The Honor Guard Man Put His Name on My Flag Ceremony. I Had the Clipboard to Prove It

The banner was forty feet tall, and my face was on it.

I was driving to the post office on June 9, 2026, when I looked up at the front of the Veterans Services building on Austin Avenue. There was a young Marine in green dress blues. It took me a full block to understand that the young Marine was me. The photo was taken at Camp Lejeune in 1973, when I was eighteen and too proud to smile on command. Under it, in white letters, the banner read, “Serve Your Country, Serve Your Community.”

Standing on the sidewalk below was Blake Hollister. He was shaking hands with a reporter from the Waco paper and laughing at something the man said. I knew Blake. He had run the honor guard for five years, and he presented the Memorial Day flag ceremony on his slide deck as if he had dreamed it up himself over a bowl of cereal.

I had designed that ceremony in 2014. I had drawn the flag-folding lanes on graph paper at my kitchen table. I had called the volunteers by phone, one by one, and written every name on a clipboard in block capitals. Nobody had ever asked me to prove any of it.

I drove home with both hands on the wheel. I did not turn on the radio, and I did not cry. My mother raised me to save that for private.

That evening I went to the hall closet and pulled out the gray folder I have kept since 1975. Inside was my service record summary, typed and signed by a lieutenant at Camp Lejeune. My MOS was listed as radio operator, 2531. The discharge line read honorable, May 1975. Under that was the photo of me in dress blues, the only copy I own.

“Mama, you have to let the lawyers handle it,” my daughter Joanna said when I called her in Austin. She is a nurse and used to hard news, but she was angry on my behalf, and it came out as impatience. “Don’t go chasing a man who has a microphone.”

“I’m not chasing him,” I said. “I’m asking for my paperwork.”

The next morning I called Marcy Oblinger at the county archive. Marcy keeps every form in labeled accordion files, and she has never once lost one. I asked her for the original 2014 sign-up sheets and every volunteer form filed since 2021.

“Those are public records, Dot,” she said in her dry voice. “Give me a day or two. I’ll pull them.”

Then I called Ruben Salas. He has been my friend since the 1990s and has chaired the council for years. He was quiet for a long time when I told him about the banner.

“I signed the stipend checks, Dot,” he finally said. “I never looked closely at who was getting them. I should have.”

I told him that wasn’t the point right now. The point was the paper.

On June 18, Marcy called back. Her voice was lower than usual.

“Dot,” she said, “the forms for 2021 through 2025 all have the same handwriting as your 2014 sheet. And it isn’t Blake’s.”