By Timothy Churchill,Staff Writer

PARIS – Vandals have made John Titus’s job exceedingly difficult this year.

Titus, a 60-year member of American Legion’s Foster-Carroll Post 72, was assigned to lead the effort to repair and mark with American flags the graves of fellow veterans in Riverside Cemetery. But, he said, more than 90 aluminum flag holders and plastic bronze-colored medallions have been stolen and destroyed recently in Riverside.

Whoever did this “has no respect at all for their country or the people that served or died” for it, Titus said.

The town provides Foster-Carroll Post 72 with the holders and flags, Titus said, and members mark the graves of 576 veterans in Paris’s 12 cemeteries with new flags each May, Titus said.

Titus said he went down to Riverside one afternoon two weeks ago to repair some gravestones and found the medallions and holders strewn about the cemetery, broken and bent. The medallions, which are clipped onto the poles, say “U.S. Veteran” in raised lettering.

“Somebody told me that they saw kids running around down there” throwing the flag holders around “like they were spears,” Titus said. Now, Titus said, he and other volunteers have to spend time identifying the graves that the holders had made visible.

“We don’t know where to put the flags anymore,” he said.

Titus, who served in Europe and Africa during World War II, said American Legion records indicated that 153 veterans from various wars are buried in the Riverside Cemetery, on Maple Street. Over the years the graves of about 130 of the 153 veterans have been identified and marked by flags, he said. Legionnaires are “still looking” for the remaining 23 graves, he said, but weather and time have worn beyond recognition the inscriptions on many of the stones.

Of the 92 graves on which the flag holders were vandalized, Titus said, 41 had been identified and marked again with new holders. Titus said he felt confident he could find and mark the remaining 51 graves before Memorial Day, but was not certain whether the town had enough flag holders on hand.

“If I have the markers, I can do it,” he said.