Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times

William Byrd Junior ROTC Cadet Maj. Robert Semones (middle) salutes a pile of burning U.S. flags Friday during a disposal ceremony that retired nine flags.

It looked like an ordinary charcoal fire, lit inside an old barrel cut in half along the length. But on a bright and warm Friday morning just ahead of the Memorial Day weekend, it became the center of a very solemnly performed ceremony to retire nine old U.S. flags that would no longer flap in the breeze.

William Byrd High School's Junior ROTC organized the ceremony held outside the front door of the Vinton school and attended by about 150 teachers and students. There was a fire extinguisher nearby, just in case.

The key to retiring a flag is dignity, said Senior Master Sgt. Paul Richardson, who teaches the school's Junior ROTC cadets. Flags can be buried or burned, once they've been cut into pieces. First, Richardson said, you cut out the blue field, in the top left-hand corner. At Byrd, the cadets also separated the white and the red stripes.

"One of the reasons I wanted to do it this way is that it gets more of the kids involved," he said. "I think it adds to the ceremony, personally."

Cadets handed the strips of cloth to their commanders, who, with stiff, sharp gestures, tossed them into the flames and saluted. The cloth produced a surprisingly tall flame and let off thick acrid smoke that caused some of the cadets to close their eyes while saluting.

Among the nine flags was an oversized one that once graced the Vinton Kroger store. It required six people to fold and to make sure it never touched the ground.

"It was about four times the size of that one," said Casey Shepard, pointing to the flag outside William Byrd.

The ceremony moved Shepard and his fellow cadets, all of whom wore their crisply ironed uniforms with immaculately creased pants.

"It's pretty significant. I've got two brothers in the Army," said Tanner Trivellin, a junior

"The flag represents my country, and I serve my country," said Ethan Walton, a senior.

"It should be disposed of in a proper way," said Shepard, a junior.

"It's like a funeral," Walton added.

All three plan to join the armed forces.

For Trivellin, it was following in his brothers' footsteps.

"One day, my older brother, we were sitting down at dinner, and he said, 'I just joined the Army today,' " he recalled.

Walton said he had signed up to become a Navy corpsman. Shepard said he wanted to go Virginia Western Community College, then to Virginia Tech, before joining the Air Force.

"It does mean a lot to me, though, when you have these older folks up here and they walk by and shake your hand," he said, as people were leaving the ceremony.