This was in the Rapid City Journal today. I want to add my thanks to all you vets. I shudder to think where we would be without your sacrifices.
Flag more than a piece of cloth
By Elmer Humphry, a U.S. Navy veteran who writes from Piedmont.
PIEDMONT -- Veterans Day is in the air once again with the appropriate recognition of deeds accomplished long ago along with tears and cheers flowing as flags of fluttering stripes and starry fields float by. It's usually heartfelt and soul-enriching, but occasionally something crawls out from under the rug to proclaim that the flag is just a piece of cloth and can be used to blow your nose on or wipe your feet. You've heard some of that from time to time and a few choice words of rebuttal come to mind, but we won't even go there.
There will be stories told and retold by some old geezers, and we all know a few of each. But there is one story that comes to mind that lies in the mist of times past.
It is not a war story but rather it is a story of war.
On May 11, 1945, at 10:45 in the morning, the aircraft carrier USS Bunker Hill, operating in the South China Sea, suddenly and without warning, was struck a devastating blow by two Japanese Kamikaze suicide bombers.
One diving plane exploded into 40 armed and fueled fighters and bombers on the aft flight deck. The other penetrated the flight deck amidships into the hangar deck with cataclysmic results. In a half a heart beat there were 1,500 casualties, half the crew of 3,000, and the dead numbered 400 plus. The attackers had been concealed by a heavy cloud cover that radar of that time could not penetrate. The ship and crew had had an impossible eight seconds to react.
Hours later, the injured ship and battered crew turned toward a far-away home, but there was work to be done and the dead to be reckoned with. Weighted canvas bags and burial at sea - the only choice in the cruel and relentless heat of the tropics, hundreds of miles from friendly soil.
In the battered crew compartments below deck, sailors, exhausted and hollow-eyed, sat on the edges of their bunks and listened, unbelieving, to the metallic rumble of the ammunition hoists that lifted the heavy, five-inch shells from the lockers deep in the belly of the ship to the waiting burial party on deck. Every 60 seconds. Once every minute. Once every minute, for nearly seven hours, the elevator rumbled its deathly count. Then there was silence.
On the hangar deck, flags draped over canvas bags laid on precisely placed planks. One 52-pound shell in the foot of each bag, a blue field of stars over each heart.
On command, the planks were tilted and their precious cargo slid almost silently into the waiting sea below. No drumbeat of hooves pulling a military caisson. Only the swirling swish of the bow wave. No rolling lawns of tailored greens and precision rows of white markers. Just the ocean, endless and trackless.
In some ways, theirs is a contrast and yet a parallel to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier whose specific place is marked but name unknown. Here, their names, once known but with no markers, are fading into oblivion. Their place on earth marked only by the thousands of corroding and rusting five-inch shells scattered randomly in the darkened depths of the boundless sea bottom of the Western Pacific. No visitors or loved ones to pay homage. Just an occasional passing creature of the deep.
Their covering banner of spangled stars was their final shroud. Their journey out from beneath the precious fabric and into the sea, their last touch, their final and only bond to home.
So you see, our flag is not just a flag, but the symbol of a person in body and in spirit. There is no way to tell me, or my old shipmates, the flag is just a piece of cloth.
November 11, 2006