No copy of the famous photograph hung in our We were to tell the caller that our father was on a fishing trip. Phone-call requests for media interviews that never diminished over the years. He had trained us, as children, to deflect the When he died in January 1994, in the town of his birth, he might have believed he was taking the unwanted story of his part in the flagraising with him to the grave, where he apparently felt it belonged. He opened a funeral home fatheredĮight children joined the PTA, the Lions, the Elks and shut out any conversation on the topic of raising the flag on Iwo Jima. He shoved the mementos of his immortality into a few cardboard boxes and hid these in a closet. My father, John Henry Bradley, returned home to small-town Wisconsin after the war. He achieved this peace by willing the past into a cave of silence. Only one of them managed to live in peace Of the three survivors, two were overtaken and eventually destroyed-dead of drink and heartbreak. Three were killed in action in the continuing battle. Chapter opener: James Bradley on the beach of Iwo Jima, April 1998.įor these six, history had a different set of agendas. It became everything except the salvation of the boys who formed it. The flagraising on Iwo Jimaīecame a symbol of the island, the mountain, the battle of World War II of the highest ideals of the nation, of valor incarnate. It gave them a kind of immortality-a faceless immortality. Image, blurred and indistinct yet unforgettable, became the most recognized, the most reproduced, in the history of photography. It froze them in an elegant instant of battle: froze them in a camera lens as they hoisted an American flag on a makeshift pole. Tired, scared, thirsty, brave tiny integers in the vast confusion of war-making, trying to do their duty, trying to survive.īut something unusual happened to these six: History turned all its focus, for 1/400th of a second, on them. My young father and his five comrades were typical of these kids. The combatants, on either side, were kids-kids who had mostly come of age in cultures that resembled those of the nineteenth century. The fate of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries was forged in blood on that island and others like it. Was called Suribachi the island, Iwo Jima. There, waiting for me, was the mountain the boys had climbed in the midst of a terrible battle half a century earlier. Side of the world, to a primitive flyspeck island in the Pacific. For a few days I set aside my comfortable life-my business concerns, my life in Rye, New York-and made a pilgrimage to the other In the spring of 1998, six boys called to me from half a century ago on a distant mountain and I went there. The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know.

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