You never know what you might find at a flea market. Sometimes you’ll walk away empty-handed, but other times as the saying goes, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. When Walter and his wife Lonie were at the local flea market, they never knew that they would came across a unique American flag. “The first room we walked into had a stack of American flags,” she told TODAY. “My husband starts going through them and he says, ‘Lonie, come here. Look at this one. It’s got writing on it.’”
The couple, who have a son and son-in-law in the Marines, noticed the flag had messages scrawled all over the stripes. “We’ll always remember the sacrifice you made. God Bless,” someone wrote. “I promise we will see each other again,” another wrote. While all the other flags were priced between $15 and $30, this particular flag didn’t have a price.
If they asked us for $100 we would have given them a $100 bill. It was priceless to us because we knew it meant something,” Lonie said. But the seller only wanted $5, so they took it and brought it home. When the couple brought it home their son realized the $5 flag was really priceless. It was a tribute flag signed by a fallen Marine’s platoon members, and for some reason it wasn’t with that Marine’s family, where it belonged. The family was able to determine the flag belonged to Lance Cpl. Maciel who died in a helicopter crash in Iraq in January 2005. Lonie’s children found Maciel’s mother on Facebook and sent her a message.
She contacted the family immediately and the two talked on the phone for an hour and arranged to meet at her son’s grave outside of Houston. The two families, along with dozens of others, met at Maciel’s gravesite and the couple family handed over the signed flag. For Patsy, the moment gave her “this feeling of peace.” Only weeks before she admitted to her sister that she was starting to forget what her son looked like, but now she believed this was a sign from him telling her she won’t ever forget. “His dream was to be a Marine, and I had to let him do that. I’m proud of him, that he died doing what he loved,” Patsy told CBS News.
