Flags of Our Fathers (47 page)

“He just said, ‘I have no answers. There is no way out. There is no escape,’” Rene Jr. later recalled. “‘No escape!’ That shocked me.”

Three days later, on October 12, a janitor at Colonial Village, Frank Burpee, discovered that the door to the boiler room of one of the buildings was jammed. He got a crowbar and pried it open. On the floor lay his fellow janitor, Rene Gagnon, dead. In his hand was the inside handle to the door. Apparently he had dislodged it as he grappled with the door in the throes of his heart attack.

No way out. No escape.

He was fifty-four.

Papers across the country ran the story on page one, with “Rene Gagnon” and “Iwo Jima Flag” umbilically attached in the headlines. Many of the stories noted that the only remaining survivor among the six flagraisers was John Bradley, fifty-six, a funeral director in Antigo, Wisconsin. But “Bradley was in Canada vacationing Saturday and couldn’t be reached for comment.”

My brother Steve was present when our father got the news. “Dad answered the phone at the funeral home and it was a reporter,” he told me. “He got off the phone and said to me, ‘Rene Gagnon just died, so I’m out of town, fishing in Canada.’ The phones rang off the hook for a week, and he didn’t answer them.”

But the press knew, as it always did, where to find Rene. Reporters descended on Manchester. At the Phaneuf & Letendre Funeral Home, where his remains lay, a reporter from the
Chicago Tribune
named Mary Elson pushed her way toward the casket. Rene Jr. promised her an interview later. In it, he was typically thoughtful and compassionate as he analyzed his father’s tortured life.

“There were a lot of heavy thoughts my father was not capable of understanding,” he told Mary Elson. “He was just a young kid doing his part for his country, and suddenly everywhere he went, people were saying, ‘You’re a hero. You’re a hero.’ And he was thinking, ‘What did I do?’

“…He was happy he did it [raising the flag] and that he would go down in history. But he didn’t do it to go down in history.”

In her story, the
Tribune
’s Elson described the eulogy at Holy Rosary Church.

“We don’t have to single out an event in his life,” the pastor intoned, as a Marine honor guard stood by the flag-draped casket, lodged awkwardly between the first five rows of wooden pews.

But of course the pastor did single out an event, equating the flagraising at Iwo Jima with man’s continual battle with evil and concluding: “Rene Gagnon was respected by millions for what he stood for—a man that remains to us a sign of life, victory and courage.” It was a majestic tribute and one with which Gagnon probably would have been the first to disagree.

She had it right. Even in death, Rene was overshadowed by his photographic image.

He was interred in a mausoleum in Manchester. Because of his short length of service and his lack of medals, the government ruled that he was not eligible for burial at Arlington.

But the government did not reckon with Pauline. She mounted a telephone campaign, driving home the point to military officials that they did not want to deal with the adverse publicity that the disgruntled widow of an Iwo Jima flagraiser could generate. It took nearly two years, but on July 7, 1981, newspapers carried photographs of Pauline at the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial, gazing up at her bronzed hero on the day of his Arlington burial.

“This is our thirty-sixth wedding anniversary, so the day has special meaning to me,” she told the press. She added: “It is appropriate that Rene will be interred very near to the Iwo Jima monument. He will be just across the street.”

The headstones for Mike and Ira at Arlington are similar to all the others there: simple white slabs that denote only their names, ranks, and birth and death dates.

But Pauline saw to it that Rene’s stone was distinctive. On its back is a bronze relief of the flagraising and an inscription:

FOR GOD AND HIS COUNTRY HE RAISED OUR FLAG IN BATTLE AND SHOWED A MEASURE OF HIS PRIDE AT A PLACE CALLED IWO JIMA WHERE COURAGE NEVER DIED

Twenty

COMMON VIRTUE

There are no great men.

Just great challenges which ordinary men,

out of necessity, are forced by circumstances to meet.

—ADMIRAL WILLIAM F. “BULL” HALSEY

ONE OF MY DAD’S FINER QUALITIES WAS SIMPLICITY.

He lived by simple values, values his children could understand and emulate.

He had no hidden agendas; he expressed himself directly. He had a knack for breaking things down into quiet, irreducible truths.

“It’s as simple as that,” he’d say. “Simple as that.”

But a flagraiser’s existence wasn’t always so simple.

In 1979, the
Chicago Tribune
writer Mary Elson was following up on Rene’s death and surprised John Bradley at his desk at the McCandless, Zobel & Bradley Funeral Home.

He gave her about “ten agitated minutes of his time,” puffing “nervously on a cigarette…sitting on the edge of his chair in the electric pose of a runner ready to bolt from a starting block.”

He spent most of those ten minutes downplaying the perceived heroics of the flagraising. But in two of his sentences he revealed his thinking about that eternal 1/400th of a second. “You think of that pipe. If it was being put in the ground for any other reason…Just because there was a flag on it, that made the difference.”

Here my father captured the two competing realities of The Photograph. It was an action of common virtue, not uncommon valor, as plain as a pipe.

But because of a fluke photo—a stiff wind, a rippling flag—this common action represents valor in the eyes of millions, maybe billions of people.

The reporter Mary Elson grasped none of this and wrote in the
Chicago Tribune
that John’s pole comment was “an oddly irrelevant afterthought.”

Odd? Irrelevant? A casual afterthought? I don’t think so.

My dad had given Mary Elson the key to everything.
“Just because there was a flag on it, that made the difference…”
But just as the inquiring reporter in
Citizen Kane
had missed the significance of “Rosebud,” Mary Elson remained oblivious to the revelation John had handed her.

By the early 1980’s, the men of Easy Company were in their sixties. Their families grown, their work lives nearing an end, many of them felt an urge, long dormant, to reconnect with one another; to remember with their buddies.

Dave Severance became the catalyst for these reconnections. A career Marine, he had left the infantry to become a fighter pilot after World War II. He flew sixty-two missions in the Korean War, and won the Distinguished Flying Cross and four Air Medals before retiring with the rank of colonel in 1968. But as with anyone who had walked in the black sands, Iwo Jima would remain the defining event of his life. With the instincts of a company captain, Dave compiled a list of Easy Company veterans, searched for their addresses around the country, and began a newsletter round-robin that soon prompted several reunions.

Dave invited my father to all the reunions, but he never went. The burden of being an “immortal hero” and the press attention he’d attract made it impossible.

“I’d love to go,” he told my brother Steve once, “but I couldn’t just go and be myself and visit with the guys I wanted to. I couldn’t just be one of the guys.”

Perhaps there were other considerations as well. Perhaps they were similar to those revealed to me, through tears, by John Overmyer, a corpsman who had gone through medic training with John and was with him on Iwo.

“I stayed away from reunions at first; I didn’t want to remember, but I’m glad now that I’ve been to a few,” Overmyer told me. “I went through life wondering how I could be so proud of something that was so bad. I had twenty out of thirty of my guys killed within ten or fifteen minutes. I couldn’t get them out. I was their nineteen-year-old doctor, priest, and mother. But I couldn’t save them. It took two buddies to get me through that night. But the next morning, when someone cried ‘Corpsman!’ I got out of my foxhole and went to help him. I did it. I kept going.

“The number-one motivation on Iwo Jima was to stand with your buddies and not let them down. And all my life I was proud of that, but I couldn’t talk about it. But after going to a reunion I found others who felt the same way. And now I feel better.”

My father probably felt that need to seek out comrades for an affirmation of feelings. But his fame as a figure in The Photograph would not let him go.

Or maybe it was something else. Something too painful to reopen. In 1964, when he was forty and I was nine, my father hinted at why he couldn’t talk about Iwo Jima. But I was too young to really understand.

My third-grade class was studying American history. When we got to World War II, there, on page 98 of our textbook, was The Photograph.

My teacher told the class that my father was a hero. I was proud as only a young son can be.

That afternoon I sat near the back door of our house with my history book open to page 98, waiting for Dad to come home from work. When he finally walked through the door, I jumped toward him before he’d even had a chance to take off his coat.

“Dad!” I exclaimed. “Look! There’s your picture! My teacher says you’re a hero and she wants you to speak to my class. Will you give a speech?”

My father didn’t answer me right away. He closed the door and walked me gently over to the kitchen table. He sat down across from me. He took my textbook and looked at The Photograph. Then he gently closed the book.

After a moment he said, “I can’t talk to your class. I’ve forgotten everything.”

That was often his excuse, that he couldn’t remember.

But then he went on: “Jim, your teacher said something about heroes…”

I shifted expectantly in my chair. I thought now I would hear some juicy stories of valor. Instead, he looked me directly in my nine-year-old eyes signaling that he’d like to embed an idea in my brain for the rest of my life.

Then he said: “I want you to always remember something. The heroes of Iwo Jima are the guys who didn’t come back.”

Simple as that.

Six years went by before I discussed the subject with him again. And for some reason, on one ordinary night—it was 1970—it all bubbled up to the surface. I asked him about Iwo Jima. And persisted through the initial silence.

And that was how I learned about one special hero of Iwo Jima. And about why he didn’t come back.

It was just a normal evening in the Bradley household. Everyone else was asleep, except for Dad and me. He was forty-six then. I was sixteen, a high-schooler with pimples. The two of us were sitting up late, as we often did, watching Johnny Carson. For some reason that I’ve since forgotten, I brought up the subject that I knew by then was practically taboo. Iwo Jima.

Any information would have satisfied me. A couple of sentences. He’d never told me anything substantial. But as usual, on this night my father kept his silence, at least at first. I remember how he gave a half smile at me, then looked back at the TV—the blue screen reflecting in his glasses—then shook his head, sighed, glanced at me again.

On this night I decided not to let it go. After a long silence, I said: “Well, Dad, you were there. The Battle of Iwo Jima is a historical fact. It happened. You must remember
something
.”

Again he listened to my question, then looked back at the TV. His mind was working, he heard me, but there was only silence.

I persisted. Finally he closed his eyes and dropped his head back against the headrest of his easy chair. Then he rubbed his forehead and said, “Geez.” It sounded more like an anguished expulsion of air:
Sheeesh!!

And then my father broke a long silence.

He said: “I have tried so hard to black this out. To forget it. We could choose a buddy to go in with. My buddy was a guy from Milwaukee. We were pinned down in one area. Someone elsewhere fell injured and I ran to help out, and when I came back my buddy was gone. I couldn’t figure out where he was. I could see all around, but he wasn’t there. And nobody knew where he was.

“A few days later someone yelled that they’d found him. They called me over because I was a corpsman. The Japanese had pulled him underground and tortured him. His fingernails…his tongue…It was terrible. I’ve tried so hard to forget all this.

“And then I visited his parents after the war and just lied to them. ‘He didn’t suffer at all,’ I told them. ‘He didn’t feel a thing, didn’t know what hit him,’ I said. I just lied to them.”

I didn’t know what to say. I was young, unable to fathom the depths of emotion he had just revealed. And so we sat there for a few minutes in silence letting Johnny Carson’s next guest change the subject.

Many years later, in researching my father’s life, I asked Cliff Langley, Doc’s co-corpsman, about the discovery of Iggy’s body. Langley told me it looked to him as though Ralph Ignatowski had endured just about every variety of physical cruelty imaginable.

“Both his arms were fractured,” Langley said. “They just hung there like arms on a broken doll. He had been bayoneted repeatedly. The back of his head had been smashed in.”

Those were the relatively benign wounds. But they were not the worst of what had happened to Iggy, who had faked his urine sample to get into the Marines; Iggy, the proud Marine, the small, fresh-faced boy who had endured “Polack” ribbing with a good-natured smile.

My father remembered the worst thing. He kept the image alive under his many protective layers of silence and solitude. He never disclosed the worst thing to me, not on that night in front of the TV, not ever. But he mentioned it to my brother once, while I was in Japan.

Japan. How amazing it is that I found my way to that country—lived there—grew to love it—learned its history and studied its religious traditions—and did all of this without consciously connecting Japan to my father’s past. Perhaps the currents of thought and motivation run deeper than we sometimes think.

I was hypnotically drawn into this old land, into what struck me as an almost mystically refined, cultured society. I’d arrived from a country where people joked about Japanese robot-workers building cheap cars, living in boxes, and eating rice and fish heads. What I found instead was an infinite lacing of social refinements that had evolved over centuries.

Here was a crowded island country smaller than California, but with 110 million people living on it. Eighty percent of that terrain was mountainous, compacting the available living space to an even greater density. Centuries of close living had distilled an elaborate system of courtesies designed to make this dense cohabitation enjoyable.

I grew more and more attuned to these rituals of humility and politeness. I didn’t reflect on it at the time—indeed, not until many years later—but what I was experiencing was the irreducibly real Japan: the Japan that had existed before the militaristic epoch that culminated in the Pacific War, and that will continue into the next millennium. It was a Japan my father could never imagine.

Only now, years later, do I realize that the values of the Japanese and John Bradley were so similar. Quietness, politeness, integrity, honor, simplicity, devotion to family. Silent contemplation, looking inward for answers rather than prattling on.

I wanted my parents to come visit me in this Japan that I loved. I was sure they would see what fascinated me. I couldn’t imagine any other reaction. I wrote them a letter of invitation. My mother responded that they couldn’t make it. I never knew why or what my father’s reaction had been—that is, until I spoke with my brother Steve in May of 1997, after Dad had died. He told me exactly what my father had said back in 1974 when he received my letter of invitation.

“It was at the funeral home,” Steve told me. “Dad was agitated. He was jingling the change in his pockets like he did when he was upset.

“He said you had invited Mom and him to visit you in Tokyo. He didn’t say anything for a long while. Then he blurted out, ‘Jim wants us to come visit him. They tortured my buddy. The Japanese stuffed his penis in his mouth. I’m not too interested in going to Japan.’”

Memories of Iggy seemed to be always just under the surface. Maybe this accounts for my father’s remarkable silence about the Battle of Iwo Jima and the flagraising. Maybe.

For many of the veterans, their memories of combat receded; supplanted by happy peacetime experiences. But there were others for whom the memories did not die, but were somehow contained. And for a few, the memories were howling demons that ruled their nights.