Flags of Our Fathers

by James Bradley

My young father stood, typically, at a remove, as the last great ceremony of his public life slowly dissipated; as the festive crowd and the beribboned generals drifted from beneath the gleaming monument and toward their cars. People around him noticed that he seemed already to have receded from the whirl of voices and faces around him. “He wouldn’t keep a conversation going,” said John Strank. “He’d answer a question politely, but wouldn’t initiate anything. I heard him say, ‘It was something that happened a long time ago…’”

  Finally—echoing the Bond Tour itself, nine years earlier in Washington, the fireworks fading in that summer night—it was over. The President and Vice President had departed the speakers’ platform; the generals and admirals were gone; the crowd thinned out. The three flagraisers prepared to take their leave of one another. They would never be together again.

  Ira Hayes, Rene Gagnon, and John Bradley had fought in one of the great battles of World War II; of world history. They had planted a flag on a mountain in that battle. They had seen the image of that planting raised to the status of enduring national symbol, a gesture toward the founding ideals of the Republic. They had come home to America and helped raise a vast treasury to complete the conquest of their nation’s enemies. Now they had witnessed their “immortal” collective image transubstantiated to bronze.

  This ultimate public investiture had transported the three across a subtle boundary. It was the iconic image, now, and not the men, who were fixed in history. At last, the surviving figures in the photograph were released to their individual destinies.

  Nineteen

  CASUALTIES OF WAR

  The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated the war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.

  —KURT VONNEGUT, Slaughterhouse Five

  WITHIN NINETY DAYS of the statue’s dedication, each of the survivors’ lives went its separate way. Rene was “angling” to capitalize on his fame, my father fulfilled his singular dream of buying a funeral home, and Ira Hayes was found dead—dead drunk.

  Pieced together decades later, these facts strike me as more than coincidence. It’s as if fate chose them to serve the image: to create that happenstance tableau atop Suribachi; to storm the country with its banner under Presidential orders; to give it celluloid life; and then finally to institutionalize it in bronze.

  Consider the Marine Corps Memorial as the ultimate transmutation of The Photograph. One hundred tons of bronze, requiring an act of both houses of Congress and the President’s signature to so much as chisel another word in its base. That’s as permanent as can be.

  To me it’s as if Ira, Rene, and John served the image from photo to film to bronze, and once it was safely in its final form, they were released to their individual destinies. Never again would they meet, never again would they serve The Photograph.

  A week before Christmas 1954, Ira was arrested again in Phoenix for being drunk and disorderly. Someone figured out that it was his fifty-first such arrest, dating back to April 4, 1941—one of two arrests he had experienced before entering the service.

  A caseworker for the U.S. Indian Service, Pauline Bates Brown, tried to help him during his latest downfall. “His attitude was not bitterness,” she remembered years later, “but some hurt that I couldn’t sort out.”

  The dedication of the Iwo Jima monument at Arlington provided Ira with a brief moment of public dignity; his last, as things turned out. He quickly returned home to a routine that never varied: menial work, the bottle, the police, the jocular but tormenting question from his fellow Pimas: “How’s the hero, Ira?”

  On the frigid morning of January 24, 1955—one month shy of ten years since he raised a flag—Ira was found dead at the age of thirty-two.

  He had walked over to an abandoned hut about three hundred yards from his small living quarters on the Gila River reservation, where he’d sat in on an all-night card game. The other players included Ira’s brothers Kenny and Vernon, the White brothers Harry and Mark, and a murky, erratic character named Henry Setoyant. The men drank wine as they played. Ira was winning; Henry Setoyant was not pleased by that fact. By the early-morning hours, everyone was drunk, and Ira was the drunkest of all.

  The White brothers were the first to call it an evening. Then Vernon and Kenny said, “Let’s go home, Ira.” But by that time Ira and Henry Setoyant were arguing, clumsily pushing each other. So Vernon and Kenny left.

  It was Setoyant who came to the Hayes household with the shocking news the next morning. When they heard it, father Jobe, mother Nancy, and brother Kenny all raced across the hard bare ground toward the abandoned hut. They found Ira’s body nearby, next to a disused rusting car: lying facedown in a pool of his own vomit and blood.

  The coroner ruled it an accidental death due to overexposure in the freezing weather and too much alcohol.

  Two thousand people, many of them weeping, gathered outside the Cook Presbyterian Church in Sacaton for services on January 25. Five American flags hung at the altar. At two P.M., six young Pima Marine Reservists bore Ira’s coffin into the little church and up the central aisle past two rows of benches to the altar. Ira was dressed in a green Marine uniform. A choir sang hymns in Pima and then in English. The gray-haired pastor, Esau Joseph, likewise spoke in both languages. “We are gathered to pay final respect to our fellow tribesman,” he told the mourners. “He was a good man; he wished harm to no human being. On foreign soil he fought that men may inherit peace—a peace which he himself has found only now.”

  The following day, Ira’s body lay in state at the Arizona Capitol Rotunda. Thousands stood in line to pay tribute, overflowing the rotunda and spilling far outside the Capitol. The State Legislature stood in recess; Governor Ernest W. McFarland gave the eulogy. More than forty years later another former governor, Rose Mofford, said, “I remember it well. It was the biggest funeral I’ve ever seen in Arizona.”

  Nancy Hayes tried to maintain her self-possession. “He was always talking about the Marines,” she told a reporter. “He was so proud to be a Marine.” But she broke into sobs as she spoke.

  He was buried on a snowy day at Arlington National Cemetery. The grave site was at the bottom of a hill off Pershing Drive, just down the slope from the small tombstone marking the burial place of the great World War I general John Pershing, and next to the fresh graves of thirty-four privates, noncommissioned officers, and cooks who had died in Korea.

  Rene attended. When a reporter asked him about Ira, the old frictions slipped away. “Let’s say he had a little dream in his heart that someday the Indian would be like the white man—be able to walk all over the United States.”

  John did not attend. But from his home in Antigo, he remarked that Ira’s death “makes him truly a war casualty.”

  A book, two movies—one starring Tony Curtis, the other Lee Marvin—and a song by Johnny Cash would all later mythologize Ira’s death. In these versions he died either because of Anglo society’s exploitation of him; because of his guilt over staging a “phony” photograph; or because he was not elected to a leadership post within his tribe.

  His brother Kenny Hayes, the only survivor of Ira’s last drunken night, told me in 1998 he is convinced Ira died as a result of his scuffle with Henry Setoyant. That Ira died because of a fight with a fellow Pima. Whether Ira was pushed or tripped, what’s clear is he was simply too drunk to break his fall and get up.

  What’s also clear—to me, at least—is that the notion he died young as a result of his fame is just bunk. Today a battle-scarred Ira Hayes would be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome, and there would be understanding and treatment available to him. But in the late forties and early fifties, Ira had to suffer alone. Suffer daily with images of and misplaced guilt over his “good buddies who didn’t come back.”

  The Photograph will forever inspire paeans to glory and valor among those who see the figures as immortals. To those of us who knew them as ordinary men, there’s another
side to the story.

  Imagine six boys from your youth. Line them up in your mind. They are eighteen to twenty-four years old. Select them now; see them. How many marriages, how many children will intersect their lives?

  Now consider that other than my father, only one other flagraiser married. And that other than my family, the only offspring sired by the six young flagraisers was Rene Gagnon, Jr.

  I bonded immediately with Rene Jr. (“pronounced ‘Rainy,’ like a wet day”), when he confided that his namesake regarded his participation in the most revered military moment in history as “as significant as going to the mailbox.” I chuckled; it was something my father could have said. Of course, only a flagraiser could utter those words. Such a sentiment from a historian or even from another Marine who had fought on Iwo Jima would be sacrilegious.

  Rene Jr. described his father’s life as an existence torn by the knowledge he had done something quite ordinary on the one hand and the public’s perception of him as an immortal hero on the other. And also by the neverland of his marriage to Pauline.

  Late in his life, Rene complained of living a life of a celebrity one minute and a “John Doe” the next. This stress was a constant throughout his days.

  “It was an emotional roller coaster,” Rene Jr. said. “He would lead a normal life and then he would be invited to a parade, a function, and he would show up and be treated like a little god. The people meeting him at the airport gate, the drivers, the newspaper people, the autograph-seekers. Then it was over and he’d have to unwind for days, sometimes weeks, from being the ‘hero’ to leading a normal life. It was stop-and-go heroism.”

  But Rene never stepped away from his roller coaster. Acknowledging the cheers of a Rose Bowl crowd at halftime; dedicating another statue; appearances as a “mystery guest” on TV; another speech; waving from the convertible to the crowds lining the parade—he rarely said no. One minute the hero, and back home the airline clerk, an employee in his wife’s travel agency, and finally a janitor.

  So why couldn’t he step away? There seem to be three explanations.

  First was Rene’s natural passivity, his blowing with the latest wind. “Mr. Gagnon, it would be a great honor and a proud day in our city’s history if you would address our group.” Heady stuff.

  Second, Rene always expected his 1/400th of a second of fame would pay off. Soon after the 1954 statue dedication, Rene was searching for a sponsor for his nationwide speaking tour. In a promotional interview he admitted, “This [the experience] is all I have left. My wife and Junior need the things in life we haven’t had.” Rene was thirty-two years old.

  A sponsor never came forward. The speaking tour never got off the ground.

  Twenty-one years later in his last interview, Rene, at the age of fifty-three, was singing from the same sorry songbook. He bitterly inventoried his lost “connections”—the jobs promised him by government people when he’d been at the height of his fame, jobs that never materialized. “I’m pretty well known in Manchester,” he allowed to a reporter. “When someone who doesn’t know me is introduced to me, they say, ‘That was you in The Photograph? What the hell you doing working here? If I were you I’d have a good job and lots of money.’”

  And then there was Pauline. Probably the determining reason.

  Lillian Lebel, an employee in the Gagnons’ travel agency, remembers the divergent outlooks of Rene and Pauline: “Pauline loved the fact that he was famous. She liked the attention it brought to her. I remember how she was visibly excited about a 1975 trip to Washington, D.C. She went shopping for new clothes. Rene had an ‘I couldn’t care less’ attitude. He didn’t want to go, but Pauline insisted. If it was up to him, he would not have gone.”

  Even her own brother, Paul Harnois, admits: “She pushed him. She wanted the pride, she wanted to go on the trips, wherever there was an event. She enjoyed it more than him. He couldn’t care less if he went and she cared a lot. It affected her big-time. Pauline pushed him to be a hero.”

  Pauline was like the public: She embraced the idealized image, never grasping Rene’s conception of the ordinariness of his action.

  “All he’d say was, ‘I just happened to land there and we put up the flag and someone took a photo,’” was how Rene Jr. described his father’s recollection. Exactly as my father recalled it. But Pauline could never accept such an ordinary interpretation.

  Pauline figured Rene’s fame as a transcendent hero was the vehicle to a good life. But when that vehicle did not perform to her expectations, she rebelled.

  Rene Jr. remembered a visit in 1959 by his grandmother Irene: “My dad made a small mistake while fixing a door. My mother started screaming at him, ‘You’re stupid, you’re ignorant, you’re no good!’ Grandma had enough. She stood and said, ‘Take me home. This man built this house with his bare hands. He is talented, and the end of the world is not here!’ My mother and Grandma never shared a room again.”

  Rene tried marriage counseling. But Pauline would send Rene alone to the therapist (after all, it was his problem!). He would try to get away, fleeing with an airline ticket to some exotic place. But he always came back.

  One day in early October of 1979 Rene and Pauline tangled once again. In the aftermath, Rene Jr., who was then thirty-two, advised his father, “You have to resolve it with her.”

  “He just said, ‘I have no answers. There is no way out. There is no escape,’” Rene Jr. later recalled. “‘No escape!’ That shocked me.”

  Three days later, on October 12, a janitor at Colonial Village, Frank Burpee, discovered that the door to the boiler room of one of the buildings was jammed. He got a crowbar and pried it open. On the floor lay his fellow janitor, Rene Gagnon, dead. In his hand was the inside handle to the door. Apparently he had dislodged it as he grappled with the door in the throes of his heart attack.

  No way out. No escape.

  He was fifty-four.

  Papers across the country ran the story on page one, with “Rene Gagnon” and “Iwo Jima Flag” umbilically attached in the headlines. Many of the stories noted that the only remaining survivor among the six flagraisers was John Bradley, fifty-six, a funeral director in Antigo, Wisconsin. But “Bradley was in Canada vacationing Saturday and couldn’t be reached for comment.”

  My brother Steve was present when our father got the news. “Dad answered the phone at the funeral home and it was a reporter,” he told me. “He got off the phone and said to me, ‘Rene Gagnon just died, so I’m out of town, fishing in Canada.’ The phones rang off the hook for a week, and he didn’t answer them.”

  But the press knew, as it always did, where to find Rene. Reporters descended on Manchester. At the Phaneuf & Letendre Funeral Home, where his remains lay, a reporter from the Chicago Tribune named Mary Elson pushed her way toward the casket. Rene Jr. promised her an interview later. In it, he was typically thoughtful and compassionate as he analyzed his father’s tortured life.

  “There were a lot of heavy thoughts my father was not capable of understanding,” he told Mary Elson. “He was just a young kid doing his part for his country, and suddenly everywhere he went, people were saying, ‘You’re a hero. You’re a hero.’ And he was thinking, ‘What did I do?’

  “…He was happy he did it [raising the flag] and that he would go down in history. But he didn’t do it to go down in history.”

  In her story, the Tribune’s Elson described the eulogy at Holy Rosary Church.

  “We don’t have to single out an event in his life,” the pastor intoned, as a Marine honor guard stood by the flag-draped casket, lodged awkwardly between the first five rows of wooden pews.

  But of course the pastor did single out an event, equating the flagraising at Iwo Jima with man’s continual battle with evil and concluding: “Rene Gagnon was respected by millions for what he stood for—a man that remains to us a sign of life, victory and courage.” It was a majestic tribute and one with which Gagnon probably would have been the first to disagree.

  S
he had it right. Even in death, Rene was overshadowed by his photographic image.

  He was interred in a mausoleum in Manchester. Because of his short length of service and his lack of medals, the government ruled that he was not eligible for burial at Arlington.

  But the government did not reckon with Pauline. She mounted a telephone campaign, driving home the point to military officials that they did not want to deal with the adverse publicity that the disgruntled widow of an Iwo Jima flagraiser could generate. It took nearly two years, but on July 7, 1981, newspapers carried photographs of Pauline at the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial, gazing up at her bronzed hero on the day of his Arlington burial.

  “This is our thirty-sixth wedding anniversary, so the day has special meaning to me,” she told the press. She added: “It is appropriate that Rene will be interred very near to the Iwo Jima monument. He will be just across the street.”

  The headstones for Mike and Ira at Arlington are similar to all the others there: simple white slabs that denote only their names, ranks, and birth and death dates.

  But Pauline saw to it that Rene’s stone was distinctive. On its back is a bronze relief of the flagraising and an inscription:

  FOR GOD AND HIS COUNTRY HE RAISED OUR FLAG IN BATTLE AND SHOWED A MEASURE OF HIS PRIDE AT A PLACE CALLED IWO JIMA WHERE COURAGE NEVER DIED

  Twenty

  COMMON VIRTUE

  There are no great men.

  Just great challenges which ordinary men,

  out of necessity, are forced by circumstances to meet.

  —ADMIRAL WILLIAM F. “BULL” HALSEY

  ONE OF MY DAD’S FINER QUALITIES WAS SIMPLICITY.

  He lived by simple values, values his children could understand and emulate.

  He had no hidden agendas; he expressed himself directly. He had a knack for breaking things down into quiet, irreducible truths.