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I UNDERSTAND that many took comfort in the American flag after 9/11. They saw it as a symbol of resilience, determination, and respect for victims of terror. They also viewed it as an endorsement of the thousands who were doing all they could to clear wreckage and search against hope for even one more survivor.

To fly the flag and wear red, white, and blue allowed people to make a gesture of sympathy and stand in solidarity against the heinous criminals who planned and committed the horrific massacres on September 11, 2001. I understand and applaud the human decency such gestures represent.

But I couldn’t join in the nationalistic fervor because I feared it would lead to more senseless death and because it was inarticulate. No one who was killed on September 11 died for the red, white, and blue. They perished trying to earn a living for themselves and their families. Or they died with compassionate courage in heroic efforts to save lives. The flag-waving came after that. I repeat, most of it was completely sincere. People were in pain and needed to grab hold of something. Flags are easy to hold.

I have another view of the flag. It emanates from a context that is unique to me. It certainly is a view that many despise. I wish I didn’t know what I do because then I could just put on the colors and not risk having people think that because I won’t embrace a current mass symbol of compassion, hope, and resistance to madness, that I somehow cared less for the victims than the flag-wavers.

It was because of victims that I couldn’t cling to the flag, a symbol of all sorts of heinous crimes committed by this country. I used to try to embrace Old Glory because, as an American, it belonged to me as well. And because I love my country. But as Mark Twain said, that "comes naturally, like breathing. There is no personal merit in breathing."

One day in the summer of 1988, sitting in a plane at the airport in Tegucigalpa on the way home from Central America, I saw a giant US Air Force transport (I think they are called C-130s). It sat on the runaway with its large cargo bay agape. The plane was empty, but the area surrounding it was littered with its military cargo. Because of where I had just been, I knew it was earmarked to spread more heartbreak and carnage upon the peasants of the region. This was because the US government, in support of multinational corporations, wanted to keep the prices of commodities as cheap as possible. And they were busy cheapening the most important commodity of all, human life. That plane contained support and endorsement for the death squads that were combing the countryside and terrorizing the populace of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua.

Death squads were CIA-trained terrorists that murdered and tortured people suspected of having allegiance to anyone but United States–backed dictators or "contras" in the region. The murders they committed were often excruciatingly gruesome because they were meant to terrorize others to keep them from joining the battle for land reform and human rights.

Painted on the tailfin of that transport was a big American flag. I sat there and considered how many more lives would be destroyed because of the state-sponsored terrorism that would be implemented with the commodities that had been unloaded from that one plane. I thought of how this evil was being done at the expense of US taxpayers. I knew that they’d never permit such a thing to happen if they only understood what was being done in their name and in the murky shadow of the Stars and Stripes. I thought about how the money that was being spent on barbarism would be looked upon as foreign aid. That sanitary little term could delude Americans into believing, when they saw the figures for this "aid," that the USA was philanthropic and the world was not sufficiently grateful. I sadly mulled over how the whole scam was cynically packaged as an attempt to export democracy to backward people. In fact, it was an effort to negate the will of the majority down there.

Eventually it succeeded.

Sitting on that runway in far-off Tegucigalpa, the flag left my possession, for good. Never again could I wear it or endorse it, because never again would it not symbolize what I knew had been done in Central America.

I have lived a flagless life for many years now and risk the disdain of my fellow Americans because of it. After the 9/11 attacks numerous people, some of them old friends, told me that they thought my inability to fall in behind the flag and the flag-waving Bush administration reflected poorly upon me. I understand why they might have felt that way, and I am sorry to have disappointed them. But because I have seen the flag used to spread terror, I cannot risk betraying the victims of terror, just because I fear some people will mistakenly believe my heart is not in shreds over the 9/11 human calamity.

I still believe in what this country can be. Essential to the continued quest for the American dream is free speech. One thing I am free to say is that I want to end the massacre of all innocents. I want no more terror. I also say, by not flying the flag, that our problems can’t be solved through nationalism. I say that nationalism can be found at the source of much of the madness that has changed our world in such an awful way. That said, I understand why so many people clung to Old Glory after 9/11. I know that they did so out of compassion and decency. I respect them for that, and I defend their right to choose that symbol at that moment. I hope that at least some of them understand that other good and decent people might have some pretty good reasons for seeking a different path toward healing the enormous wound we sustained.

— Barry Crimmins

Excerpted from Never Shake Hands with a War Criminal, © 2004 by Barry Crimmins. Reprinted by permission of Seven Stories Press.