HOLLADAY — After 10 years, Raymond Howarth replaced the fading American flag in front of his home. But he would not change the prisoner-of-war flag flying below it.
When a neighbor came to tell him the flag was in bad shape, Howarth asked if he had ever seen a prisoner of war.
"They're much rattier than that flag will ever get," Howarth said.
The waving bands of red and white tell Howarth's neighbors about his love of country. The smaller one beneath it tells them of his story.
Howarth was a POW in World War II, tired and beaten like the washed-out flag blowing in his garden.
He was captured on New Year's Day in 1945 while serving with the 60mm mortar section of a rifle company in the 100th Infantry Division.
After slogging through mud and snow with a mortar wound to his back, German soldiers found him holed up in a farmhouse.
They took him to a psychiatric hospital in Heppenheim, Germany, a place Nazis described as a prison hospital.
High stone walls, designed to constrict mentally handicapped patients, kept Heppenheim's 350 prisoners from ever seeing the outside world, Howarth said. And a sadistic Commandant Ziegler, the leader of the prison, limited rations to 125 calories per day.
It was a torturous death camp in which Howarth saw 50 comrades die, he said.
Before Heppenheim was liberated, Howarth heard the deep pounding of American bombs in the direction of Worms, an industrial city 25 kilometers to the east. The next day, an American fighter pilot flew low and strafed the road outside the hospital, killing German soldiers, Howarth said.
The guards lined him up with other prisoners opposite a firing squad, but an inferior officer pleaded with Commandant Ziegler not to kill the prisoners.
"What happens here won't end here," the guard told Ziegler.
That night, Howarth had a nightmare.
"Everything was exactly the same as it had been that day," he said, "except the guards pulled the trigger."
American soldiers liberated Heppenheim the next day. They drove Howarth, a mere shadow of the man who had enlisted two years earlier, to the city of Worms in the bed of a lorry. When he approached a U.S. base, he saw an American flag strapped to a pole.
"I just thought to myself, 'Thank goodness. I'm heading back to the land of the free,' " Howarth said.
Six decades removed, Howarth looks out his window to the two flags. One is vibrant and updated, the other weathered and irreplaceable.
Both tell a story about the man who flies them.
E-mail: mgonda@desnews.com