Each year, for the past 16 years, more than 500 American flags honoring active-duty military service members and veterans are placed at the Airborne & Special Operations Museum Parade Ground.
It’s known as the Field of Honor, and through the project, anyone can purchase a display flag to commemorate a service member. Each flag displays a tag identifying both the person who sponsored the flag and the flag honoree.
Cool Spring Downtown District partners with the Airborne & Special Operations Museum Foundation to put on the display with support from over a dozen local business sponsors, including CityView.
This year’s Field of Honor display was erected on Sept. 11 and will be taken down on Nov. 12, the day after Veterans Day.
CityView took a closer look at the Field of Honor with the two people who make sure the flags stay firmly planted each year: Bianca Shoneman, president and CEO of Cool Spring Downtown District, and Renee Lane, executive director of the Airborne and Special Operations Museum Foundation.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
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CityView Today: How did this tradition come about and what sparked the initial idea for it?
BIANCA SHONEMAN: The Downtown Alliance, a business-to-business organization, started this fundraiser for the Airborne Special Operations Museum Foundation 16 years ago as a way to better connect the military community to the broader Fayetteville community.
The display opens on Sept. 11 and is accessible through Veterans Day. Why were these dates chosen?
RENEE LANE: The original plans for the Field of Honor were for it to be posted in May and it stayed up through July 4. It coordinated with Military Appreciation Month and Memorial Day. While those are good bookend dates, it's an extremely hot summer season here in North Carolina, and it was really during the pandemic that we changed the dates to coincide more with the more contemporary war, 20 years of war that ended with the pull out of Afghanistan two years ago.
9/11 is a perfect time to open the Field of Honor because we have so many soldiers from this area who have served at Fort Bragg, and now Fort Liberty, who have retired here, work here, whose families are here …
There's a great connection in this community with 9/11, and taking it through Veterans Day really makes it really a better bookend, where you have these two significant days on the calendar that link service members in our community with a significant event, which is 9/11. And everyone who has served our nation will be celebrated during Veterans Day. So it's a great way for people to honor and support their loved ones with a flag. It's a great way for families to remember a loved one who gave their life for the country in any of the wars, any of the missions.
How do Cool Spring and ASOMF work together to put up the flags each year?
LANE: We're great partners in that we work well together and we have the same objective in mind — and that is to sell out the field and make sure that we have community partners helping us along the way. Cool Spring District staff are responsible for the community partnerships with different companies in the area that want to be part of the Field of Honor, and they want to be recognized as companies who not only support Fayetteville, but also support our military population in the region.
Here at the museum, we do all of the behind-the-scenes work and make sure the flags are on the poles. We coordinate with the city Parks and Recreation Department. They do our lawn and landscaping for us, but they will also help mark our field. And we coordinate with volunteer groups out at Fort Liberty and with the partner organizations for their veterans groups to come in and help us not only put in the rebar in the ground, but also put the flags on the rebar. The assistance we've had from the installation has been phenomenal.
SHONEMAN: So we (Cool Springs) do a significant amount of fundraising for the event, so we work with corporate partners — to include CityView, who is a sponsor of the event — to raise money. Because the bottom line is it is a fundraiser for the Airborne Special Operations Museum Foundation.
What have the proceeds traditionally been used for — any particular purpose here at the museum?
LANE: The proceeds that we receive from the Field of Honor — and we split it 50-50 — go back into our annual fund. We have plenty of things here that we do for the community, such as our Lindsay Lectures speaker series. We have authors coming in, subject matter experts to talk about different times in history, different military missions, books, current events, things like that. We also have exhibits that we have on display in our lobby, which are called temporary exhibits. And while we have the artifacts, we may need signage or something to go along with them that helps us there and general operational support for the foundation to help the museum complete its mission.
What challenges, if any, have ASOMF and Cool Springs faced in bringing this memorial to fruition annually?
LANE: Well, I think that the public's expectation is that we should have a ceremony every year. And while we would love to do that, once we hit the 20-year mark for 9/11 here at the ASOM, our intent is to do it at the five-year increment mark. We may do something in between, it just depends.
When we opened it for the 20th year, we had a bagpiper, we had a memory bell, we had a program. But you just can't do that every year. And we would love to, but it's not feasible — attendance dwindles, people's attention gets drifted elsewhere. But at the same time, we want to make sure the public understands that we're here to support this community with this huge field of flags. And we'll do a ceremony in 2025 and 2030, but we hope that they understand that we're all operating with very small staff numbers. And it's sometimes not feasible to meet a lot of those expectations. I think just mainly managing the expectations of the public has probably been the biggest thing.
What happens to the flags after the field is taken down for the year?
LANE: The flags that are not sent back to the person who purchased them or the person who has been honored remain here at the museum. And we have a Vietnam veterans pinning ceremony that we perform daily of men and women who served in Vietnam but did not receive an official US Vietnam veterans pin …
So there's a little ceremony that we'd here in the museum in front of our insignia and the flags in our lobby, where usually we will have a retired officer or non commissioned officer presenting that pin to the veteran. And they wear them proudly on their hats. And it's really interesting to see a lot of the bus tours come in with visitors who did serve in Vietnam. They're just putting their hat on and coming in. They're not thinking, “Oh, well, I'm going to get a pin.” They have no clue. And so the first thing that our volunteers do is ask who served in Vietnam. And you'll see hands go up, men and women both, and they also ask, “Are you the spouse of someone who served who's no longer with us?”
Hands go up and all of those people get a special Vietnam veterans pin and a spouse of a Vietnam veteran pin. And we not only give them the special pin, but we also give them a U.S. flag that has flown on the Field of Honor, and they get a salute. And sometimes you see lots of tears coming from these veterans and the spouses, because this is very unexpected to them. We don't have a sign up that says, “Hey, tell us if you're a Vietnam veteran.” We just ask. And that's how they're welcomed here, and they should be.
What value do you feel the field brings to downtown Fayetteville, in general?
SHONEMAN: In general, visitation increases at the museum and throughout the downtown while the parade field is up, the flag field is up. So it is an economic driver. People come — there's nearly 600 flags in the field — bringing family members down to take photos or bringing family members down to enjoy the sense of pride. That in and of itself has a tangential benefit economically, supporting our restaurants and retailers. Also just given Fayetteville's vast history with Fort Liberty, it's a very important connection between the city and the military. We were the first city in the state to have a Field of Honor, which is a national movement, but were the first city in the state to have it.
You said thousands of people visited the Field of Honor in 2022. How do the numbers compare over the years? What has visitation this year looked like?
LANE: We have had a lot of people visit, and although we're not open on Mondays, we're here to see cars pull up and people jump out and run down to the field. Even when we're closed in the evenings, there are people that will come and look at the field. They'll take their families down there, and it's a nice, quiet time for people to just look at the tags and think about the service connection between the honoree and the field. So it's a very big attraction for us. And anytime you've turned on the news the last ten days, the U.S. has been mentioned, and while we don't ever comment on world events or what our military is doing, events like that do increase traffic in the museum and definitely for the Field of Honor.
When people come to visit the Field of Honor, what do you hope they will take away?
LANE: That we could probably have 3,000 flags or 5,000 flags out there, but we only have room for 500.
SHONEMAN: Oh, it's absolutely stunning and breathtaking to walk through a field of hundreds of flags. It's a true sense of patriotism … And it's pretty amazing to see when you walk through, the variety of people that have served, the number of years that they've committed their life to keeping our country safe and how many combats some people have been in can be really amazing.
Is this tradition going away anytime soon?
LANE: No, absolutely not. I couldn't manage thousands of phone calls of people asking, “Why aren't you doing it? Why aren't you doing it?” I know other communities do it, but we're Fayetteville and I think we do it the best of anybody because we have such a military culture here that we support it 100%, the community’s behind it 100%, and it's not going anywhere.
SHONEMAN: No way. We hope to grow it each year.
Contact Evey Weisblat at eweisblat@cityviewnc.com or 216-527-3608.
