According to Flags of Our Fathers, What Motivates Young Men to Such Valor

Chapter ONE

Flags of Our Fathers
By JAMES BRADLEY with RON POWERS
Bantam

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< SACRED GROUND

The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know. --Harry Truman

In the spring of 1998, six boys chosen to me from half a century ago on a distant mount and I went there. For a few days I set aside my comfortable life—my concern concerns, my life in Rye, New York—and fabricated a pilgrimage to the other side of the world, to a primitive flyspeck island in the Pacific. At that place, waiting for me, was the mountain the boys had climbed in the midst of a terrible boxing half a century earlier. One of them was my begetter. The mount was called Suribachi; the island, Iwo Jima.

The fate of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries was forged in blood on that isle and others similar it. The combatants, on either side, were kids—kids who had mostly come of historic period in cultures that resembled those of the nineteenth century. My young father and his five comrades were typical of these kids. Tired, scared, thirsty, brave; tiny integers in the vast confusion of war-making, trying to do their duty, trying to survive.

Just something unusual happened to these six: History turned all its focus, for 1/400th of a 2d, on them. Information technology froze them in an elegant instant of battle: froze them in a camera lens every bit they hoisted an American flag on a makeshift pole. Their commonage image, blurred and indistinct yet unforgettable, became the virtually recognized, the most reproduced, in the history of photography. It gave them a kind of immortality—a faceless immortality. The flagraising on Iwo Jima became a symbol of the island, the mountain, the battle; of Globe War II; of the highest ethics of the nation, of valor incarnate. It became everything except the salvation of the boys who formed it.

-- Chapter opener: James Bradley on the beach of Iwo Jima, April 1998.

For these six, history had a different set of agendas. Three were killed in action in the standing battle. Of the three survivors, two were overtaken and eventually destroyed—expressionless of drink and heartbreak. Only 1 of them managed to live in peace into an advanced historic period. He accomplished this peace by willing the past into a cavern of silence.

My father, John Henry Bradley, returned abode to small-town Wisconsin later on the war. He shoved the mementos of his immortality into a few cardboard boxes and hid these in a closet. He married his 3rd-grade sweetheart. He opened a funeral home; fathered eight children; joined the PTA, the Lions, the Elks; and shut out any conversation on the topic of raising the flag on Iwo Jima.

When he died in January 1994, in the town of his nascence, he might have believed he was taking the unwanted story of his function in the flagraising with him to the grave, where he manifestly felt information technology belonged. He had trained united states of america, as children, to deflect the phone-phone call requests for media interviews that never diminished over the years. We were to tell the caller that our male parent was on a fishing trip. But John Bradley never fished. No re-create of the famous photograph hung in our business firm.

When we did manage to extract from him a remark well-nigh the incident, his responses were short and uncomplicated and he apace changed the subject. And this is how nosotros Bradley children grew up: happily enough, deeply continued to our peaceful, tree-shaded boondocks, only e'er with a sense of an unsolved mystery somewhere at the edges of the picture. Nosotros sensed that the outside world knew something important about him that we would never know.

For him, it was a expressionless issue; a boring topic. Merely non for the rest of us. Me, especially.

For me, a center child amid the eight, the mystery was tantalizing. I knew from an early historic period that my father had been some sort of hero. My 3rd-grade schoolteacher said so; everybody said then. I hungered to know the heroic part of my dad. But try as I might I could never go him to tell me about it.

"The existent heroes of Iwo Jima," he said once, coming every bit close as he e'er would, "are the guys who didn't come up dorsum."

John Bradley might have succeeded in taking his story to his grave had nosotros not stumbled upon the cardboard boxes a few days later on his decease.

My female parent and brothers Mark and Patrick were searching for my father's volition in the apartment he had maintained as his individual office. In a dark closet they discovered 3 heavy cardboard boxes, old just in skillful shape, stacked on top of each other.

In those boxes my father had saved the many photos and documents that came his way as a flagraiser. All of u.s. were surprised that he had saved anything at all.

Afterward I rummaged through the boxes. One alphabetic character caught my middle. The counterfoil indicated information technology was mailed from Iwo Jima on February 26, 1945. A letter written by my male parent to his folks merely 3 days afterward the flagraising.

The carefree, reassuring style of his sentences offers no hint of the hell he had just been through. He managed to sound as though he were on a rugged but enjoyable Boy Scout hike: "I'd requite my left arm for a good shower and a clean shave, I have a 6 day beard. Oasis't had any soap or water since I hit the beach. I never knew I could go without nutrient, water or sleep for three days but I know now, it can be done."

Then, almost as an aside, he wrote: "You know all nearly our battle out here. I was with the victorious [Easy Company] who reached the top of Mt. Suribachi first. I had a little to exercise with raising the American flag and information technology was the happiest moment of my life."

The "happiest moment" of his life! What a shock to read that. I wept as I realized the flagraising had been a happy moment for him equally a twenty-ane-year-former. What happened in the intervening years to cause his silence?

Reading my father's letter made the flagraising photo somehow come up live in my imagination. Over the next few weeks I found myself staring at the photo on my office wall, heedless. Who were those boys with their easily on that pole? I wondered. Were they like my father? Had they known 1 some other before that moment or were they strangers, united by a mutual duty? Did they joke with one another? Did they have nicknames? Was the flagraising "the happiest moment" of each of their lives?

The quest to answer those questions consumed iv years. At its outset I could non have told you if in that location were five or six flagraisers in that photograph. Certainly I did not know the names of the three who died during the battle.

Past its determination, I knew each of them like I know my brothers, like I know my high-schoolhouse chums. And I had grown to beloved them.

What I discovered on that quest forms the content of this book. The quest concluded, symbolically, with my ain pilgrimage to Iwo Jima.

Accompanied by my seventy-iv-yr-old female parent, iii of my brothers, and many military men and women, I ascended the 550-foot volcanic crater that was Mountain Suribachi. My xx-one-year-old father had made the climb on foot carrying bandages and medical supplies; our party was whisked up in Marine Corps vans. I stood at its pinnacle in a whipping wind that helped dry my tears. This was exactly where that American flag was raised on a Feb afternoon fifty-three years before. The wind had whipped on that 24-hour interval every bit well. It had straightened the rippling textile of that flag by its force.

Not many Americans make it to Iwo Jima these days. It is a shrine of World State of war Two, simply it is not an American shrine. A airtight Japanese naval base of operations, information technology is inaccessible to civilians of all nationalities except for rare regime-sanctioned visits.

It was the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Charles Krulak, who made our trip possible. He offered to fly us from Okinawa to Iwo Jima on his ain plane. My female parent, Betty, and three of my brothers—Steve, then forty-8, Mark, forty-seven, and Joe, thirty-seven—made the trip with me. (I was forty-four.) Not everyone in the clan could. Brothers Patrick and Tom stayed at abode, as did sisters Kathy and Barbara.

Departing Okinawa for the isle on a rainswept Tuesday aboard General Krulak's plane, we were warned that we could look similar weather at our destination. But two hours later, as we began our descent to Iwo Jima, the clouds suddenly parted and Suribachi loomed alee of us bathed in bright sun, a ghost-mount from the by thrust suddenly into our vision.

Every bit the airplane banked its wings, circling the island twice to permit us close-up photographs of Suribachi and the outlying terrain, the commandant began speaking of Iwo Jima, in a low voice, as being "holy land" and "sacred ground." "It'south holy ground to both united states and the Japanese," he added thoughtfully at 1 point.

A red carpeting was rolled out and waiting for my mother as she stepped off the plane, the first of u.s. to exit. A cadre of Japanese soldiers stood at strict attending along one side; U.Due south. Marines flanked the other.

General Krulak presented my mother to the Japanese commandant on the island, Commander Kochi. We were, indeed, the guests of the commander and his small garrison. American forces might have captured Iwo Jima in the early weeks of 1945, but today the isle is a part of Japan'southward sovereign state.

Unlike in 1945, nosotros had landed this time with their permission.

A company is inevitably struck past the impression that Iwo Jima is a very small place to have hosted such a big boxing. The isle is a petty scab barely cresting the infinite Pacific, its viii foursquare miles only about a third the mass of Manhattan Island. One hundred m men battled one another here for over a calendar month, making this 1 of the most intense and closely fought battles of any war.

Eighty 1000 American boys fought aboveground, twenty m Japanese boys fought from below. They were hidden in a sophisticated tunnel system that crisscrossed the island; reinforced tunnels that had rendered the furiously firing Japanese all just invisible to the exposed attackers.

Sixteen miles of tunnels connecting fifteen hundred man-made caverns. Many surviving Marines never saw a alive Japanese soldier on Iwo Jima. They were fighting an enemy they could not come across.

Nosotros boarded Marine vans and drove to the "Infirmary Cave," an enormous hugger-mugger hospital where Japanese surgeons had quietly operated on their wounded twoscore feet below advancing Marines. Hospital beds had been carved into the volcanic-rock walls.

Nosotros then entered a large cave that had housed Japanese mortar men. On the cavern wall were markers that corresponded to the elevations of the sloping beaches. This immune the Japanese to angle their mortar tubes and then they could striking the invading Marines accurately. The beaches of Iwo Jima had been preregistered for Japanese fire. The hell the Marines walked through had been apposite for months.

We drove across the isle to the quondam combat site where my father had been wounded two weeks subsequently the flagraising. I noticed that the ground was hard, and rust-colored. I stooped down and picked up one of the shards of rock that littered the surface. Examining it upward close, I realized that it was not a stone at all. Information technology was a piece of shrapnel. This is what nosotros had mistaken for natural terrain: fragments of exploded artillery shells. One-half a century sometime, they nonetheless formed a kind of carpet here. My father carried some of that shrapnel in his leg and foot to his grave.

And then it was on to the invasion beaches, the sands of Iwo Jima. We walked beyond the beach closest to Mount Suribachi. The invading Marines had dubbed it "Greenish Beach" and information technology was beyond this killing field that young John Bradley, a Navy corpsman, raced under decimating fire.

At present I watched as my mother made her fashion across that same embankment, sinking to her ankles in the soft volcanic sand with each stride. "I don't know how anyone survived!" she exclaimed. I watched her move advisedly in the wind and sunlight: a small white-haired widow now, but a world agone a pretty footling girl named Betty Van Gorp of Appleton, Wisconsin, who found herself in third-grade class with a new male child, a serious boy named John. My father walked Betty home from school every twenty-four hours for the stretch of the early on 1930's when he lived in Appleton, considering her house was on his street. When he came habitation from World War Ii a decade and a one-half later, he married her.

Two hundred yards inland from where she now stood, on the third mean solar day of the assault, John Bradley saw an American boy fall in the distance. He raced through the mortar and machine-gun burn down to the wounded Marine, administered plasma from a bottle strapped to a rifle he'd planted in the sand, and then dragged the boy to safety every bit bullets pinged off the rocks.

For his heroism he was awarded the Navy Cross, 2nd only to the Medal of Honor.

John Bradley never confided the details of his valor to Betty. Our family did non learn of his Navy Cross until subsequently he had died.

Now Steve took my female parent's arm and steadied her as she walked upwardly the thick sand terraces. Mark stood at the water's edge lost in thought, facing out to body of water. Joe and I saw a blockhouse overlooking the beach and made our way to it.

The Japanese had installed more than 750 blockhouses and pillboxes effectually the island: little igloos of rounded concrete, reinforced with steel rods to make them about impervious even to arms rounds. Many of their smashed white carcasses still stood, like skeletons of animals half a century dead, at intervals forth the strand. The blockhouses were hideous remnants of the isle defenders' fanaticism in a cause they knew was lost. The soldiers assigned to them had the mission of killing as many invaders as possible before their ain inevitable deaths.

Joe and I entered the squat cement structure. We could see that the machine-gun muzzle however protruding through its firing slit was bent—probably from overheating as it killed American boys. Nosotros squeezed our mode inside. In that location were two pocket-sized rooms, dark except for the brilliant lite shining through the hole: one room for shooting, the other for supplies and darkening against the onslaught.

Hunched with my brother in the confining darkness, I tried to imagine the invasion from the viewpoint of a defending blockhouse occupant: He created terror with his unimpeded field of burn, but he must have been terrified himself; a trapped killer, he knew that he would die there— probably from the searing heat of a flamethrower thrust through the firing hole by a drastic immature Marine who had managed to survive the machine-gun spray.

What must it have been like to crouch in that blockhouse and watch the American armada materialize offshore? How many days, how many hours did he accept to alive? Would he attain his assigned kill-ratio of 10 enemies before he was slaughtered?

What must it have been like for an American boy to advance toward him? I thought of my ain interactions with the Japanese when I was in my early on twenties. I attended college in Tokyo and my choices were study or sushi.

Merely for as well many on encarmine Iwo there were no choices; it had been kill or be killed. Simply now it was time to arise the mountain.

Standing where they raised the flag at the edge of the extinct volcanic crater, the wind whipping our hair, we could view the unabridged ii-mile beach where the fleet had discharged its boatloads of attacking Marines.

In Feb 1945 the Japanese could meet information technology with equal clarity from the tunnels only beneath usa. They waited patiently until the embankment was chockablock with American boys. They had spent many months prepositioning their gun sights. When the fourth dimension came, they simply opened fire, beginning one of the swell military slaughters of all history.

An oddly out-of-identify feeling at present seized me: I was so glad to exist upwardly here!

The vista below us, despite the gory freight of its history, was invigorating. The sun and the current of air seemed to bring all of us alive.

And then I realized that my high spirits were non and then out of identify at all. I was reliving something. I recalled the line from the letter my father wrote 3 days afterward the flagraising: "Information technology was the happiest moment of my life."

Aye, it had to exist exhilarating to raise that flag. From Suribachi, you feel on tiptop of the world, surrounded by ocean. Only how had my begetter's attitude shifted from that to "If only in that location hadn't been a flag attached to that pole"?

Equally some xx immature Marines and older officers milled around united states, we Bradleys began to accept pictures of one another. We posed in various spots, including well-nigh the "X" that marks the spot of the bodily raising. We had brought with us a plaque: shiny cerise, in the "mitten" shape of Wisconsin and made of Wisconsin ruby-red granite, the state stone. Part of our mission here was to embed this plaque in the rough rocky soil. Now my brother Mark scratched in that soil with a jackknife. He swept the last pebbles from the newly bared surface area and said, "OK, information technology should fit now."

Joe gently placed the plaque in the dry soil. Information technology read:
TO JOHN H.BRADLEY
FLAGRAISER FEB. 23, 1945
FROM HIS Family

We stood upwards, dusted our hands, and gazed at our handiwork. The air current blew through our hair. The hot Pacific sun shell downwardly on us. Our allotted time on the mountain was drawing short.

I trotted over to one of the Marine vans to retrieve a folder that I had carried with me from New York for this occasion. It contained notes and photographs: a few photographs of Bradleys, simply mostly of the half-dozen young men. "Let's exercise this now," I called to my family and the Marines who accompanied us upward the mountain equally I motioned them over to the marble monument which stands atop the mountain.

When the Marines had gathered in forepart of the memorial, anybody was silent for a moment. The world was silent, except for the whipping wind.

And so I began to speak. I spoke of the battle. It basis on over xxx-six days. It claimed 25,851 U.Southward. casualties, including nearly 7,000 expressionless. Most of the 22,000 defenders fought to their deaths.

It was America'due south almost heroic battle. More medals for valor were awarded for action on Iwo Jima than in any battle in the history of the United States. To put that into perspective: The Marines were awarded fourscore-four Medals of Honor in World War II. Over 4 years, that was 20-two a year, about 2 a calendar month.

Simply in just i month of fighting on this island, they were awarded twenty-seven Medals of Accolade: one third their accumulated full.

I spoke then of the famous flagraising photograph. I remarked that nearly everyone in the world recognizes it. But no one knows the boys.

I glanced toward the frieze on the monument, a rendering of the photo's image.

I'd similar to tell yous, I said, a little near them at present.

I pointed to the figure in the middle of the paradigm. Solid, anchoring, with both hands clamped firmly on the rise pole.

Here is my father, I said.

He is the well-nigh identifiable of the vi figures, the merely one whose profile is visible. But for one-half a century he was well-nigh completely silent about Iwo Jima. To his wife of 40-seven years he spoke about information technology only in one case, on their start date. It was not until afterwards his death that we learned of the Navy Cross. In his serenity humility he kept that from us. Why was he and then silent? I think the answer is summed up in his belief that the truthful heroes of Iwo Jima were the ones who didn't come up back.

(There were other reasons for my father'due south silence, as I had learned in the course of my quest. But now was not the time to share them with these Marines.)

I pointed next to a figure on the far side of John Bradley, and mostly obscured past him. The handsome mill paw from New Hampshire. Rene Gagnon stood shoulder to shoulder with my dad in the photo, I said.

Merely in existent life they took the reverse arroyo to fame. When everyone acclaimed Rene every bit a hero—his female parent, the President, Time magazine, and audiences beyond the country—he believed them. He thought he would do good from his celebrity. Like a moth, Rene was attracted to the flame of fame.

I gestured now to the figure on the far correct of the paradigm; toward the leaning, thrusting figure jamming the base of the pole into the hard Suribachi ground. His right knee is nearly level with his shoulder. His buttocks strain against his fatigues. The Texan.

Harlon Block, I said. A star football player who enlisted in the Marines with all the seniors on his high-school football game team. Harlon died half dozen days after they raised the flag. And and so he was forgotten. Harlon's back is to the camera and for near ii years this figure was misidentified. America believed it was another Marine, who likewise died on Iwo Jima.

Merely his mother, Belle, was convinced it was her boy. Nobody believed her, not her husband, her family unit, or her neighbors. And we would never have known information technology was Harlon if a certain stranger had non walked into the family cotton field in south Texas and told them that he had seen their son Harlon put that pole in the basis.

Side by side I pointed to the figure directly in back of my male parent. The Huck Finn of the group. The freckle-faced Kentuckian.

Here's Franklin Sousley from Hilltop, Kentucky, I said. He was fatherless at the age of nine and sailed for the Pacific on his nineteenth birthday. Vi months before, he had said practiced-good day to his friends on the porch of the Hilltop General Store. He said, "When I come back I'll be a hero."

Days after the flagraising, the folks back in Hilltop were celebrating their hero. But a few weeks after that, they were mourning him. I gazed at the frieze for a moment before I went on.

Wait closely at Franklin'south hands, I asked the silent crowd in front end of me. Do y'all encounter his right hand? Can yous tell that the man in back of him has grasped Franklin'due south right manus and is helping Franklin push the heavy pole?

The most adolescent of the flagraisers, I said, is getting assist from the most mature. Their veteran leader. The sergeant. Mike Strank. I pointed now to what could be seen of Mike.

Mike is on the far side of Franklin, I said. You can hardly see him. Only his helping immature Franklin was typical of him. He was respected as a great leader, a "Marine's Marine." To the boys that didn't mean that Sergeant Mike was a rough, tough killer. It meant that Mike understood his boys and would try to protect their lives as they pursued their unsafe mission.

And Sergeant Mike did his best until the finish. He was killed as he was drawing a diagram in the sand showing his boys the safest manner to attack a position.

Finally I gestured to the effigy at the far left of the image. The figure stretching upward, his fingertips not quite reaching the pole. The Pima Indian from Arizona.

Ira Hayes, I said. His hands couldn't quite grasp the pole. After, back in the United states, Ira was hailed as a hero just he didn't see it that fashion.

"How can I experience like a hero," he asked, "when I hit the beach with two hundred and fifty buddies and only twenty-7 of us walked off alive?"

Iwo Jima haunted Ira, and he tried to escape his memories in the bottle. He died 10 years, near to the mean solar day, after the photo was taken.

Half dozen boys. They form a representative movie of America in 1945: a mill worker from New England; a Kentucky tobacco farmer; a Pennsylvania coal miner's son; a Texan from the oil fields; a boy from Wisconsin'southward dairy state, and an Arizona Indian.

But ii of them walked off this island. Ane was carried off with shrapnel embedded up and downward his side. Three were buried here. And so they are besides a representative motion picture of Iwo Jima. If you had taken a photo of whatever half dozen boys atop Mount Suribachi that 24-hour interval, information technology would be the same: two-thirds casualties. 2 out of every three of the boys who fought on this isle of desperation were killed or wounded.

When I was finished with my talk, I couldn't look up at the faces in forepart of me. I sensed the strong emotion in the air. Quietly, I suggested that in honor of my dad, we all sing the only 2 songs John Bradley ever admitted to knowing: "Home on the Range" and "I've Been Working on the Railroad."

Nosotros sang. All of the states, in the dominicus and whipping wind. I knew, without looking up, that everyone standing on this mountaintop with me—Marines young and old, women and men; my family—was weeping. Tears were streaming down my own face. Backside me, I could hear the hoarse sobs coming from my brother Joe. I hazarded one glance upwards—at Sergeant Major Lewis Lee, the highest-ranking enlisted man in the Corps. Tanned, his sleeves rolled up over lusty forearms, muscular Sergeant Major Lee looked similar a human being who could consume a gun, never listen shoot one. Tears glistened on his chiseled face up.

Holy land. Sacred ground.

And then information technology was over.

(C) 2000 James Bradley All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-553-11133-7

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/bradley-flags.html

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