There it was: the U.S. flag, flapping high above Fourth Plain Boulevard on Friday morning.

A disgrace, Rey Cabral said to himself.

A full day after the president had gone on national television to ask governments and businesses to set flags at half-staff — and 23 hours after the Vancouver Barracks Cemetery, just across the street, had complied with the order to commemorate the Fort Hood massacre — Clark County’s Center for Community Health seemed to be carrying on as if nothing had happened.

“Two days went by before they even lowered the flag,” Cabral, 62, said Tuesday. “It’s an insult.”

Working from his central Vancouver apartment, this once-homeless Vietnam veteran has spent years waging a one-man campaign for a simple change at local cities, schools and Clark County’s government: create and follow policies for rapidly lowering the American flag to half-staff to recognize the area’s fallen fighters.

It’s a task they regularly fail at, Cabral said.

Local politicians and their secretaries groan when they hear his voice on the phone or see him stand to speak at a hearing, Cabral said.

“He’s called I don’t know how many times,” County Administrator Bill Barron recalled Tuesday.

But when 2005 Hudson’s Bay graduate Lance Cpl. Adam Emul was killed by a bomb in western Iraq, it was Cabral who talked Vancouver Public Schools into giving him a day of honor, even though Gov. Chris Gregoire’s office had been silent on his passing.

Two weeks ago, after a bomb tore through the vehicle Pfc. Ian Walz of Vancouver was riding in in southern Afghanistan, it was Cabral who started making calls to make sure the young soldier would get the recognition Cabral felt he deserved from his state, county and city.

“He’s a very good monitor of our activity,” Barron said of Cabral. “We fully want to comply with honoring our veterans.”

Under the former plane mechanic’s volunteer vigilance, local agencies continue to turn up flaws in their practice.

Two years ago, Cabral persuaded county commissioners to issue county policy P-280, declaring that the county would lower its 12 or so U.S. flags to half-staff for seven days whenever the commissioners, governor or president asked to recognize a death in the Armed Forces.

The city of Vancouver has a similar policy: it lowers the flag for five business days following word of a city resident’s killing during active duty, as determined by the governor or the president.

Officially, Vancouver Public Schools only lowers its flags when asked by Olympia or the White House.

But those requests are often slow to come; sometimes they never come at all.

Peggy Furno, administrative assistant to City Manager Pat McDonnell, said the people in her office had looked for some order about the Fort Hood shootings.

“I got on the governor’s site in Washington and looked,” she said. “The mayor’s secretary has a bookmark for the White House. … There was no proclamation.”

President Barack Obama had asked on national television for a weeklong period of mourning. But the e-mail alert the city was expecting from Obama’s White House never arrived, Furno said.

So despite Cabral’s call on Thursday afternoon, Vancouver didn’t lower any of its 16 flags until Tuesday, when Furno finally decided to make the half-staff order herself.

Indecision like that drives Cabral crazy.

“Where’s the initiative?” the veteran asked Tuesday, pushing his thick glasses up his nose. “A little common sense here seems to have floated away in the age of computers.”