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On the morning of May 15, members of Boy Scout Troop 502 went around both Oak City Cemetery and Pineview Cemetery, placing American flags on the graves of American veterans in honor of the upcoming Memorial Day.

A relatively small troop of five Scouts, Troop 502 has been doing this annually every Memorial Day for the past four or five years. Scoutmaster Steve Reynolds sat down with the Post Searchlight to give more information.

“The city asked us to do it,” he said. The city provides the troop with the necessary flags. “They maintain the cemeteries. And they’ve given us little PVC pipe to replace any that needed replacing. We look for those, and monuments that are associated with veterans.”

“We try to be involved in city improvement, or community improvement,” Reynolds continued. “That’s a focus of our troop, we try to do things for our community. And we’re glad to be able to honor these veterans with these flags.” Reynolds estimates they placed 535 flags in total that day. “The way we identify the veterans is by markers that the veterans are due from the government. So it’s either a marble headstone, a marble footstone, a brass plaque, sometimes it’s just a VFW flag medallion,” he continued. “But we go through each grave and make sure that every veteran is honored. So if there’s not a marker denoting that person as being in the military, they don’t get a flag… If they don’t have a marker, something denoting them as a veteran, you can’t identify them to put a flag down, so, I wish everybody would put a flag down for their loved ones.“

“It was always nice to do it every year, so families could go out and see the flags and know that their loved ones are remembered,” Eagle Scout Lucas Reynolds said. “Even if we didn’t know them, it was still a nice thing to do for them.”