Oh, say can you see ... Old Glory in a landfill?

CHAPEL HILL -- Patrick Mitchell watched as town employees dumped branches and leaves at the Orange County Landfill on Eubanks Road.

In the pile lay nine nylon American flags, still attached to the short poles that once stood in formation on utility poles along Franklin Street during patriotic celebrations.

Mitchell, a construction contractor who lives north of Hillsborough, pulled out the flags and laid them atop the pile. Then he pulled out his camcorder.

"This is the respect our country gets, right here," he said, an edge of anger in his voice.

He spied the pink banners that accompanied Old Glory: "Discover our Diversity," they said. "Downtown Chapel Hill and Carrboro."

"Downtown Chapel Hill and Carrboro," Mitchell said bitterly. "And they do this to our flag."

Mitchell loaded the flags into the horse trailer he had just used to haul debris from a house he is remodeling in Hillsborough. He took them to his horse farm off N.C. 57.

The stars and the stripes are still soiled, but seven flags now hang on the south side of his stable, overlooking a fenced pasture where nine horses graze, along with a pig named Skillet.

An eighth flag hangs from the porch of a rough-sawn pine shed that Mitchell built to look like a general store, with a wire screen to keep the chickens out.

Mitchell is a Marlboro man who smokes Lights in a gold box. A divorced father of two boys, he wears golden brown work boots and light-washed blue jeans around the ranch house he remodeled for his fiancee. He is at least 6 feet tall, with feathery gray hair and a sharp face, creased, no doubt from long days in the sun.

Mitchell, 42, grew up in Otter Lake, Mich., pledging allegiance to the flag in elementary classrooms. In the early 1980s, he spent four years on the Caribbean Sea, loading missiles onto VF-84 Navy fighter jets on the USS Nimitz. He moved to North Carolina about nine years ago.

"We've got a war going on right now," Mitchell said Tuesday, about two weeks after his trip to the landfill. "The disrespect people are showing to the president and to the flag, it's just not right."

Federal law prohibits allowing a U.S. flag to touch the ground and requires destroying worn flags "in a dignified way, preferably by burning." Mitchell plans to burn his flags July 4, including the ninth flag, which is too tattered to display.

Chapel Hill Town Manager Roger Stancil acknowledged that town employees had made a mistake. Until about a year ago, he said, the town's holiday flags had been handled by the traffic division of the Department of Public Works. Then the division was transferred to the Engineering Department, which had less experience with flags.

Stancil said traffic division employees were cleaning out a warehouse when they found the flags. He could not say whether replacements had been bought, only that the town was cleaning house before moving into the new Town Operations Center off Eubanks Road.

"I really don't want to use that as an excuse for that happening," said Stancil, adding that most residents are generally less aware of flag etiquette than they used to be. "We regret it, they regret it and we're working to make sure that our employees know the proper procedure for disposing of a flag."