No one said anything to either man. No one gave an order, or even made a suggestion. But the two soldiers seemed to simply know what they had to do.
Maj. Lance Dell and Sgt. 1st Class Eric Allison of the Missouri National Guard rescued a burned American flag.
“They treated the flag like it was trash,” Allison said. “It’s not trash to us.”
In a demonstration on South Florissant Road in Ferguson on Dec. 4, several protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks lit an American flag on fire. After letting it burn for a bit, they let it drop to the wet ground.
At that point — it could have been one or two seconds, it might have been 30 — two Missouri National Guardsmen in combat gear crossed into the fray of South Florissant.
With as much tenderness as can be mustered when covered in riot gear and hit by angry insults, Dell and Allison picked up the remains of the flag off the street, folded as much of it as they could, picked up smaller, charred pieces of fabric and then walked it inside for safe keeping.
In a telephone interview with the Post-Dispatch (and with a public information officer in the room with them), the two shared their thoughts about the protests and the night of Dec. 4.
Allison said local police officers always took the lead in making any arrests, and that the guard units were there strictly to back up those officers.
“The majority of the protesters were very peaceful,” Dell said. “There were very few instances of us having to get involved because the protesters got violent.”
Dell, 46, and Allison, 43, are full-time National Guard members, assigned to the 205th Military Police Battalion in Poplar Bluff.
Both men spent 13 months in Afghanistan around 2010, and Allison also spent 18 months in Iraq in 2004-05. They’ve served together long enough that they knew their thoughts were aligned when the flag was burned. They looked at each other and acted.
'We love the flag'
Said Allison, “My dad used to tell me that you can’t even count the people who gave their lives so we can fly that flag. We love the flag, or at least what it stands for.”
Dell noted that he and his men are well aware of the court rulings concerning flag burning.
“We know that it’s a constitutional right to burn the flag,” Dell said.
“But I knew we couldn’t leave it just lying in the road.”
Two weeks after the incident, the flag was still in the two soldiers’ possession.
They’re not sure what exactly will become of it, but Dell said anyone concerned should know that it will be handled “by the code.”
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