An open letter to Vicente Camacho, director of the Office of Military Liaison and Veteran\u2019s Affairs: I would like to extend my gratitude to the Department of Veterans Affairs and your liaison office for its services during my father\u2019s, Antonio Q. Maratita\u2019s, funeral. I would also like to thank you for the heartache it has caused me and my sister. If I am not mistaken, it is military protocol that the folded U.S. flag is presented to the next of kin. I myself was not able to attend my father\u2019s funeral but my younger sister did. I do believe you were made aware of this. However, it seemed incumbent upon you to proceed to present the flag to my father\u2019s brother, Oscar Quitugua. I hope you are proud of the disheartening and repudiating impression the Department of Veterans Affairs and your liaison office have left with me and my sister and of bestowing a sense of entitlement upon Mr. Quitugua, who only took in my father in the last few months of his life. My sister and I have kindly asked for the flag, but Mr. Quitugua, as his wife not so kindly expressed, refuses to give it to us. I hope that other families seeking your services are not met with such disregard and disrespect as we have been. <\/p>\n
[B]Antolynn Maratita[\/B]
\n[I]Tigard, OR[\/I]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An open letter to Vicente Camacho, director of the Office of Military Liaison and Veteran\u2019s Affairs: I would like to extend my gratitude to the Department of Veterans Affairs and your liaison office for its services during my father\u2019s, Antonio Q. Maratita\u2019s, funeral. I would also like to thank you for the heartache it has caused me and my sister. If I am not mistaken, it is military protocol that the folded U.S. flag is presented to the next of kin. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174849\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}