Flags of Our Fathers Read online

  His method was tough discipline leavened with gentleness. During the exhausting hikes up and down Pendleton’s canyon trails, just when the boys were groaning at the monotonous sameness of it all, Mike would call a halt, reach into his pack and pull out a chocolate “energy bar,” and carve it into small bits. “Here are your pills,” he’d tell the boys, who were soon laughing.

  Robert Radebaugh loved the memory of the night Mike organized a séance in his tent. There was Strank, surrounded by a bunch of kids with their eyes squeezed shut and their hands suspended just above the surface of a card table. Mike had told the boys that he would make the table talk. He told them he would ask the table questions and it would respond by tapping on the floor. (It was Mike, of course, who was doing the tapping.)

  Few seemed to have much fondness for Rene Gagnon. One of the youngest and most sheltered of the Marines in the company, Rene had had little experience in the art of mingling with men, and he never really got a chance to develop it. His comrades-in-arms seemed to recoil from the slight, callow nineteen-year-old almost by reflex. They shook their heads at the pencil-thin mustache he sometimes cultivated; it made him look like nothing so much as a little boy trying to disguise himself as a man. The memories of him, among the guys of Easy Company, are almost unremittingly withering: “He seemed like a guy who didn’t want his body hurt.” “I didn’t like him from the moment I met him.” “He had an attitude of indifference. Negative cockiness.” “He was looking for the easy way out.”

  Ira Hayes was toxic in Rene’s presence. Ira played solitaire, the card game of choice for this solitary boy. When Rene made the mistake of looking over his shoulder and intoning, “This goes on that,” Ira leaped off the bunk and took a swing at him.

  And the men in his Company could tick off a whole list of grievances: “He had an irritating attitude. Nothing was ever right. Everything needed fixing. The food wasn’t right. The entertainment wasn’t right. The command wasn’t right. Very negative, very negative.”

  It fell to Mike Strank to confront Rene’s liabilities and turn this weak link into a useful integer in the chain. He rode the boy hard, pointing out every screwup, making him the butt of his jokes and ridicule, until Captain Severance finally noticed the problem and reassigned the boy as a runner, a messenger reporting to headquarters. It wasn’t cruelty that motivated Mike; it was the larger goal of saving lives. And with the transfer, Rene remained a functioning member of the company. The other Marines were relieved, and Rene saw no problem in it. “I figured it would be a pretty good deal, getting the jeep and running errands for headquarters,” he later said.

  Only on liberty was Rene able to enjoy anything even remotely similar to a last laugh. “We used to take Gagnon with us on the town,” Rodriguez admitted. “The girls flocked to him. He was real handsome. We’d get his leftovers.”

  Harlon Block’s tour at the advanced training camps was a period of inwardness for the hearty Texas athlete: diligent training and quiet contemplation. He kept close to Mike Strank, whom he admired. The ex-footballer who had once craved some of Leo Ryan’s “boards” for his football pants now adapted some of Mike’s mannerisms: Like Mike, he wore his helmet cocked to one side. Like Mike, he disdained socks. Like Mike, he cultivated the strange habit of showering with his boots on.

  Privately, he continued to wrestle with his Adventist beliefs and their conflict with his military obligations. And with his conviction that from his next mission, he would not return.

  On a weekend leave, Harlon hitchhiked up to Dos Palos, California, where Ed Jr. was in flight school to become a weather pilot. That night, as the two brothers sat at Ed’s kitchen table under a single lightbulb, Harlon told Ed that after his next assignment he was not coming back.

  “He spoke as a patriot,” Ed recalled to me. “He wasn’t scared about it. But he told me he wasn’t coming back. I tried to act like he was fibbing; I pretended that he was joking around. I said, ‘You’re crazy, Harlon. You’re not serious. Don’t give me that.’ But he was serious. He wasn’t joking around.”

  His sister, Maurine, was the last family member to see Harlon alive. Harlon took a bus trip from Camp Pendleton to Loma Linda to visit her one summer day. It was on this visit that Harlon disclosed what he had been doing in the swamps back in Texas. If he got sick, he told Maurine, maybe it was God’s will that he receive a discharge. But after God had not intervened, Harlon made up his mind that it was his fate to do his duty—never mind the torment he felt over the moral implications of battle.

  On the morning he left for Camp Pendleton, and then the Pacific, Harlon told his sister what he’d told the others: “Maurine, I’m not comin’ back.”

  “As the bus pulled out,” she recalled sadly many years later, “I had the strong intuitive feeling that Harlon was right and I would never see my little brother again.”

  In their half year at Camp Pendleton, the Marines of the 5th Division had survived fleas, rain, cold, hot sun, bad food, and rattlesnakes; they had learned all that the officers and facilities at the surreal city of men could teach them.

  Now it was time to board some ships and sail off into the ocean, toward another training facility, at a destination as yet unnamed, and learn some more.

  On September 19—Franklin’s birthday, as it happened—the Marines left San Diego harbor in troopships. Their voyage would take two weeks. Many of them would never see their American homeland again. But all of them would get a glimpse of Paradise before the firestorm to come. And yet a second, massive, “specialized city” within that Paradise.

  Paradise—Hawaii—looked lush and green and inviting from the rails of the ships dropping anchor in Hilo Bay. Few of these American heartland boys had ever seen anything quite so exotic. One Marine later remembered it as “a huge hunk of green jade shimmering in the dark blue of the Pacific Ocean.”

  From the cars they boarded on a narrow-gauge railroad bound for their new camp, they could see waterfalls, pineapple plants, fern jungles with their brilliant flora, wild parrots screeching in flight. This was “the Big Island,” Hawaii itself.

  Their arrival, however, burst the illusion and brought them back to earth—dusty, hardscrabble earth. Spearhead’s final destination turned out to be yet another training camp forged from what had been a ranch. This was the former Parker Ranch, the largest cattle empire on American soil. At the outbreak of the war its owner, Richard Smart, agreed to lease its forty thousand acres to the Marine Corps for one dollar a year. Its first major use had been as a respite for the battered and fatigued 2nd Division after the battle of Tarawa in 1943. The leathernecks quickly renamed the grounds Camp Tarawa, and the name held through the remainder of the war.

  Camp Tarawa sprawled across terrain that lay between two volcanoes: Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, whose snowcapped peaks were visible from the hundreds of pyramid-shaped tents soon erected there. The camp was sixty-five miles away from the town of Hilo and sixteen miles from the beach. And on this side of Paradise, at least, the landscape was a far cry from Eden. Shiny slabs of black rock, ossified lava flow, covered much of the ground. Coating the rock were layers of volcanic dust that spiraled up in the whipping wind that never seemed to abate, getting in the boys’ eyes, flavoring their food.

  “Oh, Camp Tarawa was a miserable place, with those lava rocks and constant dust,” recalled Roy Steinfort. “The Red Cross judged it unfit to hold prisoners there. So it was a perfect place for the Marines.”

  As to the food, the troops-in-training would enjoy none of the beefsteaks that the Parker Ranch had sent out to an appreciative America. “We were on the biggest cattle ranch and on Hawaii,” one of them later recalled, “but we never got beef and no pineapple juice.” Instead, they would take sustenance with a nightly meal that someone dubbed “SOS,” for “shit-on-a-shingle”: creamed mutton on toast. Sometimes, for variety, they got mutton meat loaf or mutton stew.

  A local woman, a cook named Tsugi Kaiama, came to the rescue of the boys’ palates with an inviting de
licacy: juicy hamburgers. Each day Tsugi—“Sue”—requisitioned a steer from the slaughterhouse and fed it through her gas grinder. The steak and rib sections added greatly to the flavor, as did her addition of celery and bread crumbs. The Marines queued up for Sue’s burgers in lines so long that the townspeople gave up on joining them.

  One day Sue spotted a boy who looked like a local; a Hawaiian, perhaps. When he reached the counter she asked him if that was true. No, the boy said, he was an American Indian. He introduced himself as Ira Hayes.

  Here, in the final four months before the great armada departed for its still top-secret destination—for the Japanese island known only as “X”—the Marines would fine-tune the ultraspecialized skills they would need for their great challenge. They would learn how to disembark, take the beach, turn left, and cut off the mountain.

  “Disembark” hardly suggests the lethal difficulty of the first component in this sequence. It entailed the stomach-wrenching, terrifying process of climbing down the webbing of cargo nets pitched over the sides of the great transport ships—every step of the climb encumbered by heavy packs—and securing a seat in one of the smaller landing crafts that would carry the men into the shallow water and to the edge of the beach. The young men were forced to make their descent as the huge transports bobbed and yawed in the turbulent waves. Some lost their footing and plunged into the water, others found themselves painfully jammed against the ships by a sudden collision of hull against hull.

  My father told me about the challenge of this experience once when I was a young man. It was one of the very few times he ever spoke of his wartime life, and that fact made it even more memorable to me.

  He told of clinging for dear life to the webbing, trying to choke back nausea and disabling terror, as he followed the back of the next Marine down. “I kept saying to myself, ‘If he can do it, I can do it,’” my father told me.

  So much of what all these boys would do over the next months, so much of their survival, so much of their sanity in the midst of murderous chaos, would come down to just that: following the back of the next Marine. If he could do it, they could do it.

  The maneuvers at Camp Tarawa, with its obsidian terrain and its access to the pitching Pacific surf, were designed, as far as was humanly possible, to make the troops live out the assault on Iwo Jima before they got there; to live it out in their reflexes, their instincts, their dreams. The ideal result of Tarawa was that, once in combat, the boys would not have to think; would not have the mental option of making a wrong move. They would already have done it—psychically speaking—all their lives.

  While the boys trained and retrained, their colonels and generals plotted strategy according to specific orders they had received from Washington at a secret conference at Pearl Harbor. The officers dissected and reconfigured this strategy inside a forbidding-looking wood structure next to division headquarters, a building that bore the deceptively innocuous title of “the conference center.”

  The conference center’s windows were blacked out, its shut doors sealed with double locks, its premises cordoned off with barbed wire and the constant presence of armed MP’s. No one could enter the conference center without a special pass.

  It was inside this dark edifice that a small training staff was told in November of 1944 that “Island X” was Iwo Jima. Fred Haynes, on Harry the Horse’s staff, remembers how the training changed at Camp Tarawa after they secretly studied the maps of Iwo Jima:

  We knew we would land on Green Beach, right under Mount Suribachi. And we knew we had to cut Suribachi off.

  We found a volcanic hill about the same height as Suribachi, about 550 feet high. We took tennis court tape and marked off a “beach” around this “Suribachi.” We then rehearsed the men “landing” on this “Iwo” and getting them across the island to cut off the mountain from the rest of the island.

  We had the riflemen—the flagraisers would have done this many times—form into a boat team of twenty-five or so men. Each of these teams lined up a distance away as if they were at sea, headed for the “shore.” They walked together until they hit the tape (beach) and then deployed. The 1st Battalion went straight across the island while the 2nd Battalion, with Easy Company, had to swing around immediately to the left and together they would take the hill.

  We wore out thousands of pairs of tough rubber shoes going over that rough volcanic rock practicing this. We had a hard time keeping the troops in shoes.

  After all the serious practice, Ira Hayes still managed to recapture a vestige of his Pima youth on Camp Tarawa. With his friend Ed Castle he would go looking for horses to ride during rare moments of leisure—an easy task on the vast ranchland, if one was not afraid of riding bareback. “There were no saddles,” Castle recalled, “so we’d stand on a rock and jump on the horse’s back. You had to hold on to the horse’s mane…so you wouldn’t fall off. Ira was a very good rider and he loved to ride bareback. He’d talk then about being free and roaming the plains, when there were no reservations.”

  Franklin could not get lucky. He could not get home to Kentucky. So he found a way to bring a little bit of Kentucky to Tarawa.

  Bill Ranous smelled something highly peculiar in the company’s tent one day, in the general area of Franklin’s cot. More than peculiar: something downright rotten. “What’s that smell?” he asked Franklin.

  Franklin looked around to make sure they were alone. Then he motioned Ranous to come over to the cot. Silently, he raised the blanket to reveal a tub filled with a foul-scented, dark mush.

  “What,” Ranous asked, “is that?”

  “Raisin jack!” Franklin answered proudly. It was, as Ranous soon learned, an alcoholic mash that the young Kentuckian would later strain through a filter to make drinkable: a kind of moonshine.

  He’d appropriated the raisins from the kitchen while on KP duty, he explained to Ranous. And he’d added a little yeast, and then waited while nature did the rest: an old folk skill that he’d brought with him all the way from the Appalachians.

  “He was real proud of that raisin jack,” Ranous remembered.

  My father passed his days at Camp Tarawa attending to his duties and thinking of home. From what his friends recalled of him, he clung to his characteristic serenity and the exceptional focus that would guide him through his long and happy life in Wisconsin. A dream burned in his heart, even as a hell on earth brewed on the other side of the ocean: a clear, simple dream of returning home and opening his funeral home. Through all the turmoil that was about to engulf him, he never lost sight of that dream.

  Robert Lane remembered Doc’s tranquillity in those days. “He was more mature than most guys,” Lane said. “He never participated in the drinking bouts. And he used to tell me how he handled people who were suffering the loss of a loved one. He had already done that often in his life, in the funeral business.”

  In November, the men whose home states authorized absentee voting were allowed to cast their ballots in the general elections. But most of the boys were too young to vote. By that month, infantry regiments were running seventy-two-hour maneuvers, as fighters and dive-bombers roared overhead. The practice landings continued, and continued.

  It was in November that Harlon Block made the gesture that would underscore his bond with Belle. The 5th Division announced a plan to make National Service Life Insurance policies available to every man in the ranks. Harlon purchased a ten-thousand-dollar policy. The beneficiary was Belle. Not Ed, and not both his parents, as would have been routine, but Belle. In doing so, he ensured his mother’s comfort and freedom in the years beyond his death.

  Harlon wrote his mother a letter in November, a few weeks before the ships sailed. In it he imagines what it would be like to be home: “Let’s see, the early oranges are already gone, the navel oranges too. About another month and you will be selling the ruby reds.” He asks after the football buddies he enlisted with in a group. “Are the rest of the guys that came in when I did OK?”

  Think
ing of Christmas, he mentions the girl he is convinced he will never see again: “Buy Catherine [Pierce] a present for me and send it out to her. Get anything that would be alright for the occasion. You know more about that than I do.”

  Harlon instructs Belle to “buy all the kids something, and Dad don’t forget him.” Then the boy focuses in on his mother, and becomes in his fantasy her Santa: “Above all don’t forget yourself. Just go down and buy yourself a new hat, coat, dress and shoes (and purse). Use as much money as you need.”

  December 1944. The last Christmas for too many young boys. Then off for the forty-day sail to Iwo Jima. The boys of Spearhead had been expertly trained for ten months. They were proficient in the techniques of war. But more important, they were a team, ready to fight for one another. These boys were bonded by feelings stronger than they would have for any other humans in their life.

  The vast, specialized city of men—boys, really, but a functioning society of experts now, trained and coordinated and interdependent and ready for its mission—will move out upon the Pacific. Behind them, in safe America, Bing Crosby sang of a white Christmas, just like the ones he used to know. Ahead lay a hot island of black sand, where many of them would ensure a long future of Christmases in America by laying down their lives.

  Six

  ARMADA

  Don’t worry about me, Momma. I’ll be OK.

  —FROM THE LAST LETTER OF AN

  IWO JIMA–BOUND MARINE

  THERE WERE NO CHEERING CROWDS to see Mike, Harlon, Ira, Doc, Rene, and Franklin off as they departed Camp Tarawa. To maintain military secrecy they journeyed to the port of Hilo in the dead of night.