Recently I’ve seen a couple interesting letters to the editor in the Northwest Florida Daily News, our sister paper down in Fort Walton. Both writers, one from Laurel Hill, yesterday’s from a man in Mary Esther, espoused their right to fly the Confederate battle flag as an homage to their ancestors who fought in the C.S.A. Both offered passionate defenses for their display of the banner.

Their letters helped me with a comparable dilemma. I too, wish to show fealty to my nation yet celebrate the honor and bravery of fighting ancestors. My dad, you see, served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II on Johnston Island, a Pacific atoll, where he was a radio operator in command of the island’s station. Johnston was a fueling stop between Hawaii and battlefronts to the west. One of the missions Dad guided through his zone was the first atomic bomb group. Dad entered the war in late 1944.

Simultaneously, my Onkel Friederich served in the Wehrmacht defending his German homeland against conquering Allies. He, too, entered the war late, and was stationed in the imposing Ehrenbreitstein fortress overlooking the confluence of the Rhein and Mosel rivers and the city of Koblenz, where my relatives still live today.

Just as the letter writers’ Confederate ancestors weren’t slaveholders, Onkel Friederich had nothing to do with the establishment and operation of concentration camps. Like Dad, he was just doing his duty when his nation called. Employing the logic and words of one of the letter writers, having “earned the right to display both flags,” I can proudly fly both my beloved Stars-n-Stripes and, if I had one, the swastika banner of the Third Reich.

Just as those who fly the Stars-n-Bars don’t mind that the Confederate battle flag is symbolic to their black neighbors of a sorrowful period in our nation’s history, I can in equally righteous indignation overlook that the Nazi banner is offensive to my Jewish, homosexual, Catholic and, if I have any, gypsy neighbors. As both writers observed, it’s “my heritage,” and that, apparently, trumps the feelings of others.

But I don’t choose to purchase or display a Third Reich flag. Instead I will continue to fly Old Glory, just as my family faithfully has done long before it became fashionable under our current régime to use the flag to determine who’s more patriotic than thou by how ostentatious one’s display of our flag is. It’s the one flag that encompasses all Americans, no matter their race, color, creed, sexual orientation, politics, or any of the silly hyphenates that only serve to further divide rather than unite us.

No, I’ll let the swastika flags stay in museums where they belong. There they may serve to educate and enlighten rather than to provoke and divide. I can still honor the bravery of Dad, Onkel Friederich and their gallant comrades in my heart even as I lament the foolishness of wars that divide families–and similar peoples–into opposing camps.

After nearly a century and a half, perhaps the Confederate battle flag finally deserves similar disposition.

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