During the build-up for the Desert Storm attack on Iraq, one of my cousin's sons was a U.S. Marine colonel in charge of building a city in Kuwait to house the Marine forces that made the ground assault. So I began to electronically correspond with him. 

Imagine a good old Missouri son, who loved the green grass of home, suddenly being shown an expanse of wind-blown sand and dust by an admiral and told, "Colonel Mater, build it here."  

So Dan Mater, of Fenton, and a graduate of Eureka High School, obeyed his orders, and despite the dust and sand, oversaw and directed a city to house 65,000 Marines. 

During that period, we wrote about baling hay and whatever came up, and it seemed to help keep him geared up to get a great job done. After the assault, he and some South Korean Marines went to Baghdad, and liberated a castle or two. The result was that I received a very special U.S. flag. When Dan returned home, he presented me some nice pictures of the camp and the castles, along with a beautifully folded U.S. flag, with the dust of Kuwait still visible.  

As long as I am alive, the flag will never see my flag pole, but remain in its place of honor in my home.  

So, happy Flag Day to you! That is my flag-related story. I did bring a Japanese WWII flag back from the Pacific in 1946, but that is a different story.