Joseph Sabino Mistick: Remembering, not belittling, our heroes

In our house there is an American flag, now a tightly folded triangle, that once draped the casket of a Navy veteran who returned from World War II, broken but hopeful, yet not healthy enough to live more than a handful of years once back home. The flag was presented to his widow at his grave.

There are millions of flags just like it in homes across the land. All honorably discharged veterans and those on active duty are entitled to a funeral with military honors, including the sounding of taps and the folding and presentation of those flags to the family, as a symbol of the nation’s appreciation for “honorable and faithful service.”

At home, the flags might be placed in a wooden case and displayed on a bookshelf or tucked away in a drawer, the pain still too fresh for some family members decades later. But if you ask those families what the one material possession is that they would grab in a fire, they are likely to tell you that it’s that flag.

That is why it was a punch to the gut last week when it was reported in The Atlantic that the president and commander in chief called the heroes who are buried in American military cemeteries in France “suckers” and “losers.”

And there was more, including claims that Donald Trump called George H.W. Bush a “loser” for being shot down over the Pacific in WWII and that he asked that amputee veterans not be included in a planned military parade because “nobody wants to see that.”

You can believe what you want about that report, and Trump has denied saying those things, getting really agitated when the parts of the story were confirmed by a Fox News reporter. But he has talked like that before and on the record.

During the 2015 campaign for the Republican nomination for president, Trump belittled Sen. John McCain, who had spent over five years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. The Navy pilot was shot down, captured, tortured and maimed. He returned home with a permanent limp and unable to raise his arms above his head.

But Trump said this about McCain: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

Those comments had little effect on the last presidential race, and none of it may matter for this one. But the actor Tom Hanks recently described the sacrifices that got us where we are today, at the doorstep of free elections, in his New York Times article “We Are Still Living the Legacy of World War II.”

“Boys who had just graduated from high school — the classes of ’41-’44 — died in North Africa, in the mountains of Italy and on the coral reefs at Tarawa. Death-by-telegram came knocking at your neighbor’s door, if not yours.”

We should be thinking about that now. Forget the noise of these crazy times. If you have one of those tightly folded American flags tucked away in a drawer, it is time to get it out. Sometimes we need a reminder of what really counts.