Showing clearly in one window was — look at that! — an American flag draped from a gold stick, sitting on the window’s ledge.
My flag! Here in Munsan-ni, so removed from my own world, was my own proud flag, standing proudly in its reds, whites and blues. It cleared away my haunting sense of lonesome isolation and jerked me back to being me again — an upbeat young guy from the States there to do a job.
Who was inside and why had they displayed the flag, I wondered? I didn’t stop to ask.
Had I done so, I might have discovered that the family wanted to honor American troops who were fighting for their freedom. Perhaps the daughter had married a Marine and moved to California. Maybe the woman had fallen for Van Johnson or the guy was a Red Sox fan.
I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that the vision of the Stars and Stripes jumped out at me, alive in its bright, familiar colors. It took me back to Hobart, Ind., and to the patriotic values I had learned there. It quickened my step and jolted me with renewed sense of purpose.
Perhaps it wasn’t June 14 — I don’t remember. But it was Flag Day for me, right there on that drab, dusty Korean street where I was on my way to join thousands of other American troops fighting for freedom and for that inspiring banner that we celebrate today.