The old, shaky voice came on the line and said, “Da Nang. You said Da Nang. Young lady, who gave you that word?”
“My husband Harold,” I said. “He passed two years ago. The HOA says his flag pole has to come down.”
The line was quiet, and then General Ames said, “Your Harold pulled me and two other men out of a burning transport in Da Nang in 1968. I would not have seen 1969 without him. I have thought about him every single day for fifty-six years.”
I had to hold the counter.
“But you did not call me to talk about the war,” he said. “You called because Harold left you something. Open his footlocker.”
The key from the little box at the base of the pole opened the locker, and under his uniform was the envelope. Inside was his honorable discharge, his commendation, and a page in his own hand that pointed to a law, a federal law, the Freedom to Display the American Flag Act, and under it our states statute protecting a veterans right to fly the flag.
The HOA lawyer asked if I could still understand legal documents. My husband had left me the only one that mattered.
General Ames was ninety-one, and he could not travel, but he dictated a letter to the HOA board, and he had his own grandson, a lawyer, send it alongside the statutes Harold had cited. The HOA could not fine a widow for flying the flag of the country her husband nearly died for. The law said so plainly, and so did a general.
The board voided every dollar of the eighteen thousand in fines. The flag pole stayed.
The neighbor boys still come over to help me raise the flag, every morning at six, the way Harold did for thirty-eight years. And once, General Ames had his family drive him out to Mesa, and he stood at the bottom of that pole in the dawn, straight as he could manage, and he saluted it, for the man who made sure he would grow old.