How The Left Supports The Troops

U.S. Army Pfc. Timothy Hines Jr, 21, was buried Friday with full military honors after a funeral in Vineyard Community Church in Springdale, Ohio with four hundred mourners attending. Timothy was wounded by a roadside bomb in Baghdad on June 19 and lingered at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC for weeks before he passed away. Timothy left behind a two year old daughter and a pregnant widow due to deliver in two weeks. Friends of the widow's parents filled Timothy's father- and mother-in-laws lawn with twenty American flags as a show of support.

Sara Wessel, Timothy's sister-in-law, was awakened yesterday morning by her car alarm. Somebody had torn the flags out of the lawn, piled them under her car parked in front of the house, and set them on fire. They had not been up a full day yet after the funeral.

Jim Wessel, Hines' father-in-law, likes to think the fire was random vandalism: "If it wasn't random vandalism, what statement were they trying to make?" His neighbors don't buy the random vandalism theory. There were twenty other cars parked on the street. Only the car parked in front of the flag-flying house was torched.

Says neighbor Bob Kramer, "With the connection to this family, what are the chances of them randomly getting the flags out of their yard and choosing that car? For someone to target them and add to their suffering is just horrendous."

By Saturday afternoon, family, friends, and neighbors had replaced the the twenty burnt flags with two hundred new ones.

Wessel said, "We have a great neighborhood."