There is a permanent tab now, at the top of The Daily Flag, which contains the links to each of the Armed Forces flag manuals. Each one is fascinating reading, and I hope you will take the time to look through them.

U.S. Air Force flag manual (91 pages PDF)

U.S. Marine Corps flag manual (71 pages PDF)

U.S. Army flag manual (82 pages PDF)

U.S. Navy flag manual (106 pages PDF).

U.S. Coast Guard uses the Navy’s NTP 13 (B) with this additional material.

Nautical flag etiquette and protocol for civilians is addressed by the U.S. Power Squadrons, and may be found in detail here. Maritime or nautical etiquette can be quite different from ordinary civilian flag code, so this is so interesting for those of us who are land-locked.

If I have made any egregious errors with this material, don’t fuss and fume about it, but please, drop me a note.

I want to share a story with you, that has appeared in various forms in the press, on television, and on the Internet. But it is worth repeating, and I am going to quote it precisely from Leepson’s book and hope that he doesn’t mind.

This is a story about the flag: my flag, your flag, our flag.

The American flag proved to be an unequivocally positive symbol during the Vietnam War to the  men held as prisoners of war in Hanoi. The U.S. Navy pilot Michael Christian, who was shot down in North Vietnam and taken prisoner on April 24, 1967, was perhaps the most devoted to the flag. When he was held in the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison camp, Christian fashioned an American flag out  a few ragged bits of red and white cloth that he sewed into the inside of his prison-issue blue pajamas with a bamboo needle.

"Every afternoon we would hang Mike’s shirt on the wall of our cell and say the Pledge of Allegiance," said U.S. Sen. John McCain, a former navy pilot who was held with Christian. "For those men in that stark prison cell, it was indeed the most important and meaningful event of our day." When the prison guards discovered the flag in 1971, they beat Christian mercilessly, battering his face and breaking his ribs. While recovering from his wounds, Christian secretly made a replacement flag.

A few days after the beating, "Mike approached me, He said ‘Major, they got the flag, but they didn’t get the needle I made it with. If you agree, I’m making another flag,’ " said Air Force colonel George "Bud" Day, a Medal of Honor recipient held at the Hanoi Hilton from 1967 to 1973. "My answer was, ‘Do it.’ "

It took Christian "several weeks" to make that second flag, Day said. After he finished it, "there was never a day from that day forward that the Stars and Stripes did not fly in my room, with forty American pilots proudly saluting."

Al Kroboth, a U.S. Marine Corps A-6 navigator, was shot down July 7, 1972, over South Vietnam. Severely wounded, he was forced to march to the Hanoi Hilton where he was held until March 27, 1973, when the North Vietnamese released him and the other American POWs. When he saw the U.S. Air Force transport plane land in Hanoi to pick up the POWs that day, Kroboth said, he did not feel emotional until he noticed the large American flag painted on the airplane’s tail.

"That flag," he told the novelist Pat Conroy, a college classmate.  "It had the biggest American flag on it I ever saw. To this day, I cry when I think of it. Seeing that flag, I started crying. I couldn’t see the plane; I just saw the flag. All the guys started cheering. But that flag … that flag."

The only working space I ever kept meticulously clean was my darkroom, because to be otherwise was to invite disaster and ruin. When I worked as a draftsman, I would start out the morning in the lower center of my table, and by day’s end, I would be working in the bottom right-hand corner—with every scale, pen, pencil, Leroy lettering guide and drafting tool I owned scattered all over the table. (I stopped working as draftsman about the time AutoCAD came upon the scene, but I don’t think access to AutoCAD would have helped me much.)

I console myself with the belief that my genes for creativity and disorganization are so co-mingled that to separate them would cause terrible damage. Needless to say, Husband hates for me to sit at his desk, and he never touches mine except to solve my odd computer woes, and to look for his cordless telephone, which I occasionally carry off.

So to find the document that I was looking for, I had to clean off my desk, which meant re-shelving books and tossing papers. As I was gathering and stacking the books, it occurred to me that you, O Reader, might find it curious and interesting to know what books I had been using.

In absolutely no order they are:

Standard Handbook for Secretaries … I wrote a very important letter to a V.I.P.
The Colonial Experience (1607-1771) by Clarence B. Carson
Flag by Marc Leepson
Keeping Our Fighters Fit by Fosdick-Allen, from the War Department Commission on Training Camp Activities—1918 … I was looking for flag retreat info
Readings in Western Civilization by Knoles and Snyder … I was seeking literary references to the flag
The Journals of Lewis & Clark edited by Frank Bergon, because I wanted to see if there were any entries for the Fourth of July
Etiquette by Emily Post … the July 1944 war edition,
American Combat Planes by Ray Wagner … to see if I could identify the airplane in that photo I used a few weeks ago, with the plane on the aircraft carrier
Hamlet by William Shakespeare … I wanted to use that half-mad, hawk and handsaw/hernshaw quote, and get it right
Raven—A Journal of Vexillology (Vol. 13 & 14) from North American Vexillological Association
Protocol, The Complete Handbook of Diplomatic, Official, and Social Usagee by McCaffree, Innis, and Sand … because I wrote a very important letter to a V.I.P.
Harvard Classics, Vol. 42 English Poetry; Vol.43 American Historical Documents; and Vol. 50 Index
Native Texas Plants—Landscaping by Region, by Wasowski and Wasowski
Guide to the Soviet Navy—Fourth Edition, by Norman Polmar (from my son—I am probably the only mother in America who got this book for her birthday)
Complete Flags of the World by Dorling Kindersley Publishers
A Pocket Style Manual by Diana Hacker … because I wrote a very important letter to a V.I.P.
Plus: 2 regional telephone books, assorted spiral notebooks (I never throw away my handwritten notes), and a little index card notebook that I created to keep up with my HTML codes

*CSR Report for Congress (Congressional Research Service)
The United States Flag: Federal Law Relating to Display and Associated Questions by John R. Luckey—Legislative Attorney, American Law Division(Updated April 14, 2008)

I don’t know how much value this list is to you, O Reader, but I offer it as a small sample of the research I do when writing about flags. And that V.I.P. letter? It may have been one of the most important letters I ever wrote, so I was extremely concerned about getting it perfect.

The book is Protocol, by Mary Jane McCaffree, Pauline Innis, and Richard M. Sand, Esq. I bought it because while researching information about flags, I would find instances of flag etiquette that cross-referenced or referred to this book.

Subtitled The Complete Handbook of Diplomatic, Official and Social Usage, I decided the book would be an excellent addition to my other reference books. First published in 1977, this 25th anniversary edition was printed in 2002.

I have not started reading it yet, but I found this in a quick glance in the chapter on flag etiquette:

The most probable story of the origin of the Stars and Stripes is that Commander-in-Chief George Washington’s personal flag, which was a blue field with thirteen white stars, was substituted for the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew in the Grand Union flag.

This is the first time I have read an explanation of the flag’s conception describe as such. I am not an expert—I research and study, and extrapolate (and quote) as best I can—but this makes a lot of sense to me. George Washington’s personal flag means his field commander’s flag, which every general would fly over his headquarters.