When I worked for the government as a fire lookout, I would watch the distant dandelions of fireworks on the Fourth of July and toast my father’s birthday. Standing in that dark capsule on a mountain top I’d think of him in Europe with the 94th Infantry and wonder how his experience compared to the episodes of the television show, COMBAT, we watched as children. In the garage a brown uniform hung on a nail pounded into a rafter. We showed it to the neighborhood kids but didn’t have any gory stories to tell. There were photos in his albums of German prisoners being held at gunpoint. My father loved watching James Arness packing a pistol in the western mini-wars of Gunsmoke, but he told my brother who pestered him for GI stories, “War is a horrible thing.”
When my father the veteran died from cancer a lifetime after his return from war, his widow was given a 5 x 9 ½ foot casket flag at his funeral. A casket flag is so large it is not easy to display. But I have toted it to various fire lookouts over the years. It looked especially good at Grandview Lookout where the 80 foot tower made a great flagpole. Each Memorial Day and July 4th, I’d lean out the windows and tie it so it lifted in the breeze. I wondered how it looked to the hundred helicopter tours that flew by to the Grand Canyon. People on jeep tours in the evening would mill around below the lookout and take pictures of the flag above. I’d listen to their exclamations in foreign languages that included German and Japanese.
Back when we were still a family sitting around the supper table together, I held my breath when my older brother with an unlucky draft lottery number speculated aloud about the alternative of a life in Canada. What would my father the veteran say? He said he thought it would be a fine thing “if no one showed up for those politicians’ wars.”
I suppose my older brother, who didn’t go to Canada but enlisted in the Navy, will be due a veteran’s flag one day.
When I wore a uniform as a park ranger at Saguaro National Park, I would open the visitor center in the morning and hang the flag from the pole out front. I felt like a soldier in a fort on the frontier pulling the rope through the pulleys, standing back to watch the stars and stripes unravel and open overhead. At the end of the day I liked inviting a kid to help the Park Ranger fold the flag—just so—in neat crisp triangles the way I was taught in Brownie Scouts. Proud parents would take pictures of us.
These days I don’t display a veteran’s flag to honor war. I honor what Buddhists have taught me about violence within and violence without. I trust how the Quakers know how to remain citizens even when one’s country chooses war. What did my father the veteran teach me about peace? An old friend told me recently he watched a war movie with my dad once. “Your father got upset and said something like, ‘They’re treating it like a goddamn football game!’ I’ll always remember that,” he said.
I’ll remember it, too. And I’ll remember to fold up my father’s 5 x 9 ½ foot flag just so as if the embroidered stars and sewn stripes are the honorable pages of a history book where the dreams of dead soldiers are knit to the peaceful hopes of their children. I knew a man who crossed oceans and marched in mud and returned to his country to go to college and raise kids and not talk about the war. On those holidays when parades march and bands play, I fly my father’s flag to honor his absent hurrah.
