Flags of Our Fathers (13 page)

In January 1943 a photo appeared in the Valley newspaper. It was a photo of thirteen Weslaco Panthers, lined up facing Marine Captain D. M. Taft. Captain Taft held a Bible in his left hand; his right hand was up, as were those of Harlon, Leo Ryan, Glen Cleckler, and their other buddies as they took their oath.

For Belle it was a last, painful compromise. The move to the Valley, Harlon leaving the Adventist school, working on the oil trucks, the girlfriends, playing football on the Sabbath, and now joining the Marines, the unit that was known as “the first to fight.”

But Harlon had no fear, he wasn’t worried. He was part of an enthusiastic team, going along with his buddies. He was eighteen years old, his head full of images about the glory of war. Commandments about killing were only an abstraction.

The recruiter in San Antonio had misspoken. The boys did not stay together. They were split up after boot camp and scattered among various units. It was part of the breakdown of the individual’s past life, his remolding as a Marine.

At boot camp near San Diego, Harlon was unfazed. He quickly took to wearing his helmet at a cocky angle and made friends quietly.

Joe Pagac was a bunkmate of Harlon Block’s during that training program. The two new buddies had mess duty together, which gave them liberty from night to noon. They visited San Diego just about every night: They went bowling. Sometimes Harlon would tell Joe about what it was like to drive an oil truck to Brownsville. How he loved to play football. He’d talk about how beautiful and green the countryside was in the Valley. (Joe had always thought it was dry.)

Good duty, all in all, mess duty, Joe Pagac remembered. Nothing at all like what they were about to experience.

Like Ira, Harlon was proud of qualifying as a parachutist in the Marines. He invited his brother Ed Block, Jr., then living in San Diego, to come and watch his first jump on May 22, 1943. “I stood outside the fenced-off area to watch Harlon jump,” Ed remembered. “That night we celebrated at my house. I asked Harlon how it felt to jump. He said, ‘It scared the hell out of me!’

“Harlon also said that he snapped his watchband when he leapt from the plane,” Ed continued. “He and some buddies searched the landing area for the watch but couldn’t find it. Then a week later in another jump Harlon told me he was floating down and had to spread his legs to avoid landing directly on his watch!”

There was a saying in the Corps that there are only two types of Marines: those who are overseas and those who are about to go overseas. And on November 15, 1943, Harlon shipped out in the distant wakes of Mike and Ira.

The Raiders were the toughest outfit in the Pacific, and Mike Strank quickly became one of the toughest of the Raiders. This was the outfit that introduced “gung ho!” into the American fighting lexicon. The Raiders were legendary risk-taking killers in the South Pacific, the Green Berets of their day. Theirs was the original Mission Impossible: to storm beaches considered inaccessible in advance of larger forces; to launch rapid, surprise raids with light arms against an enemy that always outnumbered them; and to roam behind enemy lines for long periods, cut off from their own command.

Mike was more than six feet tall now, and weighed nearly two hundred pounds, all hard muscle. As the brawny man replaced the wiry miner’s boy, the introspective musician gave way to the seasoned, charismatic leader. The intuitive brilliance he’d shown in childhood now focused acutely on the inner subtleties and structures of Marine life. Mike concealed his searching intelligence beneath a rough-and-tumble exterior.

He embraced life in the Raiders on two seemingly contradictory levels. The emerging warrior in him savored their cutting edge of lethal aggression. At the same time, the instinctual big brother in him responded to their strong ethic of cooperation and mutual protection; of working constantly as a seamless unit. That, after all, was what “gung ho” meant: not mindless fanaticism, but constant teamwork and brotherhood.

Mike landed with the Raiders at Uvéa and Pavuvu, where they found little opposition.

Bloody Bougainville was a different story.

Bougainville was a key “hop” in the Pacific command’s island-hopping campaign. Guadalcanal had been the first hop, and the capture of Bougainville, the northernmost island in the Solomon chain, would push the Japanese out of the South Pacific once and for all.

Bougainville was a wet hell. As the Marine commander there later wrote, “Never had men in the Marine Corps had to fight and maintain themselves over such difficult terrain as was encountered on Bougainville.” There were centipedes three fingers wide whose bite caused excruciating pain for a day, butterflies as big as little birds, thick and nearly impenetrable jungles, bottomless mangrove swamps, man-eating-crocodile-infested rivers, millions of insects, four types of rats larger than house cats, and heavy daily torrents of rain bringing enervating humidity. And sacred skull shrines, reminders of days of cannibalism and head-hunting.

John Monks, Jr., quoting a Marine on Bougainville, described what night was like: “From seven o’clock in the evening till dawn, with only centipedes and lizards and scorpions and mosquitoes begging to get acquainted—wet, cold, exhausted, but unable to sleep—you lay there and shivered and thought and hated and prayed. But you stayed there. You didn’t cough, you didn’t snore, and you changed your position with the least amount of noise. For it was still great to be alive.”

Chuck Ables, who fought on a number of Pacific islands, called Bougainville “the closest thing to a living hell that I ever saw in my life.”

There was also the matter of an entrenched Japanese force: a murky army whose numbers and exact distribution were impossible to determine beneath the jungle foliage.

Air attacks on the island began in August of 1943 and continued through the fall. Diversionary landings on nearby islands occurred in October, as distant Marine units hurried to the area, completing the encirclement strategy. Among the arrivals were Ira Hayes, who landed at Vella Lavella in October, and Harlon Block, who hit New Caledonia four days before Christmas. For both these boys, their hard-won parachutists’ wings were now matters of ancient history. What they would experience on the island of Bougainville would change their lives forever.

As these great events were thrashing themselves out in the Pacific, a certain mild-mannered young fellow in Appleton, Wisconsin, was preparing, cautiously and under a few critical misimpressions, to do his duty.

Jack Bradley was nineteen in January 1943. Two years out of high school, he had just completed an eighteen-month apprenticeship course in the mortuary arts. But it was clear that he would be drafted at any moment.

Jack’s father, Cabbage, the old infantry doughboy who was tending bar in an Appleton hotel, had some advice. Enlist in the Navy, he urged his son. You’ll have a clean place to sleep; none of those foul trenches like the ones I endured. (To the fathers of other sons, Cabbage was a little more blunt. Have your son go into the Navy, he told them. He’ll die clean and on a full stomach.)

And so on January 13, 1943, my father and Bob Connelly hitchhiked from Appleton down to Oshkosh and signed up with the U.S. Navy. Cabbage had convinced his son and himself that the Navy would take one look at Jack’s mortician apprenticeship and escort him to a relatively safe position, such as pharmacist’s mate.

Cabbage was half right. The Navy did, in time, take notice of the apprenticeship.

The hometown recruiter had told Jack that he would be stationed at the Great Lakes naval base, not far from Appleton. But the ink was scarcely dry on their signatures when Jack and Bob were assigned to the massive Navy training center in faraway Farragut, Idaho.

The boys’ first stop was Milwaukee, where they stood naked together for their physical exams. Then they boarded a troop train with wood-burning stoves for the three-day haul west. This wasn’t what they’d been expecting, but it was an adventure.

They pulled in, exhausted but in holiday spirits, at four
A.M.
on February 10, 1943, at Athol, Idaho, to board a Navy bus for Farragut. In their cockiness they assured each other that they were in “Asshole, Idaho.”

At Farragut they got their heads shaved, saw their first mountains, came down with a virus called “cat fever,” stayed very cold most of the time, drilled in rowboats on a frigid lake, eight guys to a side, and started to imagine the good life on board a ship.

In March, young Jack Bradley received yet another jolt: He had been selected as a Seabee—the Navy engineering cadre that often did its road-building and railroad-repairing work under hostile fire. “Your dad stormed into the office and demanded to know why,” Bob Connelly recalled to me. “They told him it was because he was color-blind. Why they wanted color-blind Seabees, your father never could figure out, but he hit the roof. From what he knew, the Seabees worked like hell and fought on land. He told them, ‘I’m
not
color-blind! I had a beer last night! Test me again!’

“Your father and I,” Connelly concluded, chuckling, “didn’t care for guns.”

Jack Bradley got his wish. He was not required to join the Seabees. But this bit of luck, which Jack thought would keep him far from the front lines, ensured he would later participate in the worst battle in the history of the Marine Corps.

But Jack had some more good duty in front of him. In the fall of 1943, about the time Harlon sailed off for the South Pacific, Jack Bradley was transferred to Oaknoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California. This was the type of duty he had imagined.

But he wasn’t far from the fighters. It was his job to change the dressings of the burned veterans of Pacific battles, to empty their bedpans, to give them their painkillers, to adjust their IV’s. He was new to this work and young-looking to my later eyes, but to his fellow seventeen-and eighteen-year-old corpsmen he exuded a certain maturity. He was called “Doc” now.

Jack thought he had it made, working with the doctors and nurses in clean, ordered rooms. And San Francisco beckoned just across the bay for weekend getaways. Bill Shoemer, who had worked with Jack at his father’s funeral home in Appleton, was a fellow sailor who received a letter from his buddy aboard ship: “Jack wrote kidding me about being on duty in the Pacific while he was in Oakland with all kinds of liberty.”

But for Jack Bradley, the good life was about to change.

Rene Gagnon enlisted in May of 1943, two months after his seventeenth birthday. Until then, he’d kept on working at the Chicopee textile mills, working right up until his Army draft notice arrived. A friend of his remembered what cinched his decision. It hadn’t been the indignation after Pearl Harbor. It hadn’t been the inspiration that welled up after Guadalcanal. It had been something a little more. At about the time he got his draft notice, the handsome young boy had spotted the famous Marine recruiting poster and was knocked out by the uniform, by those snazzy dress blues and whites. His attitude, his friend recalled, was essentially: I’m goin’ in anyway. So I may as well look good.

After secretly promising Pauline he would come back and marry her, Rene was sent to Parris Island in South Carolina. He made Private First Class in July 1943, and transferred to the Marine Guard Company at the Charleston (South Carolina) Navy Yard. Like his civilian life, his Marine career seemed to be going nowhere in particular. That would eventually change.

There are few direct accounts of what Mike, Ira, and Harlon experienced on Bougainville. We do know that Mike was there longest, fighting on what is always the single toughest day, D-Day.

Mike, the indomitable leader, with the safety of his boys his uppermost goal, now saw too many of his boys fall dead right beside him. He heard their last words, saw the tears that flowed from their eyes just before they closed for the last time.

On November 1, 1943, along with 14,000 other Marines of the 3rd Division, Mike splashed ashore on the island of Bougainville at dawn in high surf. The waves pitched the landing craft this way and that and a number of the boats smashed into each other. For several young Marines, their leap from the craft into the surf was their last living act: They drowned immediately in the deep water.

Mike and the other landing Marines were raked by a devastating cross fire of Japanese machine guns and artillery fire. The Japanese resistance there was far more concentrated than the Marines had been able to detect, and within minutes the churning water was a chaos of blood, bodies, and swamped equipment.

Mike and the landing Marines could see no enemy; none of the invaders could; it would become an all-too-common frustration of sea-to-land assaults in the Pacific campaign. The Japanese were concealed by dense jungle foliage that spilled all the way down to the waterline. And they were protected by another type of shield that would recur from island to island: concrete bunkers. At Bougainville, the preinvasion naval bombardment was supposed to have destroyed these bunker positions, but none of them had been hit. The Navy had played it safe, launching some of the bombardment from a range of over seven miles. As the official Marine history later summarized, “The gunfire plan had accomplished nothing.” And because of that, many young Marines were dying all around Mike.