[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 8]
[Senate]
[Page 11279]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           SALUTING THE FLAG

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, just by chance last night I was reading a 
book and it included a speech given by John McCain, our fellow Senator. 
What Senator McCain talked about was some of his experiences in the 
prison camp in Vietnam where a man by the name of Mike Christian had 
spent an inordinate amount of time sewing on the inside of the pajama-
like outfit they gave him to wear, and he put a flag inside his 
jacket--his shirt. This jacket was discovered, the flag was discovered 
by the prison officials, and he was beaten really very much. He was 
beaten severely. Of course, they ripped the flag out of his coat.
  We take for granted saluting the flag. We come in here and we do it 
every morning. By rote, we stand and do it. I am not too sure that we 
shouldn't think a little bit more about what we are doing when we 
salute the flag. I am going to bring that excerpt from home and I am 
going to submit it for publication in the Congressional Record for 
everybody to see, about people who have been--for example, Senator 
McCain was in prison for 5\1/2\ years. As we know, he was, on many 
different occasions, tortured. So when John McCain salutes the flag and 
when Mike Christian, a fellow pilot--he was actually a navigator on an 
airplane--salute the flag, it means a lot to them, and we should 
encapsulate that when we think about saluting the flag.
  I will submit that excerpt for the Record tomorrow. I read that last 
night, late. I thought, when we salute our flag, we should think about 
it more than, I am sure, we do all the time.

                          ____________________