Flags of Our Fathers (48 page)

Among these last, a disproportionate number, I believe, are corpsmen.

It was the corpsmen, after all, who saw the worst of the worst. A Marine rifleman might see his buddy shot down beside him, and regret the loss for the rest of his life. But in the moment, he kept going. That was his training, his mission.

But the corpsman saw
only
the results. His entire mission on Iwo was to hop from blown face to severed arm, doing what he could under heavy fire to minimize the damage, stanch the flow, ease the agony.

The corpsmen remembered. And their memories ruled the night.

Danny Thomas, whose hypnotism in 1947 had ultimately proved ineffectual in blotting out the dreams, could never stop seeing the bodies at the edge of the water. “That’s the thing I see in my dreams the most,” he told me once. “How the tide and the motion of the waves would rock them.

“Just last night I woke up covered with sweat. I saw the shifting of the bodies on the Iwo Jima beach. My pajamas were drenched. I had to change. I still have to wring the sweat from my T-shirt on some nights.

“There’s one body rocking on the sand that really grabs me. He’s partially buried. His right shoulder and part of his face are sticking out of the sand. His right hand is moving in the tide as if it is beckoning: ‘Follow me. Follow me.’ I saw that guy on the second day.”

All combat produces unshakable memories. But consider Cliff Langley, who as Corpsman Langley labored side by side with my father on Iwo—3rd Platoon, Easy Company.

He went on to serve in Korea and Vietnam with the Army. But there’s one battle that rules: “The dreams have lasted for years. At seventy-three I still get ’em. I’ve been in three wars and I haven’t got past Iwo yet.”

After studying in Japan I was convinced I was an expert on Pacific history. At a Thanksgiving dinner at our family home in 1975, I was only too happy to enlighten my father and the assembled family as to the “real” reason we fought Japan in World War II: American insensitivity to Japanese culture and FDR’s severing of their oil lines forced Japan—an industrial beached whale—to attack Pearl Harbor in self-defense.

The 350,000 “liberated” victims of the rape of Nanking and the millions who perished in the Asian Holocaust might have taken some exception to this point of view. But I was entranced with it, and confidently explained to the veteran of Iwo Jima seated across the table from me that it was his side that was to blame. Japan was the victim.

Typically, my dad did not take offense that day of thanks. He nodded thoughtfully, his glasses glinting, and reached for his knife to cut the turkey.

It would be years before I read of the atrocities the Japanese military machine had perpetrated on millions of people; years before I discovered that the “self-defense” rationale I was spouting off about had been rejected by the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal as bogus.

John Bradley was fifty-two in 1975, and he knew a hell of a lot more about why we got into America’s War than I did. But rather than challenge me, he just nodded.

He was secure in himself, his marriage, his family. He was a successful man. He owned a large home in Antigo, a summer cottage at Bass Lake several miles to the north, and a thriving funeral business.

He possessed the things that mattered most to him: not fame or adulation, but a large, secure family and the respect of his fellow townspeople, respect that devolved from years of hard work, his attitude of service, and his contributions to his community.

He could afford to nod in silent understanding and hand me another slice of turkey. In return for the slice of baloney I had just handed him.

John’s heart was in bad shape by Christmas of 1993. Open-heart surgery, irregular heartbeat.

He was seventy, and had mortality on his mind. He wrote his own Christmas cards that year. He reached down through the years and sent them out to his Easy Company buddies. When I met and interviewed those men after his death, they told me that John had sporadically written little Christmas notes over the years. But his 1993 card was downright chatty and included a photograph of his extended family. Did he know it would be his last?

To Dave Severance, his old company commander, Doc confided: “I am not progressing as I should. My heart is not beating in its proper rhythm.”

Betty, making the bed, discovered John’s rosary beads under his pillow.

John Bradley’s death of a stroke in January 1994 was reported around the world. All the newscasts spoke of John Bradley’s passing, and we received clippings from as far away as Johannesburg, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.

Everyone in the world media reported that the last surviving flagraiser had died. But to us that title seemed distant, disconnected from our dad.

Fred Berner, editor of the Antigo
Daily Journal,
got it right when he wrote:

John Bradley will be forever memorialized for a few moments’ action at the top of a remote Pacific mountain. We prefer to remember him for his life.

If the famous flagraising at Iwo Jima symbolizes American patriotism and valor, Bradley’s quiet, modest nature and philanthropic efforts shine as an example of the best of small-town American values.

I will always remember my dad for a little favor at the very end of his life.

When he suffered his stroke, I was the only Bradley unable to drive to the Antigo hospital. I flew in from New York, the pilot holding the connecting plane in Chicago for me.

At about one
A.M.
on Tuesday, January 11, I pulled into the hospital parking lot. I had been traveling for seven hours.

I rushed into the Emergency entrance. The nurse on duty, who had never met me before, looked up and recognized one of “Johnny’s boys.” Without a word from me she said, “I’ll take you to your father.”

I heard him before I saw him: loud, labored breathing. Extreme heavy breathing like that which results in fainting or death. “He can’t keep that up!” I blurted out to the nurse.

Approaching his bedside, I was struck by how good he looked in spite of the chest wheezing up and down. His color was up, and he looked like my dad of old, my healthy dad.

I tried to talk to him. But my words could not compete with his loud breathing. And I was crying, besides.

I silently thanked him for being a good man, a good father, someone whom I could admire. I told him all the reasons I loved him.

After about twenty minutes, I left the room to shed my winter coat and rinse my face. When I reentered the room about five minutes later, Dad’s breathing had dramatically changed. His chest rose slowly now. Within a couple of minutes, his breathing slowed some more.

I summoned the nurse. She put an oxygen mask on Dad’s face. I told her that the family had decided against intervention.

“This will just ease his last moments,” she said quietly.

I telephoned my mother. Then Steve, who called Tom; both of them lived nearby. I telephoned Barb, Patrick, and Mark in Wausau, forty miles away.

Within twenty minutes the nearby Bradleys—Steve, his children Paul and Sarah, Tom, Joe, my mother, and me—were all by his side.

My mother cradled his head, brushed his hair, kissed his forehead. We all touched and kissed him. His breathing got weaker.

“Jack, are you leaving us now?” Betty Van Gorp Bradley whispered. “It’s all right if you leave us when you’re ready,” his wife whispered. “It’s all right, Jack.”

At 2:12
A.M.
on Tuesday, January 11, 1994, John Bradley took a small breath, exhaled, and died.

Several hours later, while my brothers were taking care of the arrangements, I sat peacefully in the dark looking at Dad, just sitting and thinking and, perhaps, praying. I noticed the nurse standing slightly behind me. The one who had eased my dad’s last minutes.

“He waited for you,” she whispered.

We both gazed at John Bradley for a few seconds.

She put her hand on my shoulder. “He waited for you,” she repeated.

His wake was held in the funeral home where he had comforted so many. It was the largest anyone could remember. When the well-wishers shook our hands to express their condolences, we could feel that they were bone cold, chilled after waiting in the long line outside in the freezing winter.

We heard many stories about our father that evening, stories of silent kindness that he never brought home with him. But no one mentioned Iwo Jima or The Photograph. One woman said she had read the obituaries but did not know the war hero who was on the monument in Arlington or the sailor on the postage stamp. She said she knew a man who helped her parents with their parents’ funerals and had become a friend of the family. She knew a man who had raised his family in Antigo and worked to make Antigo a good place to live. She said that was the man she would miss.

So John Bradley had achieved his goal and died as more than a figure in a photograph.

The morning after the wake, just before the church service, we had the closing-of-casket ceremony at the funeral home. This was the family’s last chance to say good-bye to husband, father, father-in-law, grandpa.

Some of our family placed small personal items in his casket: a poem, a ring. I walked down the hall of the Bradley Funeral Home and entered my father’s office. I faced the only photo hanging there. I gently removed it from the wall and returned to my father’s side.

I turned to my family to get their attention. I held the photo high. All could see themselves in it, posed in a family reunion shot that John Bradley had never tired of bragging about.

“That is the only photo he cared about,” I said, and then slid it into his casket.

We six “Johnny’s boys” were his pallbearers. Rolling his casket up the aisle of St. John’s, I was surprised that even though the church was packed to the gills, it was utterly silent. Like a void, more silent than when empty. The silence of a community’s utter sadness.

At the end of the ceremony we all stood in our pews silently facing Dad’s casket. The back doors to St. John’s Church were opened. Outside, beyond the back door and down the steps, stood a lone bugler bathed in frigid sunshine. He played “Taps.” The crisp and somber notes swept through the mourners and we wept.

Chiseled on John Bradley’s simple gray headstone in the Queen of Peace Cemetery are the words he learned from his mother, the words that got him through Iwo Jima, the words he repeated with his wife every night before sleeping: Blessed Mother Help Us.

After he was gone, his actions continued to speak louder than words. I was stunned to learn that my father had been awarded the Navy Cross. Stunned. I read his citation over and over and was so proud of him and his life-saving actions on Iwo Jima.

I’ll never truly understand the structure of my dad’s wall of silence. Perhaps my daughter Alison’s “Letter to Grandpa” comes close to describing the bewilderment and awe left in John Bradley’s wake.

Alison was a fifteen-year-old high-school student with an assignment: Write a short letter to the person you admire the most.

She chose her Grandpa Bradley, who had been dead for three years.

Dear Grandpa,

You’ll see on the envelope there is no address. I sat for a long time and wondered where to address it. Heaven? Is that where you are? I had no way of knowing, so I hope that this ends up getting to you.

I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately. I just have a few questions I need answered.

This past holiday Daddy took us to Washington, D.C., for a few days to learn more about you. Daddy told us stories of your youth.

He told us how as a young, unmarried man you boarded a cramped boat with thousands of other young Marines and shipped off to Iwo Jima to either live or die. World War II was such a horrible thing for your generation.

I saw the letter you wrote to your mother from Mount Suribachi. You described how filthy you all were and how you would give your “left arm for a good shower and a clean shave.” How did you do it? I’ll never know.

Finally, Daddy showed us the original footage of the flagraising in 1945. Over and over we saw you and your friends raise that flag.

This was our background to the trip, no more, no less.

But once in Washington, D.C., the enormity of the event and your contribution sank in. In our four days we climbed up your leg at the Marine Corps Memorial, had a personal tour of Congress, and a private tour of the White House.

I have finally obtained knowledge and understanding of the love and respect that the world has for you. In four days there I learned more about you than I did in the twelve years that I knew you.