A childhood belief about the pledge

It was in Kindergarten that we first learned The Pledge. A rather old teacher was talking about it and he said "he'd had friends that had died under the flag", and meant that they'd died fighting in a war. I thought that he meant that people had died of heart attacks while saying the pledge.

I accepted the fact that I could die at any minute during The Pledge, and never see my family again. After reciting it for months, and no one had died, I came to the conclusion that the teachers were just trying to scare us into saying The Pledge every morning!