What an outrage! What a contrast!

Two items I read today:

From Yahoo News: Vandals burned dozens of small American flags that decorated veterans' graves for Memorial Day and replaced many of them with hand-drawn swastikas. Members of the American Legion on this island off Washington's northwest coast replaced the burned flags with new ones Sunday afternoon. The vandals struck again on Memorial Day after a guard left at dawn, the San Juan County sheriff's office said. This time, the vandals left 33 of the hand-drawn swastikas.

From WSJ.com Opinion Journal from an article by Peter Collier: One of Mr. Thorsness's most vivid memories from seven years of imprisonment (Hanoi Hilton, Vietnam War) involved a fellow prisoner named Mike Christian, who one day found a grimy piece of cloth during a visit to the nasty concrete tank where the POWs were occasionally allowed a quick sponge bath. Christian picked up the scrap of fabric and hid it.
Back in his cell he convinced prisoners to give him precious crumbs of soap so he could clean the cloth. He stole a small piece of roof tile which he laboriously ground into a powder, mixed with a bit of water and used to make horizontal stripes. He used one of the blue pills of unknown provenance the prisoners were given for all ailments to color a square in the upper left of the cloth. With a needle made of bamboo wood and thread unraveled from the cell's one blanket, Christian stitched little stars onto the blue field.
"It took Mike a couple weeks to finish, working at night under his mosquito net so the guards couldn't see him," Mr. Thorsness told me. "Early one morning, he got up before the guards were active and held up the little flag, waving it as if in a breeze. We turned to him and saw it coming to attention and automatically saluted, some of us with tears running down our cheeks. Of course, the Vietnamese found it during a strip search, took Mike to the torture cell and beat him unmercifully. Sometime after midnight they pushed him into our cell, so bad that even his voice was gone. But when he recovered in a couple weeks, he immediately started looking for another piece of cloth."