During the last year, we were allowed outside most days for a
couple of minutes to bathe.  We showered by drawing water
from a concrete tank with a homemade bucket.  One day as we
all stood by the tank, stripped of our clothes, a young Naval
pilot named Mike Christian found the remnants of a handkerchief
in a gutter that ran under the prison wall.  Mike managed to sneak
the grimy rag into our cell and began fashioning it into a flag.

Over time we all loaned him a little soap, and he spent days
cleaning the material.  We helped by scrounging and stealing
bits and pieces of anything he could use.  At night, under his
mosquito net, Mike worked on the flag.  He made red and blue
from ground-up roof tiles and tiny amounts of ink and painted
the colors onto the cloth with watery rice glue. Using thread
from his own blanket and a homemade bamboo needle, he
sewed on stars.

Early in the morning a few days later, when the guards were
not alert, he whispered loudly from the back of our cell, "Hey
gang, look here".  He proudly held up this tattered piece of cloth,
waving it as if in a breeze.  If you used your imagination, you could
tell it was supposed to be an American flag. When he raised that
smudgy fabric, we automatically stood straight and saluted, our
chests puffing out, and more than a few eyes had tears.

About once a week the guards would strip us, run us outside and
go through our clothing.  During one of those shakedowns, they
found Mike's flag.  We all knew what would happen. That night
they came for him.

Night interrogations were always the worst.  They opened the cell
door and pulled Mike out.  We could hear the beginning of the torture
before they even had him in the torture cell. They beat him most of the
night.

About daylight they pushed what was left of him back through the cell
door. He was badly broken; even his voice was gone.  Within two weeks,
despite the danger, Mike scrounged another piece of cloth and began
another flag.  The Stars and Stripes, our national symbol, was worth the
sacrifice to him.  Now whenever I see the flag, I think of Mike and the
morning he first waved that tattered emblem of a nation. It was then,
thousands of miles from home in a lonely prison cell, that he showed us
what it is to be truly free.