LETTERS: Relegate Confederate flag to dustbin

To the editor:

When I was in the Army, I shared quarters with a man named Christopher “Smitty” Smith. He was good-natured, witty and educated. Directly across the hall from us were two Southern men who decided to decorate their door with a Confederate flag.

Mr. Smith was black, and his good nature did not extend to that flag. When he cordially asked the fellow soldiers to remove it, he was told that it was their door and they’d put whatever they pleased on it. Mr. Smith appealed to the company commander, explaining that it was offensive to him and his race. The commander heard him out, then counseled him that it was only a piece of cloth, nothing to get worked up about.

Mr. Smith’s solution was to go into town and purchase a Nazi flag. With my sweaty-palmed agreement, he tacked it on our door the night before a full-barracks inspection. When the captain and the sergeant major came through with their clipboards the next morning, they were predictably livid. The captain, who was Jewish, turned bright red and went into a tirade about the Holocaust.

Mr. Smith, with due respect to the captain’s rank, reminded him that it was only a piece of cloth, nothing to get worked up about. Both flags came down. You can imagine how on that day, Specialist Fourth Class Christopher Smith shot to the top of my hero list.

To preserve one’s heritage is laudable, even desirable, but to publicly mount a symbol of racial oppression is untenable. The flag should be burned, with the cinders enshrined in commemoration of lives that never flew free.

DAVID WINKLER

LAS VEGAS

Northern veterans home

To the editor:

In 1997, when the state Legislature funded the first veterans home and directed it be built in Clark County, Northern Nevada veterans were promised a nursing facility would be built in Washoe County at some point. It has taken 17 years and nine legislative sessions just to fund that promise (“Sandoval signs final bills of legislative session,” June 13 Review-Journal).

When ground was broken on the first home in Boulder City in June 1999, no one dreamed the proposed 11-month construction contract would still be unfulfilled three years later; no one foresaw it would be three-plus years of childish bickering between the state, the contractor and the architect over a truckload of change orders. Similarly, no one could have imagined the home’s first administrator would receive no fewer than six “six weeks to completion” notifications from the state, just to watch all but the last estimated completion date pass in disappointment.

One can only hope the intervening years have brought wiser heads to the state’s public works hierarchy. Hopefully, Gov. Brian Sandoval and his public works administrator will recognize that a landscape architect is not their best choice to oversee the construction of a health care facility; hopefully, too, they will require the architect to have substantial, recent experience designing such facilities. And just maybe, they’ll have the courage to select the best, rather than the cheapest, contract bid.

Veterans and their families in Northern Nevada have waited a long time for fulfillment of the state’s veterans home commitment. Having been intimately involved with the Boulder City project, I experienced firsthand how a well-intentioned, important project can be significantly delayed by poor initial planning and decision-making. Let’s hope Gov. Sandoval and his team will ensure that the laudable end goal is matched by all players’ shared commitment to put the project’s ultimate success above petty, territorial differences.

JON SIAS

HENDERSON

The writer was director of the Nevada Veterans Nursing Home from 1999 to 2002.

Cabdrivers and locals

To the editor:

I was born and raised here, and the fact that cabdrivers are protesting Uber is insulting and utterly ridiculous. Cabbies want nothing to do with locals. They have no desire to leave the Strip or to take a local resident anywhere other than the Strip. Cabdrivers are also notorious for long-hauling, which is a great reason for locals to avoid cabs like the plague.

If you can’t handle Uber and other services competing with your monopolized business, then get your act together, stop mistreating customers and stop ignoring your local clientele. I understand why cabbies want to stay on the Strip, but don’t expect locals to tolerate their ludicrous attitudes and obscene wait times to get us to our local destinations.

DOUG WILGAR

LAS VEGAS