A military news article recounts an Army spin on a long standing aviation tradition.  Helicopter pilots fly with American flags into combat and later give them to support organizations, friends, and family:

A nation’s flag can be a powerful symbol of pride for people, but a flag that comes with a story behind it can mean so much more… 

The aviators of the 1st Air Cavalry Brigade…are taking American flags on combat missions and then sending them back home…All of the flags come with a personalized certificate stating the date the flag was flown, what type of aircraft it was flown in, who the pilot was and that it was flown on a combat mission in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Like the flags that fly over the US Capitol, these flags have a special significance to those who receive them.

The tradition is also continued in the Air Force, as recounted in Christian Fighter Pilot is not an Oxymoron.

When I began to fly combat sorties…I was quickly educated on the popularity of creating combat souvenirs. Whether it’s a trinket carried into space on a shuttle mission or a memento carried around the globe on an aircraft carrier, people like the idea of having a souvenir with a unique story. For those who worked near combat aircraft, the souvenir of choice was a US flag…It seemed that every crew chief, intelligence officer, and random airman wanted to own a flag that had been flown in a fighter aircraft in the hostile skies of a foreign country. We actually had a large box of “waiting to be flown” flags by our operations desk, and pilots were encouraged to take a few to fly on every sortie. After the sortie, the data from the sortie would be written down and the flag owner would get a nice certificate to accompany his combat-experienced flag…

The concept of creating such markers in one’s life, remembrances of significant events, has a direct application to the Christian life:

A Christian’s testimony reminds him of his spiritual origin; to remind him of the journey he should collect ‘spiritual souvenirs;’ some have called such spiritual markers Ebenezers…

Read more in Christian Fighter Pilot is not an Oxymoron.