Flags of Our Fathers (14 page)

Those who made it ashore had begun a descent into an island hell. A Marine captain later reflected that the day began with “steak and eggs served on white tablecloths by stewards. And three and a half hours and a short boat ride later,” he continued, “we were rolling in a ditch trying to kill another human being with a knife.”

Sergeant Mike would fight on for two months, until the end of the campaign.

Ira had enlisted wanting to “protect his family,” bursting with pride to be a member of a new storied tribe, the Marines. But Ira was a passive boy; no one remembered him ever raising his voice, much less getting in a fight. Now Ira had to kill, not at a distance, as in target practice, but close up.

Ira landed on Bougainville in the early hours of December 3. He and his company walked onto the island unopposed, observed by an unseen enemy. Jack Charles, who fought with Ira, recalled how elusive the enemy was: “Though we spent over a month on Bougainville, engaging the enemy in several firefights, while on patrol and on line with the third Marine Division, I can honestly say, few if any of us ever saw a Japanese. The jungle was that thick. And they always took their wounded and dead with them…they were masters at camouflage.”

Late on the first day, the leader of the patrolling Company K sent Ira Hayes and a couple of other Marines ahead to scout in the remaining moments of daylight. The boys had groped their way about three quarters of a mile when they came upon a creek. A company of Japanese soldiers was splashing and bathing in the river. The Japanese did not detect the Americans’ presence. Vastly outnumbered, Ira and the others crept back and reported their findings to the patrol leader. Company K dug in for the night and tried to keep silent to avoid detection. A monsoon swept in, soaking the tense and terrified boys. They did not dare rise from their soaked foxholes for fear of being picked off by a sniper.

Dawn. And a long, hot day of being pinned down. Company K stayed concealed, rank with its own sweat, watching larger enemy units pass by almost within arm’s reach. Night again.

That night Ira’s childhood vanished forever. He was sharing a foxhole with Bill Faulkner. Faulkner remembered: “We took turns sleeping and Ira was sitting in one corner with his rifle between his legs and I curled up in another to get a little shuteye.”

Faulkner was jolted awake by bloodcurdling screams. Horrified, he tried to make sense of the violent lashings in the darkness. Ira was struggling with his bayoneted rifle. Impaled on the long knife blade was a Japanese soldier, still screaming. The infiltrator had crept soundlessly to the edge of the foxhole. Then he had sprung with lethal intent toward the two young Americans. In the darkness, he had not glimpsed the point of the blade that was now killing him.

The next morning, what remained of Ira’s platoon was ordered to retrieve the bodies of the Marines who had been killed on the hillside the previous day. Machinegun fire greeted them and dropped several in the now-familiar bloody heaps. They fell back and called for artillery. After forty-five minutes the barrage was lifted and the paratroopers continued on, met by only intermittent snipers.

A Marine named Dobie Fernandez remembered how terrible it was. The rain had been so heavy, he recalled, it had mutilated the corpses to the point of being unrecognizable. And there was that stench, that nearly unendurable stench.

Bill Faulkner remembered it, too. “When we reached the spot where they were, we found the Japs had driven wooden stakes through their arms, chests, and legs, pinning them to the ground. One of the Marines who came with us to get the bodies had a brother who was one of the dead. It’s tough seeing your brother like that.”

Ira Hayes fought on to the end of the battle, quiet as ever, betraying his emotions to no one. But Ira had the screams of dying men in his head now; his hands had held that bayonet with a struggling, writhing human impaled on it. It’s not known if the dreams and memories that haunted him in later life began here. All he would reveal in a letter to his mother from Bougainville was: “I’m okay, thanks to my Lord.”

Harlon Block arrived on Bougainville on December 21, just days before the island was declared secure. To boys like Harlon, growing up in quiet 1930’s America, there had been little exposure to the horrors of war. There was no TV; movies offered sanitized, heroic images of battle; radio was for entertainment; and even actual pictures of the world were scarce—the first photo magazine,
Life,
didn’t hit the newsstands until 1935.

But Harlon Block saw plenty of reality when he fought near “Hellzapoppin’ Ridge.” Arriving at the battle site, Harlon moved in a macabre world of splintered trees and burned-out brush. The earth was a churned mass of mud and human bodies. The streams were filled with blasted corpses. Dead Japanese snipers hung from trees. Harlon, the Seventh-Day Adventist, was getting his first glimpse of the world’s wickedness as he trudged past these remains of friends and enemy dead.

Nor were the Japanese through. As the Marines moved forward, a Japanese machine gun stuttered and the enemy artillery roared, raking the American line. A Japanese counterattack slammed into the Marines’ left flank. Harlon Block found himself in close-up combat, hand to hand and tree to tree. With knife, gun, and bare hands, the Texas pass-catcher fought in the confusion of English and Japanese screams. His clear-cut world of right and wrong had dissolved into a brutish fight for survival. The survivors on both sides eventually withdrew to endure another night and fight another day.

Harlon’s sweetheart, Catherine Pierce, corresponded with him throughout the war. She remembered that his letters gave her the feeling that the war was traumatic for him. He wrote obsessively of bailing out of planes, of falling into unknown territory. And of Bougainville.

Harlon had enlisted at the age of eighteen, wanting to be one with his Weslaco team. He couldn’t imagine the horror that lay behind the concepts of “fighting for your country” and “doing your duty.” Now as Harlon learned what his duty really was, the glorious concepts faded away.

Something happened to Mike, Ira, and Harlon on Bougainville. They would never discuss it, never identify exactly what had affected them so. But for the rest of their days death was never far from their thoughts.

The three Pacific veterans sailed home from Bougainville on separate boats that left the second week of January. They would have a month to stare at the ocean and ponder their private thoughts before they arrived in San Diego on February 14, 1944.

At about this time, Franklin Sousley was getting his first taste of life as a Marine. He had entered the Corps on January 5 and reported to the recruit depot in San Diego for boot camp.

One of Franklin’s buddies, Tex Stanton, remembers boot camp as “weeks of monotonous training, learning how to march, how to follow orders, how to shoot a rifle, how to be a real Marine.”

Tex remembers Franklin as “a big redheaded country boy,” serious about proving himself as a Marine. But nobody ever said that war had to be all serious. Not as long as Franklin R. Sousley had anything to do with it.

He quickly noticed something interesting about the lyrics to the stirring anthem that all recruits had to memorize, the “Marine Corps Hymn” (“From the halls of Montezuma/To the shores of Tripoli/We fight our country’s battles/In the air, on land and sea”). What Franklin noticed was that those lyrics could be transferred nicely to another tune: specifically, the raucous, rousing tune of the Roy Acuff hillbilly standard, “The Wabash Cannonball” (“Listen to the jingle/The rumble and the roar/As she glides along the woodlands/through the hills and by the shore”). Franklin was glad to belt it out in his high nasal twang for any leatherneck who would listen, slapping an upended rifle as a makeshift bass fiddle. Somehow, he escaped time in the brig for that one.

Franklin left the boys laughing, but in a letter home to his mother, Goldie, he revealed the challenge of being a young man far from home: “I believe I am homesick for once in my life. If you had treated me mean before I left, it wouldn’t be so hard to forget; but you were so good that when they start raving around here, I think of home.”

Franklin was like so many of the millions of country boys who served in World War II for whom a big weekend was playing Ping-Pong at the USO for two days. As his buddy Pee Wee Griffiths remembers, “Franklin was a big overgrown kid with rust-colored hair. He’d lumber along speaking in his Kentucky drawl. He was a big smiling country boy.”

In that January of 1944, eighteen-year-old Private First Class Rene Gagnon was serving in a Military Police unit guarding the Navy Yard at Charleston, South Carolina. He had endured a hot and humid boot camp at Parris Island during the summer of 1943. Other “boots” who trained with him would later remember little about him other than he was “a nice guy.” But there was one thing. In his dress uniform, the handsome French-American looked “like a movie star.”

That January marked the end of Jack Bradley’s safe passage through the war. A fellow pharmacist’s mate told Jack he was transferred to Field Medical School. This meant he was being transferred to the Marines, to be a combat medic, a corpsman. Not good news. Jack raced downstairs and indeed found his name on the list. He must have been stunned. His strategy had been to join the Navy to avoid fighting with the Army. Now he found himself a member of the most rugged group of warriors in the world.

At Field Medical School (FMS) outside San Diego, Navy corpsmen were trained to care for Marines in battle. FMS had classes in specialized life-saving skills, and Jack was also expected to endure the rigors of battle like any leatherneck. That meant tough Marine Corps conditioning.

“We had been through Navy boot camp,” Corpsman John Overmyer remembered. “But with the Marines it was much more rugged. We were learning from hardened combat veterans. We definitely got the message that we would someday have to do under fire what we were being trained to do. The Marines were serious.”

“There was culture shock for us Navy guys going into a Marine school,” Corpsman Gregory Emery recalled. “The discipline and demands in the Marines are immediate. No boot camp in another service can ever match the Marine Corps. It’s immediately obvious, from the very first second.”

Jack wore Marine uniforms, Marine dog tags. He watched Marine combat films and learned how to fire his .45-caliber pistol. He rose at dawn to hike with Marines who never slowed down.

He was shown footage of horribly wounded Marines in actual combat. “We learned how to crawl out under fire and rescue injured men,” Corpsman Overmyer recalled. “We learned how to make a splint with weeds, paper, twigs, anything.”

I asked Mr. Overmyer what he remembered, years later, as the most noticeable difference between his Navy and Marine training. “Pride,” he answered immediately. “You felt a different sort of pride being trained in the Marine tradition. The Marines made us feel we were part of a special team.”

In February and March of 1944, Jack continued his FMS training while Rene was back east. Franklin was granted a furlough after boot camp, as were Mike, Ira, and Harlon after they docked in San Diego.

To the civilian noncombatant, war was “knowable” and “understandable.” Orderly files of men and machines marching off to war, flags waving, patriotic songs playing. War could be clear and logical to those who had not touched its barb.

But battle veterans quickly lost a sense of war’s certitude. Images of horror they could scarcely comprehend invaded their thoughts, tortured their minds. Bewildered and numbed, they could not unburden themselves to their civilian counterparts, who could never comprehend through mere words.

Mike, Ira, and Harlon—these three boys back from their Pacific Heart of Darkness—now embraced death. Two were convinced their next battle would be their last. And one lingered on for ten years before he was consumed by his living nightmare.

Ira wrote to his parents when he touched land. His letter, posted from San Diego, was typically upbeat: “Well, I’m back in Dago…arrived here Monday with the whole regiment. We get furloughs starting Monday for 30 long days…I’ll get home the fastest way possible.”

He was back on the Gila Reservation a few days after that. Nancy saw the change in him as soon as he stepped off the bus.

At twenty, Ira was stockier, Nancy noticed; he had gained about fifteen pounds of muscle during boot camp and it had stayed on him during the jungle nightmare on Bougainville. The slim, quiet boy had been transformed into a very formidable-looking young man.

But the real change, his mother saw, was in his affect.

He looked old, Nancy thought. Standing there in his overseas cap. So much older than she remembered. He’d always had a solemn face, his full mouth in repose a natural frown. But now those turned-down corners did not broaden so easily into a smile. Hardly at all, in fact.

Ira had always been a solemn-looking boy, Nancy thought. Now he looked, at times, downright sullen.