Flag found abandoned in Arkansas hand-delivered on 4th of July to New Iberia family
RUSSELLVILLE, Ark. -- The medals and flag draped over the grave of an Army National Guard soldier are back where they belong after being discovered in an unlikely place 400 miles away from the closest relative.
Fellow Army veteran Bart Noland hand-delivered the mementos from Russellville, Arkansas, to New Iberia.
"This is our area that we memorialize our fallen soldiers," Noland said while gesturing to a shelf at Riggs-Hamilton American Legion Post 20.
The flag and display case sat at a place of honor there for close to a year before a breakthrough last week and its Fourth of July delivery.
Once or twice a year, someone turns in the flag of a fallen soldier to the local post, and legionnaires try to return it to a relative.
Not every memento has a name, but when Staff Sergeant Chris Charrier's did.
"One of our fellow legionnaires has a friend that goes to the storage unit auctions. They had a unit that had come up for auction that I guess had been abandoned, and when the gentleman was cleaning it out, he found the flag," Noland explained.
Bart Noland and his wife met dead ends when contacting the Army and other offices to return the flag, but the funeral home that buried Charrier took their information to share with his family.
"The next day, we received a phone call from the soldier's mother, and we told her who we were, what we had, and she started to break down in tears over the phone...Cause they didn't know whatever happened to the flag," Noland stated.
Charrier died at home in 2011 when he was just 33. He was a decorated National Guardsman who completed two tours in Iraq.
Noland took off on the Fourth of July, traveling 15 hours round trip to bring the shadow box home to New Iberia, Louisiana. Charrier's mother and daughters received it. Recalling it brought Noland to tears.
"It felt really good. It was kind of like being back in the service, being on active duty. Doing missions," Noland said.
Noland has his father's and two of his grandfather's flags, but his father-in-law's is still missing. He said he would have ridden halfway across the country if it meant honoring a veteran and their family's sacrifice.
"It's real important. I mean it means everything. It represents what that person sacrificed, and everything that they went through. It shows their accomplishments. What they did for this country," Noland said.
Louisiana is not the furthest this legion has returned flags to. Previously, they have brought a flag to Texas and Arizona. Noland said he hand-delivers flags because doing any less would be showing less respect than the veteran deserves.
"We do the right things by our veterans. That's what we do. Try to take care of one another," Noland concluded.