Flags of Our Fathers

by James Bradley

  Harlon, the middle child, loved being part of a team, going along with the guys. He was a real contributor, but not a leader or initiator. He wasn’t a quarterback calling the plays or a team captain. His main job was to block for others, to be a real teammate.

  He played hard enough to catch the attention of the editors of the student newspaper, the Weslaco Hi-Life: “Hard-hitting, pass-catching, 165 pounds, 5 feet 11 inches describes Harlon Block, right end of the Panther line. Although this is his first year in Weslaco High School and his first year of athletics, he is probably one of the more natural athletes in the Valley.”

  Harlon made “All South Texas” along with Leo Ryan and B. R. Guess in that undefeated 1942 gridiron season. Leo always felt that the team might have triumphed in the Texas playoffs if their bus hadn’t been confined to the Valley by the gasoline shortage. Still, it was a team to remember. Their photograph appeared in the local papers, all open collars and parted hair and confident grins.

  But Belle hadn’t seen Harlon star on the gridiron. Belle insisted the family observe the Adventist Sabbath from Friday sunset to Saturday sunset. During Harlon’s Friday-night football games she sat quietly at home, concerned for his soul. This proud Christian woman never could quite enjoy the way Harlon was throwing himself into life as a budding young man. She was fearful for his spirituality; she seemed to worry that she was losing him. He was playing around too much; he was always gone, Belle complained to Ed.

  Harlon was a hell-raiser in Belle’s eyes, but he was pretty tame by most people’s standards. He was bashful in groups and blushed at off-color jokes. Leo Ryan said Harlon worried about his looks and never thought the girls liked him—“Y’all go on ahead without me, now; I’m not gonna get a date,” he would tell Leo and the guys.

  But the girls sensed something special in him. His brother Ed Jr. told me that the girls flocked to Harlon. And in many of the curling black-and-white photographs of Harlon that I’ve managed to collect, there is a happy-looking young woman standing close to him.

  But the dalliances were innocent, kid stuff. His favorite girl, the one many think he might have married after the war, was Catherine Pierce. “We’d go to the movies together,” Catherine remembered. “And we’d go to church functions. We liked each other, we dated, but we never so much as held hands.”

  Harlon would soon be off to war, soon be a symbol to the world of male bravado. But it’s doubtful that in his short life Harlon Block ever kissed a girl.

  Ira Hayes: Gila River Indian Reservation, Arizona

  I came to realize that much of what there is to know about Ira Hayes can be gleaned by studying him on the flagraising photo.

  First of all, his silence, his utter quietness. Sit and look at the photo for an hour, an afternoon, a day. Sit quietly with Ira’s not addressing you. Then you know the utter silence that was Ira Hayes, a boy whose favorite game was solitaire.

  For another clue look at Ira’s position on the photo. He’s the last figure to the left, the boy whose hands can’t quite reach the pole. That’s Ira, different, apart from the rest, unable to grasp the pole just as he was unable later to get his hands around his life.

  If you feel you don’t know enough about Ira, you know how I felt in the summer of 1998. I had interviewed many people—school chums, ex-Marines, his three living relatives—but I still didn’t have a handle on him. I didn’t know who he was, what made him tick. So I flew to Arizona in search of the “real” Ira Hayes. And I learned that he cannot be found.

  I drove south out of Phoenix until I was on the Pearl Harbor Highway, as Interstate 10 is called as it nears Ira’s reservation. I drove through the dry, silent heat along flat pink desert land, a plain of mesquite bushes and deep green saguaro cactus that recedes until it hits the Santan Mountains.

  I drove until the four-lane highway crossed a meandering ravine about fifteen yards wide. A sign marked the ravine. It read: GILA RIVER. I pulled my car over and looked down from the highway into what used to be the Gila riverbed. I saw only a wide, dry, empty nothingness. The Gila River hadn’t flowed under that highway for decades.

  I gazed out at Ira’s land, the Gila River Indian Reservation. It’s not big, with maybe 15,000 inhabitants. Framed by the mountains in the distance, a glance gives you the feeling you can see it all. Behind me, as I stood overlooking the dry riverbed, cars, RV’s, and campers of my society whooshed by. Sometimes a horn sounded to warn me not to back up onto the busy highway. The noises contrasted with the stillness, the utter silence of the reservation before me. After looking down once more at the river that wasn’t a river, I got back into my car, off to find Ira Hayes.

  Ira was a Pima Indian, a member of a small, proud tribe that had inhabited this quiet land for centuries. He was born Ira Hamilton Hayes on January 12, 1923, to Nancy and Jobe Hayes. He was the oldest of the six Hayes children. Two children, Harold and Arlene, died as babies. Two other children died before they were thirty, Leonard in a car crash and Vernon of spinal meningitis. Ira made it to thirty-two years of age. Nancy and Jobe lived longer than all their children except Kenny, who was born in 1931 and was sixty-seven when I met him.

  At birth Ira was already “apart,” separated from other Americans by law and custom. Arizona, a state for only eleven years at the time of Ira’s birth, did not recognize Pima Indians as citizens. Pimas could not vote; they could not sue anyone in the courts.

  The home Ira was born into was a one-room adobe hut built of mesquite posts and arrowhead rock. Sturdy and economical, it faced east in the traditional way, so that each morning its occupants, opening the door, were greeted by the rising sun. A well-swept canvas rug covered the dirt floor; upon it stood a woodstove, a table and chairs, iron bedsteads with cornshuck mattresses. An American flag graced one wall; religious paintings and a Bible were always in evidence.

  The front of the house had a traditional vato, a shady arbor under which to relax and entertain visitors. Outside, to the west stood a carrel, shed, and storehouse. Built to last for centuries, the Hayes home would still be standing today if it hadn’t been destroyed by vandals in the early 1990’s.

  Subsistence farming, cotton-growing, basket-weaving, the chopping and selling of mesquite branches to white town-dwellers for firewood—these were the hard features of survival for most Pima Indians during Ira’s boyhood. Jobe Hayes was a farmer, a cotton harvester, and a chopper of weeds. From Jobe, Ira inherited his complete and utter silence. “He was a quiet man,” Ira’s niece Sara Bernal remembered of Jobe. “He would go days without saying anything unless you spoke to him first.” And Kenny Hayes, Ira’s only living brother, who himself rarely speaks, said only: “My dad hardly ever talked.”

  As a little boy, as a young man, and later as an adult, Ira was a quiet person. He didn’t feel any compulsion to make conversation, to break any ice. He could be in another’s presence for hours not talking, silent as the mountains overlooking his reservation. As his boyhood friend Dana Norris told me, “Even though I’m from the same culture, I couldn’t get under his skin. Ira had the characteristic of not wanting to talk.”

  And in Ira’s Pima culture being quiet and self-effacing was encouraged. “In our culture, it’s not proper for a Pima to seek recognition,” tribal leader Urban Giff explained to me. Or as Dana Norris put it, “We Pimas are not prone to tooting our own horns.” But Ira wasn’t just quiet; he was a silent island unto himself, already separate from his other Pima friends.

  Yet when Ira did speak he displayed a keen mind and an impressive grasp of the English language.

  It was his mother, Nancy, a devout Presbyterian, who read to him from the Bible when he was a youngster. Nancy ran an ordered home, volunteered in the community, and was a pillar of the church, which was just a stone’s throw from the Hayeses’ front door.

  Nancy saw to it that Ira and his siblings got the best education available. All his life Ira devoured all kinds of books. He was the most prolific letter writer of the six flagraisers. And when it was time for
high school she sent them as boarders to the Phoenix Indian School.

  But Ira’s literacy wasn’t a rarity. His tribe had a long history of being an advanced culture, compared to other Indian tribes and even white settlers.

  “Pima” means “River People,” and for over two thousand years the Pima had lived by the Gila River as successful and peaceful farmers. Before the time of Christ, they had organized an extensive network of irrigation canals to bring water to their crops. Excavations have identified over five hundred miles of canals built by the year 300 B.C. One book on the Pima states that they had “ruins that crumbled when Rome was still young.”

  In 1864 a group of white settlers made the first contact with the Pima. They were escorted by the Commander of the Army of the West, Colonel Stephen Kearny. Colonel Kearny posted guards among the settlers as they mingled with the Pima. But as he later wrote, instead of encountering “wild Indians,” he was surprised to admit that the Pima “surpassed the Christian nations in agriculture” and were “immeasurably before them in honesty and virtue.”

  The praise is impressive, coming as it does from an unsentimental warrior more accustomed to slaughtering Indians than tipping his hat to them. But Kearney had it right: He found himself beholding a settled culture, in the southern half of what is now Arizona, that had brilliantly harmonized land, water, crops, and domesticated animals to create a peaceable kingdom of plenty and of virtue.

  Central to all this was the art of bringing water to a dry, rainless place: Over the centuries, the Pima canals drained water from the Gila and distributed it skillfully through fertile fields of wheat, corn, squash, beans, melons, and cottonwood trees. The tribe seemed to take its character from the Gila’s deep, generous flow: Unwarlike and rarely invaded, Pima Indians were a sharing people who offered their bounties to other nations and, in time, to the forty-niners and other white nomads making their way across the desert in prairie schooners, headed for California.

  This latter gesture may have been a mistake. It drew attention to the paradise the tribe had painstakingly created for itself. In return for the Pimas’ generosity and even protection under attacks by Apaches, the migrating Easterners who settled in Arizona began to help themselves to the same water sources that sustained the peaceful culture.

  By the 1870’s, and despite lip-service assurances from the U.S. government, the Pimas’ agricultural system was disrupted. In the 1890’s, agents of the U.S. Geological Survey arrived with plans to rectify the situation. But they wouldn’t listen to the suggestions of the Pimas who had successfully farmed there for centuries. Instead, the United States tore up the canals and replaced them with an unworkable and destructive system.

  In 1930, former President Calvin Coolidge dedicated the Coolidge Dam on the Gila River. He smoked a peace pipe—a custom unknown to the Pima, but gratifying to the newsreel cameramen—and declared that the dam would save the Pima nation from poverty. The Gila’s table continued to fall; not a drop went to the Pima. And so things went, until finally the only way that one could determine that a stream had once flowed through these dry precincts was by looking at that sign beside a bridge on the Pearl Harbor Highway that promised a “Gila River.”

  The remarkable thing, given the decades of thievery and ruination of the Pimas, is the legacy of dignity and forbearance that prevails amid their exploited culture. For three quarters of a century, the Pimas had fed starving whites, protected whites against attack by other tribes, never killed a white man, and never robbed one. Moreover, they obligingly took up the names, the clothing, the religion, and the rules and regulations of their exploiters.

  In 1917, even though they were not U.S. citizens and thus exempt from military service, a majority of young Pima men waived this right and enlisted to fight in France. Matthew Juan, a Pima, was the first Arizona soldier killed in action in World War I, a fact all Pima young men were proud of.

  Ira Hayes’s people are watchers and listeners, not talkers. The voices are spare as they describe Ira, usually referring to what he wasn’t, as if he never revealed who he really was at heart.

  “Ira wasn’t playful, he wasn’t competitive,” recalled Dana Norris.

  “Ira didn’t go in for games,” his cousin Buddy Lewis remembered.

  “The other Hayes boys would tease me,” his niece Sara Bernal recalled, “but not Ira. He was quiet, somewhat distant.”

  And when they do describe a distinctive trait of his, it’s always the same: Ira’s total silence, his self-effacement:

  “Ira was very shy,” Buddy Lewis told me. “He preferred to stay in the background.”

  “Ira didn’t speak unless spoken to,” said Sara Bernal. “He was like his father.”

  “Ira was a quiet guy,” Dana Norris confirmed. “Such a quiet guy.”

  After grade school on the reservation, Ira went to board at the Phoenix Indian School. There he mixed with Indians of other tribes but retained the sense of himself as distinct, a proud Pima. “He’d come and hang out with his Pima friends,” Dana Norris remembers. “He felt most comfortable around his own kind.”

  In three days on Ira’s reservation I spoke with many people who knew Ira. They told me the outlines of Ira’s life; they remember the boy, but he was so totally self-contained they just shook their heads when I asked them about Ira’s attitudes, his beliefs, any distinguishing traits.

  Esther Monahan remembered him clearly. A fellow Pima, she attended the Phoenix Indian School with Ira. She saw him daily in their Pima homeroom. But she couldn’t recall Ira’s ever saying anything. Anything at all. She told me:

  “Ira wasn’t like the other guys. He was shy and wouldn’t talk to us girls. He was much more shy than the other Pima boys. The girls would chase him and try to hug him, like we did with all the boys. We’d catch the other boys, who enjoyed it. But not Ira. Ira would just run away.”

  In time, Ira’s school day would begin with news of faraway battles. “Every morning in school,” Eleanor Pasquale remembers, “we would get a report on World War Two. We would sing the anthems of the Army, the Marines, and the Navy.”

  Ira enlisted in the Marines nine months after Pearl Harbor, when he was nineteen. His community sent him off to war with a traditional Pima ceremony.

  Fifty-six years later, I was embraced by a similar Pima ceremony on my visit to Arizona. It was a dinner at the Ira Hayes American Legion Post, about a mile from where Ira’s house once stood. I listened to young and old Pima speakers relate proud stories of their culture and felt the warm embrace of community we rarely experience in our Anglo gatherings.

  Near the end of the ceremony I was asked to come onstage, and Eleanor Pasquale presented me with a Pima painting. In the center is the legendary Pima figure Su-he (pronounced Soo-heee), and in the background is the famous flagraising photo.

  Eleanor, a dignified lady who knew Ira, explained the significance of the painting to me. Su-he is a stick figure in the center of a maze. The maze represents all the challenges of life and the center is where peace and security reside. “Like Su-he, if you keep going you can find the center, your peace.”

  And what about Ira in the background, I asked.

  “We hope in death he has now found his peace,” she answered. “The peace that he couldn’t find on this earth.”

  Rene Gagnon: Manchester, New Hampshire

  He is the figure hidden by my father in the photo. He stands shoulder to shoulder with John Bradley, only the tip of his helmet and his two hands visible. And in his life he often remained in the background, obscured by others. He was shy, unaggressive, not a standout type of guy. He had little to say when asked a question.

  He never imagined life as something to grab hold of and shake. Molded by huge unseen corporate and military forces, he saw his life as that which “they” decided it should be. Life was a question of “luck” or “contacts.”

  He wasn’t a man’s man, he never chummed with the guys. The only steps he took in his life were at the suggestion of the women in his li
fe, his mother and later his wife. He always lived with one of them, and other than his time in the Marines, he spent no time out on his own. He followed his wife’s advice in search of the lucky break that never materialized. He listened to her until it was too late. And by then he was trapped for good.

  Rene Gagnon arrived on March 7, 1925, the only child of French-Canadian mill workers Henry and Irene Gagnon. French Canadians formed a dense ethnic enclave on the west side of Manchester, New Hampshire, in those years; a “Little Canada” in which French was the language and Catholicism the religion. In at least some cases, the menfolk’s notions of propriety were markedly more European than the surrounding Yankee Puritan norm.

  Rene might eventually have had some siblings, and a chance at a more self-assured childhood, had not Irene Gagnon decided to take him for some fresh air in his stroller one day during his infancy. Their jaunt might have been unremarkable had not Irene spotted Henry Gagnon strolling along the same street. Henry was in the company of another woman. The other woman, like Irene, was pushing a stroller. In the stroller was another infant—Henry’s, but not Irene’s.

  Irene not only divorced Henry; she never allowed him back into her house or her life. She never discussed him with Rene. Rene’s own son, Rene Jr., told me that he believed his father never met the old man until after he had returned home from the war.

  Strikingly handsome with his lean Gallic face and dark hair and brows, Rene grew up under the coddling influence of Irene. Her life consisted of her job in the mills and her son. She often brought him to work with her to show him off, to be cooed over by the other women. People remember him as a quiet boy, always in the background. He paid attention to the Holy Cross nuns at St. George’s grade school, but he did little that people could later remember.