Posted on 08/29/2003 9:46:00 PM PDT by Pokey78
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Late Friday afternoon, toward the end of a long day in Baghdad, U.S. Army reserve Capt. Ken Hutnick of Alpharetta scored some time with a satellite phone.
He called stateside.
Not because he needed to hear the voice of his wife, Suzanne, or the gurgle of his 20-month-old daughter, Katharine. Hutnick called because Georgia's never-ending fight over the state flag had stretched clear to Iraq.
He and his unit have become wrapped up in it -- accused of fraud, in fact.
"What do we need to do from here to clear this up?" the captain asked.
The cast of characters in this story includes the new state flag, a sister in Middle Georgia, Gov. Sonny Perdue and the flaggers -- those hard-core disciples of the Confederate battle emblem, who keep in close touch via e-mail and Internet Web sites.
Hutnick, 39, is the manager of a mortgage loan office in Alpharetta. He gave up his family and his job -- temporarily, he hopes -- to do intelligence reconnaissance work for his country. He's been gone since March.
Flaggers protest
This summer, Hutnick had asked his sister in Perry to send him one of the new state flags. She did. He and his fellows, based at Fort Gillem, liked it. Last week, Hutnick sent her an e-mail:
"We took the attached photos with the new Georgia flag. If you can get these to the governor, I bet he would get a kick out of them. . . . Tell him Georgia's finest, Company H of the 121st Infantry, have been flying this flag over our TOC [Tactical Operations Center] in the heart of Iraq, Baghdad International Airport, and that we would like to present it to him when we get home. Good publicity for him and the unit."
Hutnick's sister is Megan Smith, president of the Perry Chamber of Commerce in Houston County, where the governor hails from. She did as her kid brother asked and sent the photos to Perdue.
The governor's aides were thrilled and passed them on to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Political Insider, a daily Internet column. One photo was published Monday -- Hutnick is on the far right of the group shot.
Almost immediately, a flood of Internet protests hit Georgia's political circles. Flaggers, who reject the new flag as a compromise despite its Confederate roots, challenged the authenticity of the photo- graph.
Fake, they said. Perdue's computer-literate henchmen had painted pixels in the shape of Georgia's newest flag, they deduced.
Hutnick, sweating in Iraq, saw many of those messages, relayed by his sister.
"We kind of take it as a personal insult -- when we're over here running missions and stuff," he said in a telephone interview. Hutnick has replied to some of the e-mails from flaggers. The general drift of his response has been simple: He and his crew don't need this distraction. Please stop.
Flaggers claimed to have their proof: a pair of e-mails, said to be from infantrymen in the picture, declaring the photo to be a hoax. But efforts to use the e-mail addresses of the soldiers, as presented by the flaggers, were unsuccessful.
The governor drew the conclusion that the flaggers' fervor had led them into dishonest territory.
"When you resort to forging e-mails from soldiers in Iraq -- that crosses the line," Perdue said Friday. "I'm embarrassed for them."
Perdue was once a friend of many of the flaggers and came to office in January with their help. During last year's campaign, Perdue promised a public vote on the state banner, tapping into anger over the way then-Gov. Roy Barnes persuaded the Legislature in 2001 to change the dominant Confederate emblem.
But since the Rebel battle emblem was removed as an option from next year's referendum, many flaggers have disowned Perdue. They now "flag" him with protests as heartily as they did Barnes.
A lot at stake
The photo from Iraq represents a convergence of interests.
A few dusty soldiers, who had adopted the new flag as a vestige of home, want their picture with the governor when they get back, a last souvenir of their war days. Members of Company H are three to four days away from moving to Kuwait, where they'll clean their equipment and head home -- by mid-September, they hope.
As for the governor, Perdue has much at stake in next year's March flag referendum. Voters will choose between two flags: the new one, which he signed into law this spring and is designed to look like the first political banner of the Confederacy; or the blue flag raised by Barnes in 2001. The 1956 state flag, with its Rebel cross, has no place on the ballot.
Republican strategists want the new state flag to be seen as the one carried by U.S. soldiers into battle -- they think it would create a hard-to-shake emotional bond with voters.
The tide of protests from supporters of the 1956 flag quickly subsided as word of Hutnick's phone call spread -- again via the Internet.
Ken Waters is a flagger, getting ready to run in a state House race in Paulding County. He followed the Iraq-flag flap closely. He now thinks "those brave soldiers were used as political pawns" by the governor and the Perry Chamber of Commerce. But he has decided that the photo of the state flag in Iraq is "probably real, though I have no way of knowing for sure." Then again, Waters said he might come to the state Capitol to meet Company H next month. Then he could see both flag and soldiers with his own eyes.
I'm a Georgian, and I agree with you.
Those who are still obsessing over this issue here are in the vast minority.
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