Logansport welcomes tribute to fallen soldiers

Logansport is about 1100 miles from Rockland, Maine. That's where retired postal clerk and Army veteran Mike Ehredt is headed. Ehredt is making his way — on foot — across the United States with a jogger stroller, placing flags holding yellow ribbons, bearing the name, rank, service, age and hometown of service members lost in Iraq.

The journey began on May 1, 2010, some 2000 miles ago in Astoria, Oregon. When he reaches Maine, Ehredt will have travelled 4,514 miles as part of Project America Run. He's placing a flag along each mile of the roads he travels. Names of soldiers are obtained from icasualties.org which lists the number of Iraq Coalition Military Fatalities at 4,416.

Ehredt placed a flag at mile marker 58 along US 24, just west of Logansport at around 1:30 p.m. on August 31. He stopped, selected the flag, placed it carefully in the ground, then saluted.

He traveled through Logansport and met up with Deputy Mayor Linda Klinck at Mall Road. Klinck and her husband will serve as Ehredt's hosts for his overnight stay in Logansport. 

Klinck says she was contacted about nine months ago about serving as a host. For her, the experience parallels a similar one she had in the mid-1970s and a man who was biking across the country stopped in at the root beer stand where she was working. She and her husband will have dinner with Ehredt tonight. Tomorrow, they'll drop him off at Mall Road tomorrow morning around 7:15 a.m. so he can continue on the next leg of his journey.

Ehredt travels with a jogger stroller equipped with high-tech gadgets that guide him — an iPhone and a SPOT satellite GPS Messenger system. 

"Everything's in a database," Ehredt said. 

When he places a flag, the database is updated with a map that shows its location. The flags are shipped about ten days ahead of him, in shipments of about 300 at a time.

Ehredt is placing the flags in reverse chronological order by date of death. Pfc. Shawn D. Hensel of Logansport was killed during an enemy attack in Baghdad on August 14, 2007. A flag was placed in his honor near Paradise, Montana on May 25, 2010. 

When he reaches Maine, Ehredt is looking forward to a lobster boil on the beach. He estimates that he'll be finished six weeks from Friday, at 11 a.m. 

Until then, he'll travel about 30 miles a day, carefully placing each of the 1,190 flags that remain.

"I read each name, look at their age, put it down and move on," Ehredt said. "I'm never alone."

Visit the Project America Run website to learn more.

Search a complete list of Soldiers and Marines and view the locations of flags on a map.

See photos of Project America Run in Logansport.