It’s a day Paul Monti would never forget. The day he got the news military parents dread: His 30-year-old son Jared was killed in the line of duty in Afghanistan. Paul instantly joined the ranks of a club no one chooses to be a part: he was a Gold Star parent.
Paul didn’t know what to do or say when he got the news, or how to process his grief. A few months later, on his first Veterans Day visit to his son’s gravesite at the Massachusetts National Cemetery, he noticed something strange: There wasn’t a flag on display near any of the 78,000 graves in the cemetery. Not one.
The flags weren’t there because the cemetery ground crews complained the flags made it too hard to cut the cemetery’s grass. Paul, upon hearing that news, did what any Gold Star parent would do: He fought the Department of Veterans Affairs until the rule was changed.
But this Gold…
