Tom Feane had just returned from physical military training when he discovered his house’s American flag in a pile of ashes. 

Folded pieces of charred, black nylon on a small patch of discolored grass were the only remnants of the flag’s red and white stripes that once hung from Feane’s front porch. 

‘It was just a bunch of black ash,’ said Feane, a junior political science major and member of Syracuse University’s ROTC.

‘I was kind of taken aback by it, didn’t really know what to do,’ he said.

Feane’s U.S. Army flag, still hanging, was charred across the bottom. 

He and his housemates, all ROTC members living on the 900 block of Ackerman Avenue, placed the American flag ashes into a bag. Syracuse police, Feane and his housemates suspect someone ignited their American and U.S. Army flags between 2 and 6 a.m. on Sept. 29. No suspects were found, police said. But the blaze has ignited frustration and disappointment in some student veterans and ROTC members around campus. 

The flag burning was an isolated incident, and there’s no indication of any patterns, said Department of Public Safety Chief Tony Callisto. It was the first flag burning he’s seen in his four and a half years at SU. But this was a serious crime, he said, because the fire from the flags on the front porch could have spread through the house. 

Callisto said it’s unusual to see many flags flying in the East neighborhood, which may have been why someone chose to vandalize them.

‘It certainly could have been a message or it could have very well been somebody engaging in random vandalism,’ Callisto said. 

‘There’s folks out there that are intoxicated, and they do something stupid,’ he said.

Though the flag burning may have been an isolated prank, students connected to the military are not amused.

‘I find it disheartening that people would go to that extent to make a message,’ said Michael Rivezzo, president of SU’s Student Veterans Club.

Rivezzo still has the American flag patch from the uniform he wore while fighting in Afghanistan between December 2007 and December 2008.

‘We wear it on our shirts, and we wear it with pride,’ said Rivezzo, a senior marketing management and finance major. 

Burning the flags on someone’s porch sends a strong message, and it’s the ‘lowest of what anybody can do,’ Rivezzo said. But he said people should still keep hanging their flags.

Most students in ROTC have a tendency to hang American flags, and it’s disappointing someone would burn a symbol of the country, said Lt. Col. Susan Hardwick, a professor of military science. But the military is here to protect everyone’s rights, even those who choose to burn flags as a freedom of expression, she said.

‘That’s within their rights, and that’s a right that we would protect,’ Hardwick said. 

The freedom to burn a flag is protected under the First Amendment, but it hasn’t been without disputes. In June 2006, the U.S. Senate rejected a constitutional amendment to ban flag desecration. The amendment lost by just one vote of the two-thirds majority needed to pass it. 

As an ROTC member and a resident of the Ackerman house where the flags were burned, Matthew Karrenbauer said he sees a difference in burning individual flags and those of others.

‘It’s one thing to buy your own American flag and burn it as some sort of political statement,’ said Karrenbauer, a senior political science and Middle Eastern studies major and a guest columnist for The Daily Orange. ‘It’s another thing to go up to someone’s house and light the flag on fire when there are people living in there, and it could easily catch a house on fire.’

The flags weren’t burnt when Karrenbauer went to bed around 2 a.m. He suspects someone ignited them before 6 a.m., when he and his roommates had ROTC physical army training on the Quad, he said. It was too dark to see any damage that early, so the housemates didn’t realize the flags were burned until some returned between 7:30 and 8 a.m. 

Karrenbauer didn’t get home that day until around 3 p.m., when he saw the damaged flags for himself. He thinks the fire was an isolated incident that an intoxicated person may have performed as a prank, he said. 

‘I don’t see why it would ever cross someone’s mind to burn the American flag, especially when it’s attached to someone’s house,’ he said. 

Karrenbauer and his housemates plan to take the ashes of the old American flag to the American Legion, a veterans organization, so the flag can be properly disposed of in a ceremony.

But for now, the partially burnt U.S. Army flag still hangs from the front porch of Karrenbauer’s home, as well as a new American flag the group put up right after fire officials inspected the damage on Sept. 29, the same day of the blaze.

‘It was our way of saying that, ‘Just because you burned one flag, we’ve got plenty others in the house,” Karrenbauer said. ‘And we’ll continue to hang them and show our pride in America no matter what.’

mcboren@syr.edu

Published on October 6, 2010 at 12:00 pm