Mike's Flag
Condensed from a speech by Leo K Thorsness,
recipient of the Medal of Honor.
You've probably seen the bumper sticker somewhere along the road. It depicts
an American Flag, accompanied by the words "These colors don't run." I'm
always glad to see this, because it reminds me of an incident from my
confinement in North Vietnam at the Hao Lo POW Camp, or the "Hanoi Hilton," as
it became known.
Then a Major in the U.S. Air Force, I had been captured and imprisoned from
1967-1973. Our treatment had been frequently brutal. After three years,
however, the beatings and torture became less frequent. During the last year,
we were allowed outside most days for a couple of minutes to bathe. We
showered by drawing water from a concrete tank with a homemade bucket. One
day as we all stood by the tank, stripped of our clothes, a young Naval pilot
named Mike Christian found the remnants of a handkerchief in a gutter that ran
under the prison wall.
Mike managed to sneak the grimy rag into our cell and began fashioning it into
a flag. Over time we all loaned him a little soap, and he spent days cleaning
the material. We helped by scrounging and stealing bits and pieces of
anything he could use. At night, under his mosquito net, Mike worked on the
flag. He made red and blue from ground-up roof tiles and tiny amounts of ink
and painted the colors onto the cloth with watery rice glue. Using thread
from his own blanket and a homemade bamboo needle, he sewed on stars.
Early in the morning a few days later, when the guards were not alert, he
whispered loudly from the back of our cell, "Hey gang, look here." He proudly
held up this tattered piece of cloth, waving it as if in a breeze. If you
used your imagination, you could tell it was supposed to be an American flag.
When he raised that smudgy fabric, we automatically stood straight and
saluted, our chests puffing out, and more than a few eyes had tears.
About once a week the guards would strip us, run us outside and go through our
clothing. During one of those shakedowns, they found Mike's flag. We all
knew what would happen. That night they came for him. Night interrogations
were always the worst. They opened the cell door and pulled Mike out. We
could hear the beginning of the torture before they even had him in the
torture cell. They beat him most of the night. About daylight they pushed
what was left of him back through the cell door. He was badly broken; even
his voice was gone.
Within two weeks, despite the danger, Mike scrounged another piece of cloth
and began another flag. The Stars and Stripes, our national symbol, was worth
the sacrifice to him. Now, whenever I see the flag, I think of Mike and the
morning he first waved that tattered emblem of a nation. It was then,
thousands of miles from home in a lonely prison cell, that he showed us what
it is to be truly free.