Lohmann: Marines provide flags to Virginia War Memorial

When you visit the Virginia War Memorial, you can count on being moved by the thousands of names etched on the glass and marble walls.

You also can count on seeing flags representing the various branches of the military flying conspicuously -- 24 hours a day, seven days a week -- outside the memorial on Belvidere Street just before the Lee Bridge.

Unless, of course, they're not.

Local members of the Marine Corps League were taken aback when they drove by the memorial recently and noticed empty flagpoles. They checked with Jon C. Hatfield, executive director of the memorial, and discovered the reason: state budget cuts.

"It's not much of a war memorial if you don't have flags," said Russell W. Wyatt Sr., commandant of the Marine Corps League, James M. Slay Detachment.

So, the group did something about it.

Members held a fundraiser over the summer that featured the Marine Corps Band, and the other day they presented Hatfield with a year's worth of flags: Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard and Merchant Marine flags, as well as special POW-MIA and war memorial flags.

That's a significant contribution. A set of large flags costs about $2,000, Hatfield said, and the memorial goes through about four sets in a year.

The flags are rotated every month and those that have been flying are taken down, washed and mended from flapping in the wind 24/7. They last for about three month-long stints before they become too faded and frayed to continue flying.

"These 11,000 names surrounding us here," Hatfield said, motioning to the list of fallen Virginians memorialized at the shrine, "deserve the best."

Until the Marine Corps League came through, the best the memorial could do in recent times was to take the flags down periodically to try to make them last longer. The state-owned memorial has seen its budget reduced by almost 30 percent over the past few years, Hatfield said. The flags got caught in the budget squeeze.

The new flags look good, flying again at the south end of the memorial. The American and Virginia flags fly at the opposite end. It's hard to imagine them not waving in the breeze over this patch of hallowed ground.

"That's what we thought," Clyde Childress, judge advocate for the local detachment of the Marine Corps League, which is made up of Marines, Marine Corps veterans and Fleet Marine Force Corpsmen who served honorably in the corps. "We're hoping other service organizations will pitch in and provide flags to the war memorial in the future."

At the brief ceremony where they delivered the flags, members of the Marines Corps League also brought along a $5,000 check for the Virginia Wounded Warrior Program, which coordinates support services for veterans with stress-related and traumatic brain injuries from service in combat.

The Marines' support of the war memorial and the Wounded Warrior Program is a case, Hatfield said, of "veterans taking care of their own."

Contact Bill Lohmann at (804) 649-6639 or . Follow him at http://twitter.com/wlohmann.