Flags of Our Fathers (43 page)

Not long after that, Jack was holding Betty tightly in his arms and telling her, “I love you with my whole heart and soul.” Betty was touched; taken by the way Jack said those words, “heart and soul.” No one had ever said that to her. “I knew he really loved me,” she said.

John left the next day for more surgery on his shrapnel wounds at Bethesda Naval Medical Center.

When his surgery was complete, his obligations as a figure in The Photograph resumed. November 10, 1945, would mark the 170th anniversary of the Marine Corps. To commemorate it, Felix de Weldon had struck a twenty-five-foot statue of the six boys. De Weldon, John, and Commandant Vandegrift would dedicate it in front of the Navy Building on Connecticut Avenue in Washington. That night, John would be interviewed coast-to-coast on the NBC Blue network, his last “hero” broadcast before he left the service. “If you are not busy at 9:30
P.M.
Saturday,” he humbly wrote to Betty, “perhaps you could listen in.”

In this valedictory broadcast, flanked in the studio by Commandant Vandegrift and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, John focused his remarks not on himself but on his comrades, the Marines. “The thing that no corpsman will ever forget is that no matter how badly hurt they were, they never complained,” he said. “We lived with them and buddied with them, and it wasn’t a question of taking care of a patient, but of looking after your friends. That’s the way I will always feel about the Marines.”

Three days later he was discharged. He was twenty-two and had spent thirty-four months, a seventh of his life, in the Navy—the outfit he’d joined so that he would not have to fight on land.

He made straight for Appleton. He proposed to Betty and they were engaged on December 3. In January 1946, he began classes in the Wisconsin Institute of Mortuary Science in Milwaukee, while working part-time at the Weiss Funeral Home there. The life he had dreamed of in California, in Hawaii, on the sulfur island, was becoming a reality. The life before that was already fading into the ether.

Ira boarded a ship from Japan, after a month with the occupational forces, on October 25, to return home. It was his eleventh and last military transport. He landed at San Francisco on November 9 and was discharged from active duty at San Diego on December 1, 1945. Just turned twenty-two, he had spent thirty-nine months of his life as a Marine, twenty-three of them in three overseas tours.

Pete Strank, one of Mike’s two younger brothers and a Navy man, came home too, in a sense. In another sense, Pete never came home.

Pete had resembled Mike: big, at six foot four; boisterous, handsome with a white-toothed smile; full of life.

That had changed on March 19, 1945, when Pete’s ship, the USS
Franklin,
sixty miles off the coast of Japan, took a hit by a kamikaze dive-bomber carrying two five-hundred-pound bombs. The
Franklin,
loaded with fully fueled and armed fighter planes, became a bomb herself, a thirty-thousand-ton floating bomb. She burst into an inferno of explosions and Niagaras of ignited gasoline; the massive concussions lifted her out of the water and shook her from side to side. As the black smoke formed itself into a mushroom cloud, 724 crewmen perished.

No one thought the
Franklin
would survive. But she did, a husk of her former self; she limped back to the United States as the most heavily damaged warship in U.S. naval history, her crew the most decorated. Pete survived in a similar way—a husk of his former self. His wife, Ann, told me, “Pete’s nerves were shot. His hands shook and his behavior was erratic. He drank too much after the war, trying to forget.”

He would moan in bed at night next to Ann. Once she nudged him and he sprang up, his hands seizing her neck. “The only thing he ever told me about the Navy,” Ann said, “was that a kamikaze hit his ship and they shoveled body parts up with coal shovels.”

And John Strank, the third brother, told me: “I lost two brothers in the Pacific War.”

Nineteen forty-six was the first year in more than a decade and a half that dawned with the world at peace. Like John Bradley, millions of returning servicemen plunged into the dreams they had deferred: marriage, parenthood, a new house, perhaps college on the GI Bill.

Many of these young men made stress-free transitions into the peace-time world. Don Mayer was among the tens of thousands who entered college. “It was great,” he said. “Our tuition and books were paid for and we got sixty-five dollars a month on top of it.” Jack Lucas finally began his high-school career—the only Medal of Honor winner to enroll as a freshman. Robert Leader, after recovering from his grievous wounds and the long day lying helpless under fire on the Iwo beach, reentered college and eventually became a professor of fine arts at Notre Dame. “No guilt,” he insisted many years later. “I did my best and it was the right thing to do.” And Donald Howell spoke for many when he declared, “I just got on with my life after Iwo Jima. There was a job to do, and we did it and that was it. If you want to lie around and feel sorry for yourself, you can.”

But for many other veterans, it was not that easy. For many, there would be no peace. For many, the word “dream” would mean something entirely different. Many, like Pete Strank, left parts of themselves behind, in the dreamscape war that would never end.

“Life was never regular again,” Tex Stanton said. “We were changed from the moment we put our feet in that sand.”

Corpsman George Whalen, a Medal of Honor winner on Iwo, did not grow aware of the trauma he had suffered until the battle had ended. “I had nightmares in the hospital after Iwo,” he told me. “I would scream in my bed. They had to put me in a private room because I would wake up the other guys. I had dreams of my platoon sergeant with his face blown away, his legs gone.”

For Danny Thomas, no amount of toasting could ever quite put “Buttermilk Chick” to rest. “After a while the dreams started,” he said. “And the one that kept coming back—you know how the surf comes in on a beach, rolling back and forth? I see that surf coming in on Iwo, and there are the bodies of my friends, just rolling back and forth. And there’s nothing I can do for them.”

James Buchanan found it hard to concentrate on things. “I felt life was very short,” he said. “I didn’t value anything other than life and my family. I lacked incentive. I couldn’t take anything too seriously.”

Corpsman Cliff Langley could not stop the nightmares. “I would be facing death,” he said, “I would come close to being killed, and then it didn’t happen. If I would wake up, get right up out of bed, it would finish. But if I laid there, the nightmare would continue. This went on for years.”

Wesley Kuhn, the theatrical “Kissing Bandit” from Appleton, found the nights hard, too. “When I traveled on business,” he said, “I would check into a hotel room, and one of the first things I did was lay my K-Bar knife on a chair next to my bed.”

John Bradley seemed to have escaped the demons of the wartime dreamscape. In the first months of his return, he wrote constantly to Betty from Milwaukee and the mortuary institute, and there was no Iwo Jima in the letters; the letters were suffused with serenity and happiness, a kind of luminous normality: “Gee I just can’t seem to keep my mind on this schoolwork and that’s bad in a way. The good thing about it is I’m always thinking of you and wishing myself with you.”

Serenity and happiness. And yet even after the two were married, John Bradley continued to weep in his sleep for four years.

Rene returned from China in April 1946. He came home with hopes of benefiting from his “hero” cachet and realizing a dream of his own: to become a state police officer.

He thought he could do it with “connections,” but Rene did not meet the qualifications for the job, and no one in the New Hampshire state police department seemed inclined to give him a courtesy appointment based on his reputation. Soon Rene was back at work with Pauline in the Manchester mills.

Ira resumed his life at the Pima reservation south of Phoenix. He moved back into his family’s adobe house. Nancy kept a print of the flagraising photograph on the wall, but Ira did not encourage conversation about it.

Neither did his father, Jobe. “Jobe was very quiet, he hardly talked at all,” recalled Sara Bernal, the niece who lived for a time with the Hayes family. “He worked in the fields chopping weeds, harvesting cotton. He did what he had to do. He never said anything about the flagraising. And Ira was just like his dad.”

He found menial jobs, day-labor work: picking cotton, stacking ice in an ice plant. Eventually he bought a dwelling of his own: a room in an abandoned barracks that during the war had housed Japanese-Americans who had been relocated. He bought it for $50, using his privilege as a veteran.

If Ira thought that he could come all the way back to his former life—if he thought the hoopla over the flagraising photograph would die down now that the war was ended—he was wrong.

“Tourists would drive all over the reservation looking for me,” he would later tell a reporter. “They’d spot me in the field, rush up to me with their cameras and ask, ‘Are you that Indian that raised the flag on Iwo Jima?’”

Inevitably, perhaps, Ira turned again to the anesthetizing relief that he had sought during the Bond Tour.

“We’d work in the fields together and drink afterwards,” recalled Arnold Charles, a friend from those days. “We drank anything, mostly Tokay wine and Coors beer. We had to drink on the streets because it was illegal for Indians to drink in the bars. The police could see us outside drinking, and we’d get thrown in jail in Phoenix for being drunk and disorderly.”

Arnold Charles recalled Ira as easy to get along with, a nice guy. But Ira’s cousin Buddy Lewis remembered Ira’s trip wire.

“His favorite expression when asked about Iwo was, ‘That’s a bunch of bullshit,’” said Lewis. “He would say it to shut the conversation down. When people called him a hero, he’d just say, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ and walk away.”

Ironically it was Ira’s “hero” cachet that made access to liquor easier. Someone was always buying for him. In Phoenix, he found, he would not get kicked out of the skid-row bars around Third and Jefferson; the proprietors were proud to have this particular Indian on the premises.

Yet he remained a loner. As his drinking continued, he would sleep in alleys, along railroad tracks. His face grew heavy and his features thickened. The arrests piled up: drunk and disorderly. “Ira was a nice guy,” Buddy Lewis said, “but he changed when he got drunk. He had a split personality. He was mean when he was drunk. He would laugh, but he went ape-shit over the subject of Iwo Jima. He didn’t want to talk about it.”

Servicemen’s weddings were commonplace events in the spring of 1946, but on Sunday, May 5, a photograph of one of them made newspapers across America. Its caption read: “One of the flagraisers on Iwo Jima, John H. Bradley of Appleton, Saturday married a hometown sweetheart, the former Elizabeth Van Gorp, in St. Mary’s Catholic Church there.”

After a honeymoon night in Milwaukee’s snazzy Pfister Hotel, they set up housekeeping in the city. John had rented a chauffeur’s quarters above a four-stall garage of an elegant house at Lake Drive and Linnwood Avenue, a wealthy section of town. He began working full-time at the Fass Funeral Home.

Reporters, book authors, and collectors of memorabilia tracked him down and made constant demands on his time. But the young husband and quiet civilian was already separating himself from such things. “It was either a matter of granting interviews full-time or trying to make a living for my family,” he remarked in a rare interview near the end of his life. “So I decided to make a living for my family and treat everyone the same: no interviews for anyone.”

From the earliest days of their marriage, John and Betty made a ritual of saying their nightly prayers silently together. “Then one night I asked him what his prayers were,” my mother recalled. “They were similar, so we started praying aloud.

“After doing this a number of times, I heard him finish with some extra words. I asked him, ‘What did you say?’ He was embarrassed, and answered, ‘Oh, I just said, “Blessed Mother, please help us so everything turns out all right.” ’ We were both silent for a minute and then he added, ‘It’s something I said on Iwo.’”

John’s other nightly habit, though, was something he refused to talk about at all. When Betty would ask him about it in the morning, he would simply turn away.

“He’d be sleeping, his eyes closed,” was the way my mother remembered it. “But he’d be whimpering. His body would shake, and tears would stream out of his eyes, down his face.”