Flags of Our Fathers

by James Bradley

  At Weslaco Ira would have asked around about the whereabouts of Ed Block. (He almost certainly did not know that the Block family had left town, and that Ed had come back alone.) No one would have paid much attention to his questions: He could have been another laborer, looking for work on Ed’s cotton farm.

  He had hitchhiked more than thirteen hundred miles in three days.

  With his directions, Ira hitched back north out of Weslaco for a few miles, then walked west off the main road two more miles to an unmarked crossroad. Looking north from there, he could see Ed Block’s cinder-block house about fifty yards away across the red dirt.

  He walked up the driveway and knocked on the door. No one answered. Ira turned his gaze to the cotton field, where a lone figure was bent over in the hot sun. Ira knew all about cotton fields.

  He approached the figure silently, from behind. When he was near him, he softly asked: “Are you Mr. Block? Harlo’s father?”

  Many years later, Rebecca Salazar—who eventually became Ed’s second wife—still vividly remembered the excitement in Ed’s voice when he reached her by telephone.

  “He was almost breathless,” Rebecca recalled. “He asked me, ‘Do you know that Indian in the flagraising photo?’ I said, ‘Yes…’

  “And Ed went on, ‘Well, he was here today! He just left. He just walked up and started talking to me about Harlon, how they were good friends. He talked about Harlon playing football, about driving the oil trucks with me. He knew everything! He and Harlon had been good buddies.’”

  Rebecca Salazar continued to reconstruct the call from Ed: “‘I didn’t know what to say. I was speechless. And he asked me if I knew Harlon was in the photo, the guy putting the pole in the ground. I told him we had suspected it. Ira said it was definitely him, that Harlon and he had been together going up the hill, that Ira knew it was Harlon. He said that there was confusion in Washington about the photo and when Ira tried to set it straight, they hushed him up. He was pretty mad about it and he wanted to set the record straight.’”

  Apparently the conversation out in the cotton field did not last long. As Ed told Rebecca, “Once he knew that I knew Harlon was in the photo, he just said, ‘Okay, well, I guess I’ll be off.’ We shook hands and he walked out of the field.

  “I was so stunned I didn’t even think to ask him where he was going or where he came from. I should have offered him something to eat, seen if he needed a place to sleep. But I wasn’t thinking clearly. He was just standing there before me, talking about Harlon, and then he was gone.”

  Belle—haunted Belle, ravaged Belle, tireless, fixated, unrelenting Belle—had been right all along.

  It took fourteen days before Ed mustered the courage to pick up the phone and call his estranged wife in California. When she received the news, Belle was matter-of-fact about it. She wrote to Ira for confirmation and received a handwritten note in response:

  …God knows how happy I was to get your letter!

  I knew your son very well. I’m writing this cause I know, I was there and I saw. Harlon was in on this picture.

  But how they fouled up the picture, I don’t know. I was the last man to come back to the states for this 7th Bond Drive…when I did arrive in Washington D.C. I tried to set the thing right but some Colonel told me not to say another word as the two men were dead, meaning Harlon and Hansen. And besides the public knew who was who in the picture at the time and didn’t want no last minute commotion.

  …It did not seem right for such a brave Marine as your son, not to get any national recognition.

  Not long after that, Harlon’s friend Leo Ryan returned to his hometown and paid a visit to Ed Block. “He told me that Ira Hayes had visited him and that Harlon was in the photo,” Leo recalled. “He pointed to the figure in the photo and said, ‘This is my boy, and I’m going to do my best to get him recognized.’”

  On August 16, 1946—the first anniversary of the victory over Japan—the city fathers of Buffalo, New York, invited the three surviving flagraisers to participate in a day of patriotic ceremonies. John demurred: He had made his rules, and besides, Betty was now in the late stages of an ill-fated pregnancy. Ira and Rene accepted. But if they expected to relive some of the euphoria of the Bond Tour, they were mistaken. It wasn’t the same, and neither were they.

  A photograph in The New York Times told it all: There they were, Ira and Rene, raising Old Glory one more time, but there was something forlorn in their attitudes. And the ravages of drink and hard living were etched on Ira’s fleshy face.

  The story began, “Two men who took part in the historic Iwo Jima flagraising sounded a note of sadness and disillusionment today as Buffalo jubilantly celebrated the first anniversary of V-J Day.” Noting that Rene “felt some disappointment about not seeing all those promises fulfilled that were made when the war was on,” the article gave full play to Rene’s burst of self-pity:

  “And I’m not saying it because it’s just my case,” he continued. “It isn’t. It’s the same for other fellows, too.

  “I had no success in my attempt to obtain a police or fire department job in Manchester,” Gagnon continued. “I can’t find a place to live in my own town. I have to live with my wife’s relatives in Hooksett, about eight miles away.”

  The article did not take note of this, but no evidence exists that Rene had sought out the training that would have made him eligible for such jobs. Clearly, this youngest and most naive flagraiser—he was still only twenty-one in 1946—had assumed that his “hero” mantle was a kind of appointment for life, complete with compensation. During the tour, John Bradley could see it coming. “All the bigwigs on the tour would slap us on the back and promise us a job if we ever needed one,” he told me once. “I didn’t think much of it, but Rene’s eyes lit up. He thought he had it made.”

  Meanwhile, Ira was telling a slightly different tale of woe: “I want to be out on my own,” he told reporters, “but out in Arizona the white race looks down on the Indian as if he were a little man and I don’t stand a chance anywhere off the reservation unless I come East.”

  Such self-pity is not uncommon among people in the grip of alcoholism. But Ira’s next remarks perhaps touched the true source of his very legitimate torment: “Most of our buddies are gone,” Hayes observed. “Three of the men who raised the flag are gone. We hit the beach on Iwo with 250 men and left with 27 a month and a half later. I still think about that all the time.”

  In that oft-repeated lament, I believe, lay the key to the locked-up sorrows of Ira Hayes.

  But even as Ira continued to brood about his lost buddies, and continued to pour alcohol over his grief, the seeds of his most singular act of moral heroism were beginning to bear fruit. His 2,600-mile hitchhiking odyssey of the previous spring, from the Gila River reservation in Arizona to Ed Block’s south Texas cotton field and back—had put in motion a series of events that quickly reached the highest levels of the U.S. Marine command.

  After hearing of Ira’s visit from Ed, Belle Block acted immediately. She composed a letter to the Congressman from the Weslaco district, Milton H. West, signing herself “Mrs. E. F. Block,” and using Ed’s address in the Rio Grande Valley:

  In studying the picture of the famous flagraising on the peak of Suribachi I was convinced that the Marine at the base was my son, and began writing to several Marines that I was acquainted with to inquire if my son was the one in the picture and have received assurance from them that it was, but could not get definite proof until I got in touch with Ira Hamilton Hayes one of the survivors of the flagraising and received a lengthy letter from him identifying and verifying that it was my son…

  The Congressman forwarded both letters to Commandant Vandegrift, requesting an explanation. The commandant bestirred himself and dispatched an aide to the Pima reservation in Arizona to obtain an identification affidavit from Ira.

  The aide interviewed Ira on December 10 in Phoenix, and found Ira’s deposition persuasive. Among other things, Ira recalle
d with clarity how it was Harlon who had piled stones to form a base for the pole. Then he drew the colonel’s attention to some photographs made of Hank Hansen as he helped raise the first flag on Suribachi that morning, along with Lindberg, Thomas, Michels, Charlo, and Schrier. He pointed out that Hansen was wearing a cloth cap, not a helmet, and that he also wore crossed bandoliers and parachute boots with the trousers tucked in—all these details in contrast to the figure at the base of the flagpole.

  “That’s definitely Harlon Block,” was the way Ira summed it up.

  The Marine Corps sent Ira’s deposition, along with the photographs, to John and to Rene. Both affirmed that the figure in question was not Hank Hansen and that it probably was Harlon Block.

  On January 15, 1947, almost two years after the photo appeared, Commandant Vandegrift mailed a two-page letter addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Block.” He confirmed that a mistake had been made: Henry Hansen was not in The Photograph. On the evidence and by consensus, the Marine thrusting the pole into Mount Suribachi was Harlon Block.

  Vandegrift blamed the mix-up on the photographer, Joe Rosenthal, and not on the Marines, as had Ira. As for the twenty-three months of anonymity for their son, when attention to the photo had been at its peak, the commandant could muster only a stiffly worded harrumph: “It is exceedingly regretted that an incorrect identification should have been made.”

  No matter what the wording, Belle Block had been vindicated. With nothing more than the rear view of a blurry figure in a wirephoto from six thousand miles away, she had instantly recognized her son.

  Perhaps, in the end, it did not entirely matter that the Marines confessed their error to Belle at all. “I am sure,” said Maurine, “that no matter what the government said, Mother would have gone to her grave insisting that was her son Harlon on that photograph.”

  Belle knew her boy.

  Eighteen

  MOVIES AND MONUMENTS

  If everything isn’t black and white, I say, “Why the hell not?”

  —JOHN WAYNE

  THEY WERE NO LONGER BOYS NOW; they were postwar men. And still, everything they did was news.

  In 1947, the year the Cold War began, the nation still looked to the figures in The Photograph for reassurance. In February, on the second anniversary of the flagraising, wire-service photographs went out showing John in a suit arranging flowers in a funeral home; Ira as an Arizona farmer in an open work shirt; Rene in an undershirt, working in the hot Chicopee mill. When John graduated from the Wisconsin mortuary school, when Rene Jr. was born in Manchester, when Kathleen Bradley was born in Milwaukee, when John found a job in his birth town of Antigo—when all these things happened, the flashbulbs popped and the headlines told the tale.

  Ira continued to make headlines of a darker kind. His arrests for drunkenness in Phoenix and surrounding towns piled up. The local newspapers highlighted the arrests until they grew so commonplace they were no longer a novelty; then they dropped Ira’s scrapes with the law into the police log, with the rest of the petty-crime news.

  To the reporters and tourists who never left him alone, he remained tolerant, if distant. Ira took to stuffing an American flag in his back pocket while working in the cotton field, to satisfy the inevitable request of the strangers with their cameras. But he’d never talk about the event. Or the war. Not to the tourists. Not to Nancy and Jobe. (Nancy later recalled that Ira had tried to unburden himself to her once or twice, but had ended up sobbing.) Not to anyone, except perhaps to his best friend. His best friend, according to his cousin Buddy Lewis, was the bottle.

  After a while, it was not the tourists who plagued him as much as it was his neighbors on the reservation. The other young Pimas, when they broke their usual stoicism, liked to rib Ira in the wry, almost mocking style that flavored their culture’s humor. “Iwo Jima hero!” was the inescapable salutation. Ira had used this agitating kind of wit on his own Marine buddies. The difference lay in the subject matter. Probably no phrase in the English language was as torturous to Ira Hayes as “Iwo Jima hero.”

  “It wasn’t just that Ira had seen others do much more than he, and pay for it with their lives,” said Urban Giff, a fellow ex-Marine and later a Pima leader. “His problems were made worse by the fact that in our culture, it’s not proper for a person to seek recognition. I think he always struggled with this.”

  Struggled, and drank. And slipped a little further into the darkness.

  Ira was hardly alone in facing the demons that the darkness held.

  Betty Bradley learned to cope with John’s nocturnal weeping. But she was still taken aback one day when, tidying up the contents of John’s dresser, she discovered a large knife in one of the drawers. “I asked him why he had it, and he just said, ‘Oh, I don’t know,’” my mother remembers. “He wasn’t a hunter; he had no use for that knife other than for protection.”

  If the knife represented one layer of nighttime protection for John, the two martinis he often took before bedtime represented another. “He’d never get tipsy,” Betty said, “but I always wondered if he needed to have a drink to get him past his wartime memories.”

  The memories floated through the nights of many veterans. For some, they spilled into the daylight hours as well. Danny Thomas was in medical school when the flashbacks started.

  “I’d be sitting there in class looking normal,” he said, “but I wasn’t seeing what was there. I was seeing Chick on the beach, all the death on Iwo. It was like a movie screen wrapped around me. I thought I was going crazy. I went to Health Services. They hypnotized me and that cut out the flashbacks and I couldn’t remember the dreams. I knew I was still having them because I’d wake up wet from sweat. But I couldn’t remember them.”

  For George Wahlen, the Medal of Honor became a guarantee that the memories would never go away. “People want you to talk, the mayor wants to have a parade,” he recalled. “I was always being asked to speak somewhere, introduced as a hero. I didn’t feel comfortable with it.”

  Eventually George Wahlen hit on his own way of finding relief from the constant attention. In 1948 he enlisted in the Army and spent twenty years there.

  In January of 1947 the U.S. government began the long process of transporting the bodies of the Marines slain on Iwo Jima back home.

  Franklin Runyon Sousley’s remains were returned to his mountaintop community in Kentucky. The boy who had promised that he would come back a hero was buried on May 8, 1947, with honors in the small Elizaville Cemetery on a sunny, breezy Saturday. A Marine escort accompanied the coffin, and local veterans fired a rifle salute as it was lowered into the soil. A local newspaper correspondent wrote that the “volleys of shots echoed and reechoed. The soft notes of the bugle went out over the little village…and from somewhere in the distance came an echoing bugle. Strong men choked with emotion and women wept.” The governor of Kentucky stepped from the crowd and took Goldie Price’s hand in his.

  In the fall of 1947, Belle Block returned to the Valley—but not, as Ed had hoped, to reunite with him. She came to witness the burial, in the Weslaco city cemetery, of Harlon.

  She had driven from California, with her sons Mel and Larry, along the “river route” to El Paso, and from there down to the tip of the Texas knife-blade. With Ed at their side, they joined a crowd of nearly 20,000 that had gathered on a hot windless day to watch the caisson bear Harlon’s flag-draped coffin along Texas Avenue. Behind the caisson walked more than one hundred veterans, followed in turn by their families and friends in cars. Holding the reins of the horses that pulled the caisson, and walking on both its sides, were Harlon’s fellow Panthers: surviving members of the undefeated football team he’d played on; the boys who had enlisted en masse in January 1943.

  Among them were Glen Cleckler, who had fought on Iwo, and Leo Ryan, who’d been temporarily blinded at Tarawa. Leo watched the ceremony with a veteran’s detachment. “It had little to do with Harlon,” he said later. “It was Marine Corps pomp and glory. The real meaning of Harlon�
��the religious fact of his being, that boy going through the halls of the high school—that was for his friends to remember.”

  Cleckler felt the same way. “We guys who’d enlisted talked for an hour afterwards. Somebody said, ‘If old Harlon was looking at this he’d have a good laugh.’ Everybody was seeing him as a hero, but he was just Harlon to us.”

  From the perspective of half a century, Leo Ryan permitted himself to revisit that hot windless day. As it all came back, he said through tears: “All we had between the enemy and us was a pair of green dungarees. And I thought of Harlon out there leading young boys, sealing holes, fighting an unseen enemy, sleeping in a rocky hole. I wondered how many people think of the seriousness of this. So much is taken for granted. I hoped the efforts of guys like Harlon would be appreciated in the future.”

  Ed and Belle were civil toward each other that day, Mel Block recalled. But when it was all over, his mother got in the car and the three of them drove back to California. Belle never returned to the Valley.

  Mike Strank was buried at Arlington. Interment in the National Cemetery seemed fitting for the young man known universally as a “Marine’s Marine.” A busload of his family and friends came down from Franklin Borough for the occasion, on which thirteen other boys were also buried. Mike’s father, Vasil, consented to come—Vasil, who had not been able to cope with the Bond Tour. So did Pete, who could not talk about his time in the service or bring himself to look at The Photograph. John, Martha, and young Mary completed the family presence.

  The Arlington ceremony did not provide closure for the afflicted Strank family. As with John Bradley, but lacking his resolve to keep the outside world at bay, the Stranks endured for years afterward the calls and visits from veterans groups, reporters, the curious. One visitor, in the fall of 1948, was Harry S. Truman, storming through his legendary reelection campaign. Leaving his entourage at the doorstep, the President trooped into the living room of the tiny duplex that Vasil and Martha had scrimped to acquire many years earlier. As he took leave of Mike’s parents, Truman noticed young Mary standing quietly by the door. He bent down and said to her, “It was an honor to meet your parents.”