Since last week’s publication of Better Off Without ’Em, reader correspondence has been running about 60-40 against me.
But amid it all, some have been sending along a few interesting items.
Like this link from the Center for a New American Security, which shows U.S. Marines marching through Beirut beneath a Confederate battle flag.
The photo is from 1958, but read the comments below and you’ll find service members revealing that U.S. troops still sometimes fly the Confederate flag, such as “VisitorRon Dickenson” who says he flew one at a combat outpost in Mosul in 2005.
The practice of displaying the Confederate flag by American soldiers isn’t new, and the link above provides me with a rare chance to promote my own book cataloging WWII sites in the Pacific.
Page 80 of that book includes a note about southern troops of the First Marines Division at the Battle of Okinawa in 1945 hoisting the rebel flag above Shuri Castle, in honor of Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., whose father had been a Confederate general.
The slave days flag still occupies a prominent position in front of the South Carolina capitol, of course, just as it does around plenty of other government buildings in the South.
To the chagrin of many, it ain’t going away any time soon.