Flags of Our Fathers

by James Bradley

  “It’s as simple as that,” he’d say. “Simple as that.”

  But a flagraiser’s existence wasn’t always so simple.

  In 1979, the Chicago Tribune writer Mary Elson was following up on Rene’s death and surprised John Bradley at his desk at the McCandless, Zobel & Bradley Funeral Home.

  He gave her about “ten agitated minutes of his time,” puffing “nervously on a cigarette…sitting on the edge of his chair in the electric pose of a runner ready to bolt from a starting block.”

  He spent most of those ten minutes downplaying the perceived heroics of the flagraising. But in two of his sentences he revealed his thinking about that eternal 1/400th of a second. “You think of that pipe. If it was being put in the ground for any other reason…Just because there was a flag on it, that made the difference.”

  Here my father captured the two competing realities of The Photograph. It was an action of common virtue, not uncommon valor, as plain as a pipe.

  But because of a fluke photo—a stiff wind, a rippling flag—this common action represents valor in the eyes of millions, maybe billions of people.

  The reporter Mary Elson grasped none of this and wrote in the Chicago Tribune that John’s pole comment was “an oddly irrelevant afterthought.”

  Odd? Irrelevant? A casual afterthought? I don’t think so.

  My dad had given Mary Elson the key to everything. “Just because there was a flag on it, that made the difference…” But just as the inquiring reporter in Citizen Kane had missed the significance of “Rosebud,” Mary Elson remained oblivious to the revelation John had handed her.

  By the early 1980’s, the men of Easy Company were in their sixties. Their families grown, their work lives nearing an end, many of them felt an urge, long dormant, to reconnect with one another; to remember with their buddies.

  Dave Severance became the catalyst for these reconnections. A career Marine, he had left the infantry to become a fighter pilot after World War II. He flew sixty-two missions in the Korean War, and won the Distinguished Flying Cross and four Air Medals before retiring with the rank of colonel in 1968. But as with anyone who had walked in the black sands, Iwo Jima would remain the defining event of his life. With the instincts of a company captain, Dave compiled a list of Easy Company veterans, searched for their addresses around the country, and began a newsletter round-robin that soon prompted several reunions.

  Dave invited my father to all the reunions, but he never went. The burden of being an “immortal hero” and the press attention he’d attract made it impossible.

  “I’d love to go,” he told my brother Steve once, “but I couldn’t just go and be myself and visit with the guys I wanted to. I couldn’t just be one of the guys.”

  Perhaps there were other considerations as well. Perhaps they were similar to those revealed to me, through tears, by John Overmyer, a corpsman who had gone through medic training with John and was with him on Iwo.

  “I stayed away from reunions at first; I didn’t want to remember, but I’m glad now that I’ve been to a few,” Overmyer told me. “I went through life wondering how I could be so proud of something that was so bad. I had twenty out of thirty of my guys killed within ten or fifteen minutes. I couldn’t get them out. I was their nineteen-year-old doctor, priest, and mother. But I couldn’t save them. It took two buddies to get me through that night. But the next morning, when someone cried ‘Corpsman!’ I got out of my foxhole and went to help him. I did it. I kept going.

  “The number-one motivation on Iwo Jima was to stand with your buddies and not let them down. And all my life I was proud of that, but I couldn’t talk about it. But after going to a reunion I found others who felt the same way. And now I feel better.”

  My father probably felt that need to seek out comrades for an affirmation of feelings. But his fame as a figure in The Photograph would not let him go.

  Or maybe it was something else. Something too painful to reopen. In 1964, when he was forty and I was nine, my father hinted at why he couldn’t talk about Iwo Jima. But I was too young to really understand.

  My third-grade class was studying American history. When we got to World War II, there, on page 98 of our textbook, was The Photograph.

  My teacher told the class that my father was a hero. I was proud as only a young son can be.

  That afternoon I sat near the back door of our house with my history book open to page 98, waiting for Dad to come home from work. When he finally walked through the door, I jumped toward him before he’d even had a chance to take off his coat.

  “Dad!” I exclaimed. “Look! There’s your picture! My teacher says you’re a hero and she wants you to speak to my class. Will you give a speech?”

  My father didn’t answer me right away. He closed the door and walked me gently over to the kitchen table. He sat down across from me. He took my textbook and looked at The Photograph. Then he gently closed the book.

  After a moment he said, “I can’t talk to your class. I’ve forgotten everything.”

  That was often his excuse, that he couldn’t remember.

  But then he went on: “Jim, your teacher said something about heroes…”

  I shifted expectantly in my chair. I thought now I would hear some juicy stories of valor. Instead, he looked me directly in my nine-year-old eyes signaling that he’d like to embed an idea in my brain for the rest of my life.

  Then he said: “I want you to always remember something. The heroes of Iwo Jima are the guys who didn’t come back.”

  Simple as that.

  Six years went by before I discussed the subject with him again. And for some reason, on one ordinary night—it was 1970—it all bubbled up to the surface. I asked him about Iwo Jima. And persisted through the initial silence.

  And that was how I learned about one special hero of Iwo Jima. And about why he didn’t come back.

  It was just a normal evening in the Bradley household. Everyone else was asleep, except for Dad and me. He was forty-six then. I was sixteen, a high-schooler with pimples. The two of us were sitting up late, as we often did, watching Johnny Carson. For some reason that I’ve since forgotten, I brought up the subject that I knew by then was practically taboo. Iwo Jima.

  Any information would have satisfied me. A couple of sentences. He’d never told me anything substantial. But as usual, on this night my father kept his silence, at least at first. I remember how he gave a half smile at me, then looked back at the TV—the blue screen reflecting in his glasses—then shook his head, sighed, glanced at me again.

  On this night I decided not to let it go. After a long silence, I said: “Well, Dad, you were there. The Battle of Iwo Jima is a historical fact. It happened. You must remember something.”

  Again he listened to my question, then looked back at the TV. His mind was working, he heard me, but there was only silence.

  I persisted. Finally he closed his eyes and dropped his head back against the headrest of his easy chair. Then he rubbed his forehead and said, “Geez.” It sounded more like an anguished expulsion of air: Sheeesh!!

  And then my father broke a long silence.

  He said: “I have tried so hard to black this out. To forget it. We could choose a buddy to go in with. My buddy was a guy from Milwaukee. We were pinned down in one area. Someone elsewhere fell injured and I ran to help out, and when I came back my buddy was gone. I couldn’t figure out where he was. I could see all around, but he wasn’t there. And nobody knew where he was.

  “A few days later someone yelled that they’d found him. They called me over because I was a corpsman. The Japanese had pulled him underground and tortured him. His fingernails…his tongue…It was terrible. I’ve tried so hard to forget all this.

  “And then I visited his parents after the war and just lied to them. ‘He didn’t suffer at all,’ I told them. ‘He didn’t feel a thing, didn’t know what hit him,’ I said. I just lied to them.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was young, unable to fathom the d
epths of emotion he had just revealed. And so we sat there for a few minutes in silence letting Johnny Carson’s next guest change the subject.

  Many years later, in researching my father’s life, I asked Cliff Langley, Doc’s co-corpsman, about the discovery of Iggy’s body. Langley told me it looked to him as though Ralph Ignatowski had endured just about every variety of physical cruelty imaginable.

  “Both his arms were fractured,” Langley said. “They just hung there like arms on a broken doll. He had been bayoneted repeatedly. The back of his head had been smashed in.”

  Those were the relatively benign wounds. But they were not the worst of what had happened to Iggy, who had faked his urine sample to get into the Marines; Iggy, the proud Marine, the small, fresh-faced boy who had endured “Polack” ribbing with a good-natured smile.

  My father remembered the worst thing. He kept the image alive under his many protective layers of silence and solitude. He never disclosed the worst thing to me, not on that night in front of the TV, not ever. But he mentioned it to my brother once, while I was in Japan.

  Japan. How amazing it is that I found my way to that country—lived there—grew to love it—learned its history and studied its religious traditions—and did all of this without consciously connecting Japan to my father’s past. Perhaps the currents of thought and motivation run deeper than we sometimes think.

  I was hypnotically drawn into this old land, into what struck me as an almost mystically refined, cultured society. I’d arrived from a country where people joked about Japanese robot-workers building cheap cars, living in boxes, and eating rice and fish heads. What I found instead was an infinite lacing of social refinements that had evolved over centuries.

  Here was a crowded island country smaller than California, but with 110 million people living on it. Eighty percent of that terrain was mountainous, compacting the available living space to an even greater density. Centuries of close living had distilled an elaborate system of courtesies designed to make this dense cohabitation enjoyable.

  I grew more and more attuned to these rituals of humility and politeness. I didn’t reflect on it at the time—indeed, not until many years later—but what I was experiencing was the irreducibly real Japan: the Japan that had existed before the militaristic epoch that culminated in the Pacific War, and that will continue into the next millennium. It was a Japan my father could never imagine.

  Only now, years later, do I realize that the values of the Japanese and John Bradley were so similar. Quietness, politeness, integrity, honor, simplicity, devotion to family. Silent contemplation, looking inward for answers rather than prattling on.

  I wanted my parents to come visit me in this Japan that I loved. I was sure they would see what fascinated me. I couldn’t imagine any other reaction. I wrote them a letter of invitation. My mother responded that they couldn’t make it. I never knew why or what my father’s reaction had been—that is, until I spoke with my brother Steve in May of 1997, after Dad had died. He told me exactly what my father had said back in 1974 when he received my letter of invitation.

  “It was at the funeral home,” Steve told me. “Dad was agitated. He was jingling the change in his pockets like he did when he was upset.

  “He said you had invited Mom and him to visit you in Tokyo. He didn’t say anything for a long while. Then he blurted out, ‘Jim wants us to come visit him. They tortured my buddy. The Japanese stuffed his penis in his mouth. I’m not too interested in going to Japan.’”

  Memories of Iggy seemed to be always just under the surface. Maybe this accounts for my father’s remarkable silence about the Battle of Iwo Jima and the flagraising. Maybe.

  For many of the veterans, their memories of combat receded; supplanted by happy peacetime experiences. But there were others for whom the memories did not die, but were somehow contained. And for a few, the memories were howling demons that ruled their nights.

  Among these last, a disproportionate number, I believe, are corpsmen.

  It was the corpsmen, after all, who saw the worst of the worst. A Marine rifleman might see his buddy shot down beside him, and regret the loss for the rest of his life. But in the moment, he kept going. That was his training, his mission.

  But the corpsman saw only the results. His entire mission on Iwo was to hop from blown face to severed arm, doing what he could under heavy fire to minimize the damage, stanch the flow, ease the agony.

  The corpsmen remembered. And their memories ruled the night.

  Danny Thomas, whose hypnotism in 1947 had ultimately proved ineffectual in blotting out the dreams, could never stop seeing the bodies at the edge of the water. “That’s the thing I see in my dreams the most,” he told me once. “How the tide and the motion of the waves would rock them.

  “Just last night I woke up covered with sweat. I saw the shifting of the bodies on the Iwo Jima beach. My pajamas were drenched. I had to change. I still have to wring the sweat from my T-shirt on some nights.

  “There’s one body rocking on the sand that really grabs me. He’s partially buried. His right shoulder and part of his face are sticking out of the sand. His right hand is moving in the tide as if it is beckoning: ‘Follow me. Follow me.’ I saw that guy on the second day.”

  All combat produces unshakable memories. But consider Cliff Langley, who as Corpsman Langley labored side by side with my father on Iwo—3rd Platoon, Easy Company.

  He went on to serve in Korea and Vietnam with the Army. But there’s one battle that rules: “The dreams have lasted for years. At seventy-three I still get ’em. I’ve been in three wars and I haven’t got past Iwo yet.”

  After studying in Japan I was convinced I was an expert on Pacific history. At a Thanksgiving dinner at our family home in 1975, I was only too happy to enlighten my father and the assembled family as to the “real” reason we fought Japan in World War II: American insensitivity to Japanese culture and FDR’s severing of their oil lines forced Japan—an industrial beached whale—to attack Pearl Harbor in self-defense.

  The 350,000 “liberated” victims of the rape of Nanking and the millions who perished in the Asian Holocaust might have taken some exception to this point of view. But I was entranced with it, and confidently explained to the veteran of Iwo Jima seated across the table from me that it was his side that was to blame. Japan was the victim.

  Typically, my dad did not take offense that day of thanks. He nodded thoughtfully, his glasses glinting, and reached for his knife to cut the turkey.

  It would be years before I read of the atrocities the Japanese military machine had perpetrated on millions of people; years before I discovered that the “self-defense” rationale I was spouting off about had been rejected by the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal as bogus.

  John Bradley was fifty-two in 1975, and he knew a hell of a lot more about why we got into America’s War than I did. But rather than challenge me, he just nodded.

  He was secure in himself, his marriage, his family. He was a successful man. He owned a large home in Antigo, a summer cottage at Bass Lake several miles to the north, and a thriving funeral business.

  He possessed the things that mattered most to him: not fame or adulation, but a large, secure family and the respect of his fellow townspeople, respect that devolved from years of hard work, his attitude of service, and his contributions to his community.

  He could afford to nod in silent understanding and hand me another slice of turkey. In return for the slice of baloney I had just handed him.

  John’s heart was in bad shape by Christmas of 1993. Open-heart surgery, irregular heartbeat.

  He was seventy, and had mortality on his mind. He wrote his own Christmas cards that year. He reached down through the years and sent them out to his Easy Company buddies. When I met and interviewed those men after his death, they told me that John had sporadically written little Christmas notes over the years. But his 1993 card was downright chatty and included a photograph of his extended family. Did he know it would be his las
t?

  To Dave Severance, his old company commander, Doc confided: “I am not progressing as I should. My heart is not beating in its proper rhythm.”

  Betty, making the bed, discovered John’s rosary beads under his pillow.

  John Bradley’s death of a stroke in January 1994 was reported around the world. All the newscasts spoke of John Bradley’s passing, and we received clippings from as far away as Johannesburg, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.

  Everyone in the world media reported that the last surviving flagraiser had died. But to us that title seemed distant, disconnected from our dad.

  Fred Berner, editor of the Antigo Daily Journal, got it right when he wrote:

  John Bradley will be forever memorialized for a few moments’ action at the top of a remote Pacific mountain. We prefer to remember him for his life.

  If the famous flagraising at Iwo Jima symbolizes American patriotism and valor, Bradley’s quiet, modest nature and philanthropic efforts shine as an example of the best of small-town American values.

  I will always remember my dad for a little favor at the very end of his life.

  When he suffered his stroke, I was the only Bradley unable to drive to the Antigo hospital. I flew in from New York, the pilot holding the connecting plane in Chicago for me.

  At about one A.M. on Tuesday, January 11, I pulled into the hospital parking lot. I had been traveling for seven hours.

  I rushed into the Emergency entrance. The nurse on duty, who had never met me before, looked up and recognized one of “Johnny’s boys.” Without a word from me she said, “I’ll take you to your father.”

  I heard him before I saw him: loud, labored breathing. Extreme heavy breathing like that which results in fainting or death. “He can’t keep that up!” I blurted out to the nurse.

  Approaching his bedside, I was struck by how good he looked in spite of the chest wheezing up and down. His color was up, and he looked like my dad of old, my healthy dad.