{"id":1891,"date":"2009-12-03T00:30:27","date_gmt":"2009-12-03T08:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/?p=1891"},"modified":"2009-12-02T22:35:35","modified_gmt":"2009-12-03T06:35:35","slug":"us-army-aviators-commemorate-flags","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/03\/us-army-aviators-commemorate-flags\/","title":{"rendered":"US Army Aviators Commemorate Flags"},"content":{"rendered":"

A\u00a0military news article\u00a0recounts an Army spin on a long standing aviation tradition.\u00a0 Helicopter pilots fly with American flags<\/a>\u00a0into combat and\u00a0later give them to support organizations, friends, and family:<\/p>\n

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…\u00a0 <\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Like the flags that fly over the US Capitol, these flags have a special significance to those who receive them.<\/p>\n

The tradition is also continued in the Air Force, as recounted in Christian Fighter Pilot is not an Oxymoron<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

When I began to fly combat sorties…I was quickly educated on the popularity of creating combat souvenirs. Whether it\u2019s 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…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The concept of creating such markers in one’s life, remembrances of significant events, has a direct application to the Christian life:<\/p>\n

A Christian\u2019s testimony reminds him of his spiritual origin; to remind him of the journey he should collect \u2018spiritual souvenirs;\u2019 some have called such spiritual markers Ebenezers<\/em>…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read more in Christian Fighter Pilot is not an Oxymoron<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A\u00a0military news article\u00a0recounts an Army spin on a long standing aviation tradition.\u00a0 Helicopter pilots fly with American flags\u00a0into combat and\u00a0later 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…\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[13,23,52,2,32,40],"class_list":["post-1891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fighter-pilot","tag-aircraft","tag-bible","tag-iraq","tag-military","tag-pilot-training","tag-tradition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1891"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1891\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}