Rallying 'round what flag? In Iraq, U.S. fighting men--for the first time in our nation's history--were forbidden to display our flag as they went into battle. (Cover Story: Iraq War).

Eleven U.S. Marines were killed near Nasiriyah after an Iraqi unit, feigning surrender, opened fire. Although those killed in action were from Florida, Indiana, Texas, Colorado, Nevada, and California, the loss was keenly felt in Jacksonville, South Carolina, home of Camp Lejeune.

"A U.S. flag flew at half-staff... outside Camp Lejeune for the 11 Marines stationed at the base who had died," reported the Associated Press. "Some 17,500 of the 30,000 Marines assigned to Camp Lejeune are overseas and flags and signs in their support dot roadsides and businesses all over Jacksonville." Garry Fribley, whose 26-year-old son David was among those killed at Nasiriyah, captured the mood of most Americans when he said: "It's time to take the gloves off."

American fighting men should not be required to fight with "gloves" on. Nor should they be forbidden to carry our nation's flag into battle--yet our troops in Iraq were ordered not to display the Stars & Stripes.

In Korea, the sickly blue UN banner was displayed alongside the Stars & Stripes, and--in an act of unspeakable blasphemy--Americans were buried in coffins draped with the UN flag. In recent years, the remains of U.S. servicemen killed in Korea have been returned by Pyongyang in coffins that had been similarly desecrated. But "Operation Iraqi Freedom" is the first war in American history in which Americans have been ordered not to fight beneath the Stars & Stripes.

After winning a pitched battle with entrenched, well-armed Iraqi forces at the port of Umm Qasr, U.S. Marines briefly raised the American flag over the port to symbolize a hard-won victory. Traditionally, Marines are the "first in," and in many battles they have had the well earned honor of raising the U.S. flag over territory taken from the enemy--most famously at Iwo Jima's Mt. Suribachi. But according to a Reuters dispatch from Umm Qasr, shortly after raising our flag in triumph, "Marines returned and removed the Stars and Stripes. No reason was given for the decision, but Washington has consistently stressed that invading U.S. forces want to liberate Iraq, not occupy it."

According to the March 20th International Herald Tribune, U.S. troops poised at the Kuwait-Iraq border were forbidden to display "regimental, state or even the American flag.... Officials say the flag could give the citizens of Iraq the wrong idea about the convoys of artillery, ammunition and soldiers. They are not, these officials say, an army of conquest, intent on claiming Iraqi land or treasure for the United States, but a liberation force. They are concerned that streams of American flags would be seen as provocative."

How "streams of American flags" would be more provocative than, say, attacking Iraq's capital city with a cluster of cruise missiles, the article did not explain. Nor did the article explain why displaying the Stars & Stripes would detract from the image of American troops as liberators. Such concerns never prevented our flag from flying over American troops who liberated Nazi-occupied France during ...