Flags of Our Fathers

by James Bradley

  Dad never seemed to cultivate his leadership. He led a conservative life. He was not a star in any sense. But everyone liked John Bradley. Maybe part of his secret was that people felt safe talking to him. Maybe it was because of the way he listened to them. Those big ears of his, that got even more prominent toward the end of his life, were more than mere decoration.

  He was a believing, practicing Catholic. He went to Mass every Sunday, he confessed his sins, he believed the dogma. “Jeepers Christmas!” was the worst oath he ever swore. Church for him was a bright soothing presence. The priests were figures of respect. The sacraments marked births and adulthood and death. All of it was straightforward, practical, solid—just like John Bradley. We all knelt down and said the Rosary. It wasn’t that Dad insisted we do these things. He never spoke to us about faith. But his actions always spoke louder than words.

  His actions, in fact—the day-to-day actions of his long, quiet, worshipful life as a pillar of the Antigo community—spoke so loudly that the words we all wanted to hear never broke the surface: the words that would explain to us what the war had been like for him. What Iwo Jima had been like. And what it was like to have been a figure in The Photograph. This was the way John Bradley wanted it. His actions would be what defined him to us. The words we sought would have to come from someplace else.

  For decades—for an entire generation—those words remained unspoken. And so they grew unimportant, at least most of the time. We all knew about the photo, but we knew of no story behind it to give it meaning for us. Statues had been made with John Bradley’s figure in them, but my father wore no statue-shaped belt buckles; he lit no cigarettes with a statue-shaped lighter. His Navy Cross he kept out of sight; none of us knew he had been awarded it until after he had died.

  Neither I nor any of my five brothers and two sisters ever read a book about Iwo Jima while my father was alive.

  How could we be so incurious? It wasn’t ineptitude. We knew how to obtain facts. We understood how to use libraries. As we grew older we all attended universities, with their great resources. How could we have persisted in this state of not knowing?

  The answer, I think, lies in the attitude of unimportance my father projected toward the subject. “The subject,” for him, could never merely be the battle of Iwo Jima. Always, it would have to be complicated—adulterated—by his unwanted fame as one of the flagraisers. Thus it became unimportant. Importantly unimportant.

  “Reading a book on Iwo Jima at home would have been like reading a Playgirl magazine,” my sister Barbara remarked once. “It would have been something I had to hide.”

  And so it was only outsiders, strangers, who brought the subject up with him. Mostly these were the newspaper and broadcast reporters who phoned once a year, every year, in early February, near the anniversary of the flagraising. Dad never expressed anger or exasperation to these annoying inquirers. One of his strategies for avoiding that was to enlist us, his family, in handling as many of them as possible. We were trained never to put our father on the line when the calls came in. Instead, we were to tell the television networks and national newspapers that John Bradley was “unavailable, fishing in Canada.”

  My father never went fishing in Canada. Often, as we gave this excuse, he was sitting across the table from us.

  I don’t remember him ever articulating why he did not want to speak to the callers. The best he could do was to give a barely perceptible shake of his head as if he were dealing with a common inconvenience like hay fever or nearsightedness. It was his personal affliction.

  Or call it his aberration—that 1/400th of a second that welded him to a national fantasy. My father was a man firmly anchored to the world of real things, real values. He had no interest in theorizing, conjecture, high-blown sentiments. The Photograph represented something private to him, something he could never put into words. It didn’t represent any abstraction such as “valor” or “the American fighting spirit.” Probably, it represented Mike, Harlon, Ira, Franklin, and Rene, and the other boys who fought alongside him on Iwo Jima, boys whose lives he’d saved or tried to save.

  He never disparaged The Photograph. He just never said anything about it.

  John Filbrandt, an Antigo man who knew my father the longest, from the time they attended kindergarten together until my father’s death, once told me of the one and only time he heard my father say anything about the flagraising. A stockbroker had come from another community to make a presentation to their investment club. Someone tipped the stranger off about John Bradley’s past. The broker hurried over to my father.

  “I understand you are one of the men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima!” he began with a bright look in his eyes.

  Effortlessly, my father neutralized the man’s intrusive thrust without disturbing the social atmosphere. “Yes,” he replied gently, “that was a long time ago.” And steered the conversation to other things.

  I suspect he had an inventory of these preemptive phrases to deflect inquiries while not offending. Once he countered a query of mine with: “If only there hadn’t been a flag on that pole.”

  That pole. He always called it a “pole.” This reference is a key to the man and his view of the act. John Bradley was a sturdy and simple man, and plain, like the pole he raised. Helping Mike Strank with a pole—that’s what my father did. The phrase “raising Old Glory” was much too grand for my father and what he thought he did that day. Indeed, in his only interview, conducted by an Iwo Jima documentary team in Chicago in 1985, he revealed that he could have done without the heroic mantle all his life:

  Q: Considering all the fame the photograph achieved, if you had to do it all over again, knowing it would become famous, would you have jumped in as one of those six men?

  A: No, I don’t believe I would. If I knew what was going to come of that photo I am sure I would not have jumped in and given them a hand putting that flag up.

  Q: Why?

  A: I could do without the pressure and the contact by the media. I’m just a private man and I’d like to leave it that way.

  And he was at least consistent. When I began my search for my father’s past I asked my mother to tell me everything he had ever said to her about Iwo Jima.

  “Well,” she answered, “that won’t take long. He only spoke of Iwo Jima once, on our first date. I was probing him for details, and he spoke for seven or eight disinterested minutes. All the while he was absentmindedly fingering his silver cigarette lighter. And that was it. The only time he talked about it in our forty-seven-year marriage.”

  My brother Mark had to ask him about it for a history assignment once. My father’s answer was: “We were just there, we put a pole up, and someone snapped a picture.” End of interview.

  My sister Kathy hit a similar wall when she asked Dad to speak about Iwo Jima to her grade-school class. “Dad looked down, cast his eyes away, shook his head in the negative, but didn’t say anything,” she recalls. “I went to Mom and asked her about it and she said, ‘Your father feels the real heroes are the men who died on Iwo Jima.’”

  Why did he almost never speak of his past, and then only painfully, between long, excruciating silences?

  A lot of easy answers come to mind.

  “The press” covers one category. Dad deeply distrusted journalists, and with some reason. He’d been astonished, as a young man, to see how frequently reporters embellished interviews with him, even making up quotes when it suited their flowery visions. “They have the story written before they interview me,” was his oft-repeated opinion of the Fourth Estate.

  And they never got the heart of it right. They never understood the true essence of the flagraising. The press always insisted upon writing about the event in extremes, never in the realistic middle. Dad remembered (“Jeepers Christmas!”) how the papers had reported the flagraising as one of the valorous deeds in man’s history—the Marines slogging up the murderous slopes to plant the symbol of victory in a hail of gunfire.

  The rea
l story, as Dad saw it, was simple and unadorned: A flag needed to be replaced. The pole was heavy. The sun was just right. A chance shot turned an unremarkable act into a remarkable photograph.

  “You never know what they’re going to ask or how they’re going to portray it,” he told Mark a few years before he died, in explaining why he’d turned down a CBS affiliate’s request for an interview. The station management had agreed to any condition: They would try to get Walter Cronkite or Charles Kuralt, as Dad preferred; they’d keep the interview in a vault until after his death if he wished; they’d let him in on the editing. Anything. He refused.

  There were other plausible reasons: Iggy, for example. The pain and anger of remembering what had happened to Iggy, and of the pilgrimage Doc had made himself make to Iggy’s parents after the war, to give them reassurances.

  I’m sure that Iggy’s memory fueled Dad’s silence somewhat. On the other hand, I saw no other evidence that the war had embittered him. Bitterness was not part of his nature. He never spoke disparagingly of “Japs” or “Nips” or “the enemy,” or even “the Japanese.” Save for one terse remark to my brother, in explaining why he did not want to visit Japan, John Bradley did not continue to fight the war after he had returned home.

  What was it, then?

  I’ve come to believe that the answer may have been as uncomplicated, as unmysterious, as John Bradley himself. I think my father kept his silence for the same reason most men who had seen combat in World War II—or any war—kept silent. Because the totality of it was simply too painful for words.

  Some veterans cope with pain via alcohol or drugs. Others seek psychiatric counseling—or don’t seek it. Here is where I think my dad may have been a little different: He coped by making himself not think about the war, the island, his dead comrades. He coped by getting on with life.

  He seemed almost to have erased it from his memory. During the conversation when he told me about the day Iggy disappeared, he seemed almost unable to recall Iggy’s name. During his one TV interview, asked what he thought was the best thing about being a flagraiser, Dad was stumped. He’d never given it a thought. In that same interview he offered an amazing number of inaccurate details: where he’d taken his training as a corpsman, the exact circumstances of his getting to the flagpole.

  He had simply forgotten.

  But forgetting had not come easily for John Bradley. It had taken him a while to forget. He may have spoken about Iwo for only seven or eight disinterested minutes to Elizabeth Van Gorp on their first date. But after they were married, my mother told me, he wept at night, in his sleep. He wept in his sleep for four years.

  His family, friends, and community all understood that he wanted to be known for who he was, not for a larger-than-life image. He was comfortable with himself; he didn’t need any embellishment. And so his family, friends, and community closed around him to protect him from the inquiring world. In 1985, during the fortieth anniversary of the flagraising, John’s hometown paper printed an article about what it was like not writing articles on their most famous resident:

  Newspaper and broadcast stations from around the country contact Antigo Daily Journal editors, demanding to know why the newspaper hasn’t written a story on Bradley.

  Managing Editor Gene Legro, who has worked for the newspaper for almost forty years, said the paper had given up trying to interview Bradley because he didn’t want to be interviewed. He wants to be left alone. He wants his privacy and he’s entitled to that, Legro said.

  “Do you want to know about Bradley?” Legro asked. “He’s a nice guy.”

  We kids respected our dad’s wish not to talk about The Photograph, but sometimes our curiosity led us to explore what evidence there was of his wartime experiences. I remember a time when I was about six, rummaging in the attic among boxes of clippings about Doc Bradley that my mother had saved. (The three cardboard boxes we discovered after his death were not among these.) The clippings had to remain in the attic. Dad would have never tolerated these things being brought downstairs, displayed, talked about.

  I found a photograph of the original statue erected in honor of the photo and dedicated November 10, 1945. I found a newspaper clipping about my dad’s appearance in an Appleton court in 1946 on a speeding charge. The story told how the judge dismissed the case when he learned he was dealing with “John Bradley of Iwo Jima.”

  And finally I found a full-page newspaper ad from the Seventh Bond Tour, which he had participated in. It screamed: “You’ve seen the photo, you’ve heard him on the radio, now in person in Milwaukee County Stadium, see Iwo Jima hero John H. Bradley!”

  Hero. In that misunderstood and corrupted word, I think, lay the final reason for John Bradley’s silence.

  Today the word “hero” has been diminished, confused with “celebrity.” But in my father’s generation the word meant something.

  Celebrities seek fame. They take actions to get attention. Most often, the actions they take have no particular moral content. Heroes are heroes because they have risked something to help others. Their actions involve courage. Often, those heroes have been indifferent to the public’s attention. But at least, the hero could understand the focus of the emotion. However he valued or devalued his own achievement, it did stand as an accomplishment.

  The moment that saddled my father with the label of “hero” contained no action worthy of remembering. When he was shown the photo for the first time, he had no idea what he was looking at. He did not recognize himself or any of the others. The raising of that pole was as forgettable as tying the laces of his boots.

  The irony, of course, is that Doc Bradley was indeed a hero on Iwo Jima—many times over. The flagraising, in fact, might be seen as one of the few moments in which he was not acting heroically. In 1998 Dr. James Wittmeier, my father’s medical supervisor on Iwo, sat beside me silently contemplating my request for him to explain, or speculate on, why my dad never talked about that time. Finally, after many long minutes, he turned to me and softly said, “You ever hold a broken raw egg in your hands? Well, that’s how your father and I held young men’s heads.” The heads of real heroes, dying in my father’s arms.

  So he knew real heroism. He could separate the real thing from the image, the fluff. And no matter how many millions of people thought otherwise, he understood that this image of heroism was not the real thing.

  My father did not want his life dictated by what happened inside people’s heads when they saw The Photograph. The Photograph represented something to people that had no validity for John Bradley. Beautiful, elegant, inspiring, yes. The most reproduced photographic image in history, yes. A model for the world’s tallest bronze monument, certainly.

  And yet misunderstood. Fundamentally, crucially misunderstood. Unrepresentative, in fact—at least when judged against the thousands upon thousands of split seconds that Doc and his buddies witnessed during that battle.

  Antigo, the peaceable kingdom of my childhood, would be my father’s lifelong refuge from all this: a place of clarity and simple goodness, where people understood one another for who they were and what they actually did. Where hard work, service, and love of family counted, and not myth or fantasy.

  Antigo would be the one place in America where The Photograph did not distort things. Where its extraordinary power was overshadowed by the power of ordinary life.

  But my father’s longed-for reentry into this peaceable world was not to happen as quickly as he wished.

  On the second-to-last day of March 1945, in one of his last acts as President before he died two weeks later, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a secret order to Marine Headquarters in the Pacific. It was an order that further magnified the image’s impact in American life—further magnified the distance between John Bradley, the man, and Doc Bradley, the figure in The Photograph.

  Fifteen

  COMING HOME

  Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.

  —DUKE OF WELLINGT
ON

  IN SIX POCKETS OF AMERICA, six mothers waited for word.

  They did not yet know one another—or that they were soon to be forever linked by happenstance and history. At the end of March 1945 they were simply six random mothers among the 100,000 or so who waited for word from the Pacific. The newspapers, the radio, the newsreels at the movies had made it clear that a cataclysmic battle had occurred. Who survived, who was lost—this was still the great mystery.

  Six mothers: to be linked, for a while, with a seventh, through a painful accident of misidentification.

  In Weslaco, Texas, Belle Block felt that the word, in a sense, had already arrived, and the word was good. The Blocks had still not received Harlon’s March 1 letter reporting that he had “come through without a scratch.” But Belle felt secure. She felt an almost mystical connection to her boy because, as she was telling everyone, he was in the famous photograph. No one believed Belle; they asked her how she could know. But she did know, and because she knew, she felt somehow that Harlon was alive. Somehow The Photograph assured her that Harlon would not be killed.

  On a windblown day, toward the end of the month, a telegram from the Commandant of the Marine Corps arrived, tolling otherwise.

  But even as grief, borne of telegrams, began to flow into households such as the Blocks’, a different kind of current, a current of exaltation, gathered its own momentum in the nation. This current was borne of The Photograph. The Photograph seemed to illuminate the air around it; it released pulses of hope and pride and often tears in people who glimpsed it—even hardheaded people who would not think of themselves as susceptible to “inspirational” imagery.

  The public needed to touch The Photograph, own it somehow, and place it among sacred objects. The San Francisco Chronicle offered “Color Versions Hand-Painted by Trained Artists,” and sold out in a day. The California Legislature passed a resolution calling on the Post Office to issue an Iwo Jima Flagraising stamp to honor the bravery of the American fighting man. The AP in New York had established a “Joe Rosenthal desk” to handle the flood of inquiries about the photo. When the press wrote of it now, it was the “historic photo,” the “famous photo,” showing the “heroic” Marines raising the flag. There was almost no discussion of the facts surrounding the flagraising. The facts didn’t matter. The photo looked heroic, and that was enough.