DEL.ICIO.USA flag’s travels, a vet’s memories
Decades after return from WWII, soldier sent his flag on trips around the world
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Clarence Chamblee is in Europe. It is spring 1945, and the war in that part of the world is coming to an end. Because he’s 26, Chamblee thinks he’s capable of just about anything. The least of these is making it home alive.
He takes it all in, this enlisted man from Alpharetta. He sees columns of soldiers on the roads, tattered woodlands and charred vehicles. The remains of the Third Reich, whipped now, emerge from the woods, their hands held high in surrender.
Hyosub Shin/hshin@ajc.com
World War II veteran Clarence Chamblee celebrates his 90th birthday with his daughter Jeana Johnson (left) and two employees at the Wesley Woods Senior Center, unit manager Voneeka Stubbs and coordinator Evelyn Davis.
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And he sees flags, American flags, thank God for that.
“That was the way it ended,” he says.
Then he is back in the present, and he takes it all in, this retiree from the U.S. Postal Service.
He is at Wesley Woods Senior Center. It Thursday, and it’s his birthday — his 90th. He is in a wheelchair. His niece has affixed cufflinks to his dress shirt. One has come loose, but what the hell: Life is too short to fret about that.
And he sees a flag, his flag, just within reach. Chamblee smiles. That flag, like its owner, has done some traveling.
In the early 1970s he went to the Sears, Roebuck store nearest his Norcross home. He bought an American flag. It was the best they had, a cotton-Dacron banner advertised to last a long time. He thinks it cost $10.
He began mailing the flag to different post offices around the country. He usually slipped in a few bucks for shipping, along with a note: Could you please fly this flag from your location? And take a photograph? Postmasters from Key West, Fla., to Barrow, Alaska, were happy to oblige an old vet. The photos piled up, so Chamblee bought an album for them. Letters also came, bearing U.S. postmarks from as far away as Hawaii.
The flag also visited national monuments — the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kitty Hawk, N.C., where it rippled in winds like that those that once lifted a machine off the earth; at the U.S.-Mexican border in El Paso, Texas, where unsmiling guards wearing extremely dark sunglasses took a photo of themselves folding the flag for its trip home; and at the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, where the flag waved over the steel-hull grave of sailors.
And still the flag traveled — to cemeteries in Luxembourg and France, where dead soldiers are laid in long rows; and to U.S. embassies in Egypt, Syria and Norway, where the flag reminded people that evil once threatened the planet.
And that guys like Clarence Chamblee traveled across half a world to whip it.
“We were at the Danube River,” he says, and recalls a song from long ago. “The beaaaaautiful blue Danube.”
The soldiers. They’re coming out of the woods again. An officer tells Chamblee to strip those guys of their ranks, honors, and especially those swastikas. He takes a razor blade. With each swipe, another remnant of the Reich falls to the ground.
And flags, American flags, flap in the sky. Thank God for that.
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