I Really Like This Guy

 https://x.com/bskimike22802/status/2038728914189578448?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw

" THE FLAG THEY BURNED AND THE ONES WHO BLED FOR IT I cried doing the research for this. Only tears that a combat veteran would not be ashamed of. More than once. I am not embarrassed to say that. I am a science teacher and a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service. I have held men together who were coming apart in ways that would make most people close their eyes and look away. I have been in places and made decisions that follow me into rooms where I am supposed to feel safe. I do not cry easily. But I cried writing this. And I think that is exactly as it should be. Because if you do the research — if you really sit inside these stories and not just skim the surface of them — and you feel nothing, one of us is broken. I am fairly confident it is not me. So. Let us talk about a flag. And what it actually costs. — The Decision Nobody Talks About — There is a decision that combat medics make that nobody talks about at the dinner table. You do not read about it in the news. Politicians do not bring it up in speeches. But every combat medic who has ever worked a mass casualty event knows exactly what I am talking about. And most of us spend the rest of our lives carrying it in a place that does not have a name. You are at my CCP. The world is loud and wrong and smells like things that should not have a smell. My hands are already doing the assessment before my brain has fully caught up — fast, mechanical, exactly the way they trained me. I go down the line. One man. Serious wound. Survivable — IF I start right now, right here, and I do not stop. I KNOW I can save him. I have the training. I have the supplies. My hands already know what to do. But there are two more. And they are also dying, but each one not as bad, not as time consuming. If I stay with him, my friend, my Brother, the other two are gone. If I move on, he is gone. The math is the math. Save my friend or save two of my Bothers. It does not care what I feel. It does not care that he has a name, he is my friend, that I know the name of his wife… his kids… that I have talked to his family on the Satellite Phone. It does not care that somewhere there is a woman who said goodbye to him at an airport and is going to get a knock on her door that will divide her life into a before and an after. I move on. He dies. And two more live from his sacrifice… from my sacrifice. And I live with that. Not because I did something wrong. Because I did something RIGHT. I did it by the books! And the books saved two when only one would have lived. Because the math said two lives outweigh one and I had the composure to do the math in the worst moment a human being can be asked to do math. I replay it… again… and again… and again. Every quiet room. Every night that runs too long. I replay it and I come to the same answer every time and it does not help. At all. I am a medic, and that is my job, to save the most I can and let the rest be a sacrifice for the survivors, for if I tried to save them all, all of them would have perished. There are rules of being a combat medic, even if not written, we know them… Rule 1: Good People Will Die Rule 2: Doc Can't Save Everyone Rule 3: Doc Will Go Through Hell to Break Rules 1 & 2 This is the curse of a combat medic. To be the Attorney of the fallen, to plead to God for one more day, one more chance, one more evac to the next level of care… but I can only have so many clients in the same hour. I have made that call. I live with it… some days better than others. I was still in country but imagined I stood at the grave of the man I chose not to save. I have watched the honor guard carry his flag-draped casket with the kind of precision that only exists when it is the last thing you can give someone. I have watched his widow receive that folded triangle. I have stood there knowing — KNOWING — that the flag on that box passed directly over a hole in the ground where a decision I made was to allow him, someone I could have saved on a normal day, to die, because this was no normal day, and instead chose two of his brothers to litigate for their survival. Two for the cost of a friend. Math and emotion know no wars. So when I tell you the flag is not a piece of cloth, understand where that is coming from. — The Funerals — I need you to sit here for a minute. Not scroll. Sit with it. There is a protocol called the transfer of remains. A military casket comes off a plane. The flag is on it — not a crease out of alignment, not a single imperfection anywhere — because this is the last thing the military can give him, and it is going to be given perfectly. It does not matter if you are in a war zone or you are state side. When these service members get transferred, everything stops. Planes are not loaded, buses stop, mission prep stops. Every service member is halted in respect, even for a single casket with a flag draped on top. This is what defense of the flag with one’s live mean on a FOB. We all make a moment of silence in respect for the Brother or Sister who sacrificed their life for the flag and their country. They make it home, and we still carry on the fight for them. The honor guard moves with a precision that does not exist anywhere else in civilian life. Every step deliberate. Every motion exact. Because the ceremony is not for show. It is the nation saying — through the rigid, unwavering discipline of its ritual — WE KNOW WHAT THIS PERSON GAVE. We know. And we will not let them go without being witnessed. Twenty-one guns. Three volleys. The sound goes into the trees and comes back wrong. Every combat veteran in the crowd flinches at the first one and tries not to show it. Some of them do not succeed. That is not weakness. That is the body remembering something the brain is still trying to process. And then Taps. Twenty-four notes. Played at American military gravesides since the Civil War. If you have never stood at one of those funerals and felt those twenty-four notes hit you somewhere behind your sternum — and refuse to leave, days later — then you have not yet felt what I am trying to describe. I do not say that to be unkind. I say it because it is true. Those notes go somewhere in the body of a person who has served, and they do not come out. The flag is folded. Thirteen folds. A tight triangle of blue and stars. A soldier kneels. On behalf of the President of the United States, the United States Armed Forces, and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your loved one's honorable and faithful service. She takes it. She might be nineteen. She might have a child on her hip and another one coming she has not told anyone about yet because she was waiting to tell him first. She might be holding herself together by something that has no name in any language and no equivalent in any civilian experience. She holds it on the way home. She puts it somewhere she can see it. And on the nights when the house is too quiet and the chair at the dinner table is a wound that does not close and the world has moved on in a way that feels like a personal cruelty — she looks at that folded triangle. THAT flag. The one in her hands right now. THAT is what you are burning. — The Bill — Here is what I am proposing. Read the whole thing before you react. There is a serious constitutional argument underneath it and I have thought about it carefully. The Supreme Court ruled in Texas v. Johnson (1989) and United States v. Eichman (1990) that burning the American flag is protected symbolic speech under the First Amendment. I agree with this ruling, surprisingly. But not as you may thing. I have fought for your freedom of speech, my brothers and sisters have dies to protect this freedom of speech, from the government! HOWEVER. Every person who has put on the uniform of the United States Armed Forces has taken an oath. Not to a president. Not to a party. Not to any political figure alive or dead. To the CONSTITUTION — and the flag of the United States is that symbol that stands against all enemies, foreign and domestic. It is on our shoulder when we go to war. It flies over bases, FOBs, COPs in every foreign land that troops are stationed. That oath does not come with an expiration date. Ask any veteran you know. It lives in the body long after the uniform comes off. So here is the First Amendment tension that nobody in Washington is addressing: If a person has the constitutional right to burn the flag as protected symbolic expression, and a service member has a sworn constitutional oath to defend that symbol of the constitution… our flag — an oath made under legal penalty, governing their entire adult lives, sending them to the places where they watched flags draped over their brothers — then THAT SERVICE MEMBER is also engaged in a constitutionally grounded act when they place themselves between a flame and that flag. Both parties are exercising rights derived from the same founding document. The flag burner invokes the First Amendment. The veteran invokes the oath that made the First Amendment possible in the first place. My proposed bill is this: any person who has taken the military oath of enlistment or commissioning, with documented service in the United States Armed Forces, regardless if they served in a combat zone or personally witnessed the flag draped over the remains of a fellow service member — that person is legally protected from civil and criminal liability for ANY physical action taken to prevent the burning of an American flag in a public setting. As the poem says “Now there's but one shot in this old gun, So now it's time to decide which one, Which one of you will follow our lead, To stand and die for what you believe?” I put my life on the line knowing that I may be in a box draped by that flag. It is time for the people who want to exercise their freedom of speech to have that very same honor, to stand up and die for what they believe in. No arrest. No lawsuit. No criminal record. Because if you want to exercise your First Amendment right to burn the symbol of a country that my brothers died for — the symbol that came off the plane on their caskets, the symbol their widows are holding right now in quiet houses — you are now standing in a crowd where at least one person has sworn, under oath, before God, that they would defend it. You have the right to burn it. I… WE… have the right to stop you, by any means per our oath and to defend what our brothers and sisters would do if they were still alive. By any means! I am not the government as much as you are. The Government is not restricting your freedom of speech, I am fulfilling my oath, as in individual! I am embracing my freedom of speech, No, I am embracing the freedom of speech for all of my brothers who have died in service of this country since 1776, for my fallen brethren by destroying anyone who are willing to burn their casket covering. That is not a contradiction. That is the First Amendment working exactly the way the Founders intended — two competing rights, both rooted in the Constitution, working themselves out in the public square without the government pre-deciding which one wins. — What I Need You to Understand — The reason I cried researching this — and I said it at the beginning and I will say it again because I refuse to be embarrassed by the truth — is the accumulation of it all. The medic's calculation. Two lives for the cost of one. Math that does not care about names. The twenty-four notes that do not leave. The widow who does not let go of the triangle. The flag is not the cloth. The flag is the CHOICE. The choice to stand when everything says run. To hold on when everything says let go. To put your body between what you love and what is trying to destroy it. THAT is what the anthem is about. THAT is what the twenty-four notes are about. THAT is what every flag on every casket is about. You want to burn it, bring your lighter. Put your life on the line to burn that flag. I dare you! With this law, you have the freedom to burn the flag… but I will protect the flag with my life as I have done for the last 23 years, and I do not think you are ready to protect your right to burn it with the same vigor and sacrifice, for I will protect it to MY DEATH… so good luck! But I want the man in that crowd who folded that flag for a widow he never met — who stood at attention for someone else's husband, dry-eyed and straight-backed because she needed him to be — to have the legal right to stand between you and that flame without being handcuffed for it. He already spent years doing exactly that. The least we can do is make sure we do not arrest him for doing it one more time. But what do I know — I am only a medically retired Army combat medic who has made the calculation you can never take back, who has watched a flag-draped casket pass over a hole in the ground where a decision of mine is buried alongside a man I could have saved on any other day, who has placed a folded triangle into hands that shook in a way I still see in the quiet rooms, and who has enough respect for every one of them to refuse to let their symbol go without saying something. Share this if you have ever stood at a graveside while those twenty-four notes told you something words never could. Share if you support our Flag and the ones who died and where covered by it to protect the rights of those who burn it."