Former Marine's front-porch flag display is torched

By AVI SELK / The Dallas Morning News
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When Ed Jordan hung two flags from his front porch, one for his country and one for the Marine Corps he once served in, he thought no one would take issue with his gesture to honor the troops during the Fourth of July.

He returned home from an errand Monday morning to find the flags burned, their cinders scattered amid his azaleas.

The 70-year-old veteran was shocked when police told him that a flag at another house in his quiet neighborhood just north of Valley View Mall was also incinerated.

"I’d have given them the flags if they wanted them," he said, spreading a handful of remains out on his coffee table. "But to just burn them – I don’t understand that at all."

A sooty sliver of red and white was all that remained of the American flag.

Another that had depicted a famous photograph of Marines at Iwo Jima had been reduced to shreds of melted nylon.

Jordan said he enlisted in the Marines out of high school and served as a corporal at Camp Pendleton, Calif., in the 1950s.

"When I was on active duty, the flag always meant something to me," he said. "I’d always take pride when I saw it flying in civilian areas."

How others could take offense at the same sight was beyond his understanding.

"When you damage something that so many have died for, the symbol it represents, that, to me, is intolerable," he said.

Jordan didn’t hold out much hope that the culprit or culprits would be caught. He said he’ll get another flag and fly it, as he has done for more than a decade.

"I’m not angry, just disappointed," he said. "I guess, more than anything, I feel sorry for them."

"Disappointed" was also the word Jordan’s neighbor, Celeste Mele, used to describe her feelings after discovering her own flag had been burned, though she had a few others she said weren’t printable.

"The question is, was it a prank or some anti-American statement?" she said. "I guess in this day and age, it could be either one."