Flags of Our Fathers (12 page)

Mike Strank, in camouflage, on Bougainville.

Four

CALL OF DUTY

Those who expect to reap the blessings of liberty
must undergo the fatigues of supporting it.

—THOMAS PAINE

ON THE DAY JAPANESE BOMBS surprised the sailors at Pearl Harbor there was a six-year spread among the flagraisers-to-be.

Pennsylvanian Mike Strank was the oldest at twenty-one, already a Marine corporal with two years of service. Pima Ira Hayes was an eighteen-year-old sophomore at the Phoenix Indian School with eight months to go before he enlisted in the Marines. Six months younger than Ira, Jack Bradley was a recent high-school graduate and apprenticing his way to a Wisconsin funeral director’s license. Harlon Block was seventeen, still a school year away from his senior heroics for the Weslaco Panthers. Franklin Sousley was a sixteen-year-old junior in high school, rushing home to do his chores. Rene Gagnon was only fifteen, in his second and last year of high school, soon to melt into the routine of New Hampshire mill life.

Mike was three years older than Ira, six years older than Rene, large gaps for young boys. The boys would always behold Mike as their grizzled leader, the “old man.” The six boys would meet each other for the first time in April of 1944 when they came together at a new camp to form a new Marine division. Each of them arrived there by different paths.

Mike Strank got to the war first.

He had enlisted on October 6, 1939—the only one of the six flagraisers to sign up before America entered the war. He plowed through boot camp at Parris Island, his 180-pound frame taking on hard bulk by the week. Mike was a “born leader,” the oldest of the Strank boys, whom Vasil had relied upon to steer John and Pete the right way. Now the Marines quickly recognized his talents.

Mike thrived on the routine and loved this rough-and-tumble man’s world. The former French horn player with the photographic memory fit right in with the Marine Corps demands for excellence.

Private First Class Strank sailed first to Guantánamo Bay for additional training in January of 1941. America was at peace, but the Marines had been practicing amphibious assaults against Caribbean islands for over sixteen years by now. Since 1924, Marine leaders had been predicting that their next major challenge would be conquering islands in the Pacific. And they would be ready.

Corporal Strank was back at Parris Island by April of 1941, and he began molding other young Marines at New River, North Carolina (now Camp Lejeune). He became Sergeant Strank two months after Pearl Harbor.

In March 1942 Mike returned home for a short leave. Friends observed that Mike had thrived in the Marine Corps. He had an impressive physique to match his confidence and intelligence. His body rippled with strength, his bright white smile attractive against his dark tan. “Mike changed in the Marine Corps,” remembers his brother John Strank. “He had bulked up and was solid muscle.”

Three months later he was headed for combat. Not toward Europe as he had hoped, to help avenge his ravaged Czech homeland, but in the opposite direction: He joined the great swarm of young American men hastily assembled, trained, armed, and rushed west to stem the shocking Japanese onslaught in the Pacific.

At about the same time, Ira Hayes was shedding the vestiges of his Pima Indian boyhood at boot camp in San Diego.

He’d enlisted on August 26, 1942. Ira’s enlistment surprised many because he certainly wasn’t a warrior type. He was quiet, passive, and noncompetitive. “In our culture we don’t encourage competition,” Dana Norris told me. “We lived in a cooperative society, we leaned on each other, did things together.” But somehow Ira got it into his head that he should go off to fight for his country with the Marines.

His mother, Nancy, remembered Ira’s determination to be a Marine: “He just made up his mind to go. We didn’t want him to go. We wanted him to stay. But he brought home his papers and we signed them. He said he wanted to go and defend us.”

The Marine Corps recruiter noticed that Ira already had an arrest record. In the past year he had been jailed twice for being drunk and disorderly. No one remembers how or why Ira began drinking. But the record is there. Perhaps the Corps hoped their discipline would make him change his ways.

His Pima culture had enveloped him on the day before he set forth in America’s War. Nancy Hayes invited the tribal elders, church leaders, and choir to dinner in his honor. The guests enjoyed a sumptuous feast—jackrabbit stew, Jobe’s favorite dish, cooked in clay pots over flaming mesquite branches; spicy tortillas, fried potatoes, wild spinach, beans whipped into a pudding.

Then each guest spoke to Ira about honor, loyalty, his family, and his people. The Pima abhorred war and all its brutality; but in this instance, the elders agreed that it was necessary.

The choir sang hymns, and each guest embraced young Ira Hayes and said a private good-bye. All prayed for his safety.

His early letters home from San Diego show that his boyish innocence did not vanish overnight. Thoughts of home were on his mind on August 29, 1942, when he wrote his “Dear Folks”:

I’m really grateful for the big dinner you gave me and the people you invited. Things those old men said are really helpful now when you realize all they said about
God taking care of me and I really feel that he is. I’m being a good boy and always will because right now in times like this you have to get on the right way of life.

And he signed his letter with a sign of his new pride in his position:

From a guy who is proud he’s a Marine

and in his country’s service.

Ira H. Hayes

And a somewhat later correspondence revealed an earnestness that is especially touching, given the demons that Ira battled later in his life:

Today, Sunday, this morning me and another fellow went to church and heard a good sermon. The sermon was “Alcohol versus Christianity.” Which was a swell sermon made me cry to think I was once a fool but glad and happy to think that I have redeemed myself before my Lord. Therefore I am not scared in whatever the future brings me.

The Marine Corps, with its proud tradition, was the perfect organization to introduce this young Pima to the outside world. Ira wrote home that his fellow Marines were “swell guys, the best friends a fellow could have.” He would “not take a thousand dollars to separate from them.”

And being a Pima and a Marine meant Ira was doubly proud. When he read a newspaper clipping that his mother mailed him about Marine Corporal Richard Lewis, the first Pima killed in action in the war, “Ira wept tears of pride,” a fellow Marine recalled.

Marine Corps boot camp is widely recognized as the most demanding recruit training in the world. But Ira wrote home that he enjoyed it and when the other guys complained of sore muscles and aching feet he “felt sorry for them.” On the sharpshooter range he scored just six points short of expert. He was so proud of his achievement that he included a small sketch of his sharpshooter’s badge in his next letter home.

A sign of how good a Marine Ira was is that when he completed boot camp he applied for and was accepted for parachute training. Jumping out of airplanes in 1942 was a challenging and dangerous business. Marine parachute school accepted only the best candidates. Even though the training was restricted to these elite, there was a forty percent washout rate.

But Ira was determined. His buddy William Faulkner remembered the first time the two of them jumped from an airplane. “He went from brown to white and I went from white to green,” Faulkner said. “He hit the ground hard, like a sack of wet cement. We were both scared, but we did it.” And Ira wrote to his parents: “Everytime I land and get out of my chute harness, I look up and think did I really do it. Then I thank God for safety and courage.”

Ira earned his USMC Paratrooper wings on November 30,1942. He was proud to be the first Pima to graduate from parachute training. His buddies dubbed him “Chief Falling Cloud.” The Marines photographed Ira crouched with his parachute ready to jump from an airplane. The photo caused a sensation back home when it appeared in the Pima
Gazette
and the Phoenix Indian School
Redskin
.

“Everyone in school saw Ira’s photo as a paramarine,” Eleanor Pasquale remembered. “We were all proud of him. He made us proud to be Pimas.” And Ira was proud of his elite status as a paratrooper. He wrote: “I’m glad you are proud of me and I don’t blame you. Everybody must think I am a fool. But it means a lot to me. I’ll say I’m glad to be here in the Para Battalion. It’s been said time and time again around here that the Parachute outfit was the toughest and best equipped outfit in all the branches of the military, that’s why we get paid extra.”

And he began signing his letters: “Sincerely, a Paratrooper, PFC I. H. Hayes.”

He was assigned to Company B, 3rd Parachute Battalion, Divisional Special Troops, 3rd Marine Division. The good boy was now ready for war.

The summer and fall of 1942 had been eventful on fronts far distant from the football fields of south Texas. In August, about the time Harlon was drawing his pads and helmet, massive American air attacks began in Europe, and German planes pulverized Stalingrad.

The North African invasion began in November, around Homecoming time. And in the South Pacific the Marines’ stunning victory at Guadalcanal—the first American land battle of World War II—would ignite new waves of patriotism and fighting fervor among ardent, impressionable American boys.

It certainly ignited the Weslaco High Panthers. During their winning season in the fall of 1942, Glen Cleckler had the idea for all of the seniors on the team to enlist in the Marine Corps together after they graduated in May. If Harlon had any qualms about fighting he kept them to himself. It would have been difficult to voice his pacifist background, as he was the only Seventh-Day Adventist on the team. It would have been much more comfortable to go along with his buddies, to be part of the team.

Glen broached the idea with the principal, who not only endorsed it but also arranged for the boys’ classes to be accelerated so they could enlist early. Patriotic fever ran high in the Valley.

Harlon told his parents he was going to enlist along with his football buddies. For Belle the news could not have been worse. War. Fighting. Guns. The Marines! Belle pleaded with Harlon to enter the medical service, to avoid the killing. As a Seventh-Day Adventist Harlon had a legitimate out; he didn’t have to fight.

If Harlon had stayed in the Adventist school he would have heard other voices of caution. “My brothers went in as conscientious objectors,” Harlon’s girlfriend, Catherine Pierce, recalls. “They served in the medical corps to help save lives, not to take them. I don’t know why Harlon didn’t consider that option.”

But at Weslaco High School there were no forces to amplify his Adventist background. Just the opposite. There were enthusiastic newspaper articles praising the boys for their patriotism. The high school held a special pep rally, with cheerleaders shaking their pom-poms for the boys as they were introduced to thunderous applause.

“Mr. Block sided with Harlon,” Leo Ryan told me. “He said it would make him a man.” Belle was beside herself. “She said, ‘I won’t sign those papers,’” Mel Block remembers. “Dad signed them.”