Flags of Our Fathers (17 page)

By April, all units were drilling in the field, in the midst of physically draining tactical marches and three-day bivouacs.

Meanwhile, the division’s many specialists would gain engineering expertise in state-of-the-art demolitions, mapmaking, land mine use, camouflage, and bridge building. Still others would receive intense training in communications, from enormous vehicle-mounted radio receivers to portable “walkie-talkies.” And every boy in uniform was expected to meet the highest standards in conditioning, on both dry land and in the water. Swimming was a heavily emphasized skill. Those who could not swim were taught how. Those who knew how were taught to swim better.

As spring gave way to summer, Spearhead accelerated into the culminating elements of its training agenda. It launched into the first stages of amphibious training: conditioning these thousands of hard-bodied marksmen and technical specialists to move over the sides of troop transports into small landing vehicles—LVT’s—and then to climb from these into shallow water, and then onto enemy beaches, all under intense hostile fire. Here was where Spearhead’s training began to conform most closely to its finely calibrated special mission.

At Camp Pendleton, the troops got their first exposure to the terrifying skill of climbing over the rail and down the side of a skyscraper-sized transport ship and into the small LVT’s. They worked with dry-land mock-ups here; steep wooden walls covered with netting. Battle-condition training would come soon enough.

These exercises quickly gave way to full-fledged mock assaults. These games marshaled the division’s nine landing teams, each an infantry battalion with guns, armor, and other support elements. In early July, using transports that set sail from San Diego, these units participated in two landing assaults on San Clemente Island off the California coast. At the conclusion of the second landing, the troops immediately reboarded the transports and headed for their final exercise of the Pendleton phase: an assault on what their officers now called “Pendleton Island,” and described to them as “a strongly held advance air base of the Japanese in the Western Pacific—a base that menaced U.S. forces.”

No one was saying yet just where that “strongly held air base” lay.

It was during these final phases of training, in July of 1944, that a distinguished visitor began to make himself visible at Pendleton. Many of the troops caught sight of him at a distance, observing them through binoculars: a figure wrapped in a dark cape, sitting in a canvas chair beside an enormous black limousine. This was their Commander in Chief, come all the way across the continent from Washington to observe Spearhead; the legendary President whose “Fireside Chats” had kept some of these boys spellbound beside the radio with their families only a few years before. This was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Throughout the six months at Pendleton, all of Spearhead’s boys, veterans and new Marines alike, sensed a subtle but unmistakable new climate of respect from the brass. Gone was the ritualized domination of boot camp. These Marines were held to strict standards of discipline and physical endurance. But they were no longer mere recruits now; they were certified leathernecks. Crisp professionalism replaced dictatorial fury as the abiding mood of their universe. A year from their first action, the boys of Spearhead were already a brotherhood.

“
Semper Fidelis
—always faithful—it meant you were faithful to the guys around you,” is how Easy’s Donald Howell put it. “If you didn’t have those guys around you in battle, you didn’t stand a chance. With another Marine around you, you knew you had a chance.”

Robert Leader goes so far as to say this brotherhood involved a deep love: “I believe we were out there fighting for our buddies. It’s deceptive because we’d fight over a beer, insult each other’s sister, but then we were ready to risk our lives for each other. It’s like a domestic fight where the cop goes in and the man and woman, at each other’s throats moments before, beat up the cop! No Marine would admit he loved another Marine but it was true. We had a love for each other.”

My father typified this brotherhood in many ways. As the senior Navy corpsman of Easy Company, Doc had functional connections with the other five flagraisers. Though technically assigned to the 3rd Platoon, in practice he supervised the seven other corpsmen in the company; he would see to the needs of the entire company in combat. In this way, 2nd Platoon members Mike, Harlon, Ira, Franklin, and Rene came to see Doc not only as a potential lifesaver but as an integral part of their daily lives. He trained as a Marine alongside these boys, and earned their respect as an equal in the service. His platoon commander, Lieutenant Keith Wells, would later give Doc and his fellow medics the ultimate compliment: “My corpsmen were Marines.”

Mike Strank, an immensely popular sergeant who had some of the élan, if not the notoriety, of John Basilone, had his own colorful way of expressing brotherhood. Mike was a prototypic “big brother,” a tough and fearless warrior who led by example, not by intimidation. Many young Marines idolized Mike. And Mike in turn softened his martinet’s aura with frequent outbursts of goofy, profane humor.

A lover of the weekly “liberty” leaves that sent the Marines flocking into nearby towns and bars for fun, Mike was amused at a necessary ritual that accompanied each liberty: the mandatory testing for venereal disease of each man by a medic, as a chaplain stood piously by.

“You’d have to pull out your pecker and let them see if it was going to ‘cry,’” was the way Tex Stanton described the testing for telltale fluids. “And one day Mike made up this poem about it.”

As Tex recalled the poem, it went:

Walk right in

And don’t salute

Down with your skivvies

And out with your root.

Skin ’er back and give it a squeeze,

Do an about-face and stand at ease.

Another hazard of those environs, besides the clap, was the rattlesnakes. The rattlers had not been impressed by all the upheaval and the sudden onslaught of Marines. More than one trooper found himself frantically bashing a coiled diamondback with his rifle. One night a rattler visited a tent occupied by Tex Stanton and Franklin Sousley, among several others. Tex chuckled over it half a century later: “One guy reached up to get a bug off his neck, and it was the snake. He stood up all night after that.”

There were other, less lethal annoyances. The men of the 28th Regiment were encamped in a section of Pendleton, ten miles from the ocean, cut by a dramatic canyon. The original Spanish settlers had named it La Cañón de los Rosales, or Rose Canyon, a gesture to the many wild Castilians that carpeted the area. But that name quickly gave way to another one, far more relevant to anyone who had actually camped there: “Cañón Las Pulgas,” it came to be called, the Canyon of the Fleas.

The fleas were only part of the fun. Mornings were icy cold (reveille at six
A.M.
) and the water-showers were colder. It rained a lot that spring, and the boys were often wet.

Through all of this, my father was a calm center, a steadying influence on all the Easy Company boys around him. Just as the famous photograph showed him: there, in the midst of things, lending a hand. At twenty, he was already regarded as “the Old Man” among the corpsmen. He didn’t socialize much; scarcely took a drink during liberty. He made himself the company’s unofficial barber, cutting guys’ hair on request; otherwise he tended to stay in his tent, reading.

When he wasn’t crawling on his belly behind his platoon, that is. Most of his time was spent shadowing the riflemen, watching them maneuver, staying a little behind, alert for casualties. Doc, who Cabbage had recommended get a “clean bunk” in the Navy, would spend this year without sleeping in a real bed.

His kindness became his trademark. A Marine named Lloyd Thompson had injured his back severely, but did not report to sick bay. Every morning, Doc Bradley would show up at his tent to help him with his boots so he could meet reveille. James Buchanan always remembered how Doc not only treated him for cat fever, but stopped him weeks later on a company street at Pendleton to ask him how he was coming along. “No one else would do that,” Buchanan said. “He was kind.”

Father Paul Bradley (no relation) of Brooklyn, the 28th Regiment’s Catholic chaplain, recalled that Doc Bradley volunteered to assist in serving his first Mass at the camp—a typical gesture from my service-minded dad. “I asked, ‘Does anyone know how to serve Mass?’” the priest remembered. “Doc came forward. He knew all the Latin responses. He continued to be very religious. A lot of the guys went wild, but not Doc. He was very faithful attending the daily Masses.”

It was at Camp Pendleton that Doc Bradley met the doomed youth who would become his best buddy in the service and perhaps a key to his lifelong silence on the subject of his World War II experiences. It was here that my father met Iggy.

His full name was Ralph Ignatowski, and the name was nearly bigger than the boy who bore it. Like Doc, Iggy was a Wisconsin product, a baseball-and-bicycle kid, and the youngest of nine children in a close-knit Milwaukee family with strong European Catholic ties. His father, Walter, was born in Poland in 1885; his mother, Frances, in Germany in 1890. Ralph was the favorite in a family that would produce a priest (Father Bruce, the second youngest) and four servicemen. “We loved him so much,” his sister Julia said softly to me many years later.

Like Rene Gagnon, Iggy was young, almost unthinkably young, to be in combat training: He was seventeen during the advanced training at Pendleton; eighteen when Iwo was assaulted. Like Franklin Sousley, he seemed to lack the temperament of a warrior; he was a sunny jokester, a warmhearted family boy. His Marine photograph shows an intelligent, open adolescent face, clear-eyed and confident—a handsome face in an affable, jug-eared way. But there was steel beneath that surface gentleness: Ralph had been determined to enlist in the Marines upon graduation from Boy’s Tech in Milwaukee in the spring of 1944. But the Marines rejected him because of problems in his urine sample. Ralph could have sat out the war, no questions asked, at that point. Instead he returned to the induction center a few days later bearing a fresh urine sample. This one came from someone else. He made the grade.

And Iggy was proud to be a Marine, as his brother Al Ignatowski related to me years later: “I got a pass from the Army to visit Ralph at Camp Pendleton. I noticed a sergeant chewing out a young recruit. I told Ralph, ‘This is so different from the Army. You crucify these guys!’ But Ralph’s chest just swelled with pride as he replied, ‘That’s how we Marines do it!’”

At Pendleton, Doc and Iggy gravitated toward each other and quickly teamed up under the Marines’ “buddy” system. Although the Marines generally warned their troops against forging too many friendships—knowing that combat would rip huge, heartbreaking holes in these networks—the Corps recommended that each man identify one other who would be his close ally, eyes and ears, his alter ego in combat. And possibly the comforter of the other’s parents. On this the two Wisconsin boys formed their bond, a bond that quickly took on a comradely life of its own. They bunked together, ate ice cream together, went on liberty together, and generally came to know each other’s deepest hopes, fears, and joys.

Among the other beneficiaries of Doc’s kindness at Pendleton was Ira Hayes.

Ira’s mother, Nancy, had been right: Something had changed in Ira after Bougainville. Or if not changed, brought to the surface, grown darkly dominant. The God-fearing “good boy,” the earnest, reform-minded son who had wept on hearing the sermon “Alcohol versus Christianity,” was slipping back into the grip of the vice that would war with his good instincts and foreshorten his life.

He remained a good Marine (despite a growing paunch that made some wonder, mistakenly, about his endurance) and a respecter of Marines. He still cared about his “good buddies,” and would care about them until the end. But his inner circle of “good buddies” was a narrow one—Mike, Franklin, Harlon, and Doc were among its key members—and those outside it trifled with him at their peril. Playful Franklin, who would become a foxhole comrade with Ira under fire, triggered Ira’s edgy wit on their first meeting at Camp Pendleton when he asked him innocently: “What nation do you belong to?” “I’m an original American!” Ira fired back. “And that’s more than you can say.”

Ira respected Mike and Harlon because they, like him, were veterans tested by combat and the knowledge of violent death. His respect for Mike, in fact, bordered on adulation; he would talk to the Czech-born sergeant intimately and intelligently, as he would to no one else. Mike Strank, many recalled, was the only person who could get Ira to truly relax.

His bond with Doc was somewhat different. Like the other Marines, Ira sensed Jack Bradley’s gentleness and goodwill. Doc, for his part, sensed the limits of Ira’s tolerance, and respected these.