Flags of Our Fathers Read online

  A particular category of businessmen caught his eye at church: the funeral directors of Appleton. These men, Jack thought, had a special way of walking up the aisle amid the incense-smell at Mass or during a funeral service: confident, in control, but always accessible. They seemed so at ease, so first-name familiar with everybody, and everybody seemed to know and respect them. The reason, he quickly came to understand, involved service: The funeral directors were not merely men selling a commodity; other than clergy, they were the ones most intimately in touch with the townspeople in their times of sorrow and need.

  Jack Bradley understood service. That’s what an altar boy was, a “server.” And now here were these models of service well into adulthood. By his early teens, Jack Bradley was working part-time at an Appleton funeral home. He was going to be one of these respected, dignified men of service.

  Meanwhile, life in Appleton, Wisconsin, seemed to lilt along almost in defiance of the Depression, or any other unwelcome intrusion. Everyone felt the pinch, but everyone took strength from the town’s resilient economic assets and its harmony of place. The town was caught in the lingering twilight of a prior time, a way of life less typical of the Depression than of the Belle Epoque. This era was fading fast in America; but in Appleton no one seemed to notice.

  In those straw-hat years between the two world wars, Appleton seemed to embody just about everything that made America worth fighting and dying for. Its very name bespoke its atmosphere of ripe, unblemished enchantment.

  Its terrain came out of some diorama of American plenty: low, rolling hills of soil rich and dark with wheat-growing fertility; bordering forests of thick hardwood trees, especially the cherished white pine, good for furniture-making and for paper stock. All of this sumptuous land cut through by a deep clear rushing river, the Fox, whose fish-filled waters had drawn generations of Indians and, later, the great tides of European immigrants, Dutch and German, flowing west in their caravans of prairie schooners.

  Appleton was incorporated in 1853 with a population of 1,200, and its aura of quiet radiance, a place apart, never diminished over the ensuing century and a half. Demand for paper from its mills increased dramatically when an inventor in the metropolis to the south, Milwaukee, began to manufacture the typewriter in 1873.

  The hardworking Middle-European settlers brought their burgher values to the town and the countryside around it. They made it a land of beer, cheese, bratwurst, and church spires; a land where education was valued, progress honored, government clean, houses neat, children obedient, homes happy, and churches sturdy and impressive.

  Appleton boasted the first telephone in all Wisconsin, and the first house to be illuminated by incandescent light in any city beyond the East Coast. In 1911 President Taft brought it into the limelight again by biting into the four-foot-high “Big Cheese” that was Appleton’s entry in the National Dairy Show in Chicago.

  A little girl named Betty Van Gorp, who grew up to become Mrs. John Bradley, remembers 1930’s Appleton in more intimate and enchanting terms.

  It was a town of manicured lawns and clean streets with no litter, my mother has told me. A town where women swept their sidewalks and the slam of a screen door could be heard for blocks. And where people sat in swings or on the steps of their front porches on tree-shadowed summer evenings, listening to the cricket-song swell up from the grass, and watching the first fireflies of twilight, and greeting their neighbors who strolled by.

  Mothers made hot breakfasts in cold houses for their children in wintertime; Cream of Wheat or pancakes or eggs and toast and, always, hot chocolate. No meat on Fridays for the Catholic families, which was nearly everybody. Friday dinners were potato soup, creamed tuna on toast, soft-boiled eggs broken over mashed potatoes, creamed peas.

  Betty Van Gorp could hear the clip-clop of horses’ hooves as they pulled the milk wagon or the ice wagon along Appleton’s leafy streets. She could hear the whining screech of the streetcar as it stopped to pick up passengers. A ride into downtown was a nickel. On those crickety summer evenings, she often heard the creak of somebody’s rope swing. That creaking rope-swing sound stayed with her through the decades.

  When Betty Van Gorp was in third grade she found a new companion to walk her home from St. Mary’s Catholic School along the wide, tree-lined streets. A new boy in town, a serious, quiet boy named Jack Bradley. She liked Jack, although she wasn’t quite sure whether he liked her back or just liked her: Sometimes in class she was obliged to pass along notes that he had written for the inconvenient Janet Jones. Still, by fourth grade she felt bold enough to send him a homemade Valentine with “Guess Who?” written on it. She appreciated the fact that Jack never cussed, even when it was so cold you wanted to scream at the weather. “Dad gum” was the worst that ever came out of his mouth.

  Other Appleton kids gravitated to Jack Bradley as well. Bob Connelly joined the Boy Scouts with him and went on camporees. Most of the kids in the troop couldn’t afford the full uniforms. Bob recalled that Jack made do with just the neckerchief.

  Jack Puffer remembered that in eighth grade, Jack would find a way to make him laugh during those tense minutes when the Dominican nun was on the prowl in the classroom. Many times, Jack Puffer got a stick across his fingers for it, but he didn’t really care. Jack Bradley was great to be around.

  Baseball in summertime. Then a drink from one of the “bubblers,” the water fountains, that were on every corner downtown. Tackle football in winter. No money for football uniforms; the kids wore their knickers. Swimming in Lake Park. Hitching a ride there by jumping on a boxcar in the ravine. The carnival once each summer; the oop-oop of the calliope and the smell of buttered popcorn.

  It seemed an ideal life in an ideal town. But even ideal towns have their dangers and their sorrows; their abrupt reminders of the fragility of the beating human heart.

  When Jack was ten years old a catastrophe struck the household of the sort his worrying mother could not have foreseen. It was a frigid winter morning, and his sister Mary Ellen, five years old and just awake, was playing near a large electric heater that had been plugged into an outlet in the kitchen. When the child leaned over the device’s coils, the tassels of her nightdress brushed against them and caught fire. Within seconds her clothing was ablaze; the front of her body seared. Jack, nearby, screamed and filled a bucket with water to douse his sister. Their mother had been in the basement shoveling coal into the furnace. She rushed upstairs—Blessed Mother, please help us!—and rolled the howling girl in scatter rugs.

  A doctor was summoned. Examining the girl, he concluded that her burns were not severe enough to merit hospitalization. He recommended bed rest. The family placed her on a sofa, where she lay for several days.

  The doctor visited her each day. But she grew weaker, and within a week the Bradley family buried Mary Ellen. Young Jack Bradley felt responsible for her death. He regretted it for the rest of his life, this medical corpsman who dashed through machine-gun fire to give plasma to wounded and dying Marines. He regretted that he could not have responded better to his sister’s mortal screams.

  Only as a grown man and a veteran of military medical training did my father realize that it might not have been the burns themselves that had killed Mary Ellen. Likely, it was pneumonia, made more virulent by her lack of movement on the couch.

  The family struggled on. Mary Ellen’s sisters, Marge and Jean, tried to fill the vacuum left by the ravaged little girl. Childhood death was not an uncommon event in the America of those times. But this fact did not make acceptance any easier. Those who observed Kathryn afterward noticed that some of the life had gone out of her.

  In her grief, she drew sensitive young Jack, who most resembled her, even closer to her bosom. She became his counselor, and Jack, her protégé. Jack Bradley grew up religious, responsible. Eager to be of service.

  When Jack was nineteen he knew he was about to be drafted, so he devised a plan to enlist in the Navy and avoid land battle. His plan, he was sure, w
ould allow him to be of service but to stay far from the bullets. Little did he realize it would lead him directly to one of history’s bloodiest battles.

  Franklin Sousley: Hilltop, Kentucky

  The mountains are high and steep in eastern Kentucky, blue-shadowed and cut by nearly vertical hollows and plunging river gorges. It is a majestic but lonesome pocket of America. Those hollows have a way of swallowing up the people who come to live there—like the English settlers of two centuries ago who poured westward through the Cumberland Gap on the Wilderness Road. They looked up at those deep hollows and just melted into them, forming little clusters of community that grew as distinct and isolated from one another as islands on a vast upended ocean.

  The hollows swallow up people, and even history: Some of the speech patterns you hear today in those high little outposts are preserved from Daniel Boone’s time, and those patterns in turn were transported across the Atlantic from the England of Shakespeare.

  The names, too: Go there and open up a family Bible, and look at the names entered on its flyleaf through the generations. Good British names like Cochran, and Peck, and William, and James, and Harrison.

  And Sousley. Franklin Runyon Sousley.

  I love that name; I love the melody of it. It has that twang of Appalachia about it. But beneath that twang, if you listen closely, you can hear the cadences of an older, refined speech pattern. “Franklin Runyon Sousley” reminds you that the hillfolk of Kentucky still carried in their culture the calcified rhythms and accents of Old English, carried across the Atlantic and into the mountain wilderness.

  The Sousley roots go deep in Kentucky. The original Franklin Sousley was born in 1809, the year another Kentuckian by the name of Lincoln entered the world. In October 1829 that Franklin had a son, George, who eventually purchased the Holy Bible that still remains in the family, with all those English names inscribed. They were farmers—corn, wheat, tobacco—all the way down to Duke, who married Goldie Mitchell, a pretty girl with a nice, tight, red-haired perm, in November 1922. They set about the hard but productive life of raising tobacco outside the village of Hilltop. They would work the land, have a family, and maybe prosper.

  Their first son, Malcolm, came ten months later, then Franklin with his red hair on September 19, 1925. The family home was just a cabin, four small rooms heated by a potbellied stove. They had no electricity and the outhouse was out back.

  It was a hardworking farming life for the Sousleys, mostly tobacco, but the hay needed to be cut, cows meant milk for the children, and the vegetables were whatever Goldie could coax from the garden.

  When Franklin was just three, death struck the family for the first time. Five-year-old Malcolm died in Goldie’s arms, of appendicitis.

  Now Franklin was the only son and his mother drew him closer in her grief. As the boy grew she took him along with her as she indulged in her favorite pastime—fishing in the Licking River. With his buoyant personality and perpetual grin, he was a balm for his mother’s sadness.

  And there were plenty of chores to do. Duke and Goldie were constantly working, always struggling to pay the few bills an unheated cabin and small family could generate.

  When he was old enough, Franklin attended the two-room schoolhouse in nearby Elizaville. In May of 1933, when Franklin was almost eight years old, his brother Julian arrived. But just a year later his father Duke could no longer make it to the fields. “Daddy’s sick” soon yielded to “Daddy’s gone,” as Duke succumbed to diabetes at the age of thirty-five. Now Franklin, just nine, found himself the man of the family, with a mother to comfort, a tiny brother to help care for.

  The special mother-son bond between Goldie and Franklin deepened, but it wasn’t lost in gloom. Goldie, only in her early thirties, had already lost a son and a husband. But she didn’t mope. She displayed the implacable optimism, the will to go on that was transferred to Franklin, even through these dark days of hurt. She explained her misfortune as “the Lord’s way” and said that “someday He will tell me why they were taken from me.”

  Goldie didn’t smother her son in sadness, but encouraged him to revel in life’s joys. And Franklin took the lesson to heart.

  This is what people remember most about Franklin. His laughter, his good humor, his ability to put smiles on the faces of all around him. With a busy life, up early for school and to bed late at night after the chores, it seemed he had little time for play, but Franklin Sousley made the most of it.

  His grades at school were perfect—an unbroken perfect string of C’s. “He was an average student,” Winifred Burden remembered years later. “And he was a typical country child. He didn’t stay after school to play athletics, because he had to go home and work on the farm. Frankly, us city kids looked at the country kids as different and didn’t socialize with them. But Franklin was different. He was nice to everybody with that big smile of his. And everyone liked Franklin.”

  But as soon as school was done, it was back to work on the farm. Emogene Bailey lived down the road from Franklin, and remembers him clearly over half a century later. “When I picture him,” she recalled, “I see him doing farm chores, hay and corn and tobacco, vegetable gardens, mowing lawns, always busy.”

  Franklin was a dutiful son, finishing all his chores for his mother, or maybe for a slice of his favorite treat, Goldie’s Black Jam Cake. He was five feet ten inches tall and weighed 150 pounds in high school, and he could do all the heavy chores she needed done. He was a hard worker, baling hay, bundling that tobacco with those big hands of his—“the biggest hands I ever saw on a human,” a Marine in his outfit would later say of him, “like two big hams hanging there.”

  With his busy life and all the chores that had to be done, the strongest impression he left with his friends in Fleming County is that of a fun-loving, playful boy.

  That squared with Aaron Flora’s view. “Franklin was in it for a good time,” he said. “Fishing, swimming, skinny-dipping, snipe-hunting, where you take some poor fool out in the night and leave him holding a bag in the holler, waiting for you to drive the snipes at him. He was in if it was a good time.”

  Another time, he and Franklin were shooting off fireworks, and by the time they got to the Roman candles, Franklin was having so much fun he aimed one right square up a buddy’s ass.

  He was as daring as he was silly. He’d fight a running sawmill and he’d jump buck-naked into a half-frozen creek on a dare.

  His close friend J. B. Shannon remembers Franklin as “a big freckle-faced boy with bright red hair. A rambunctious young man, not afraid of anyone.”

  There was that dewy Halloween night when he and J.B. rounded up a couple of cows and prodded them onto the Hilltop General Store porch and strung up some wire so they couldn’t get back off, and then treated them to some Epsom salts. “Those cows shit on the porch all night,” J.B. fondly remembered nearly a lifetime later.

  The boys liked Franklin and so did the girls. Marion Hamm remembers that “Franklin was just fun, a tremendous guy. I never knew of him being a bad boy. We laughed so much with him always telling jokes.”

  So many of his friends and sweethearts remember his constant laughter. And he liked to dance, and that broke some ice with the girls.

  Marion tried to find words to describe what it was like being around Franklin Sousley, and then shook her head. “You can’t imagine how much fun that boy was,” she said. And then she brightened up with a memory: “The most fun was when it snowed at Christmas. Franklin would get his family’s horse and wagon and we’d get on the sled and go out to the farm and cut Christmas trees and sing carols, and we’d ride around and distribute those trees, so everyone would get one at the same time.”

  As Franklin ripened to young manhood, his ventures with the girls stayed innocent. “Franklin liked the girls and we’d chase them,” J. B. Shannon remembers. “But did we make progress? Well, we were young innocent boys and we thought we did. At least we’d brag about it, lie about it to each other.”

 
The Second World War hovered in the far distant background of Franklin’s boyhood. News of its great battles and gossip about the fates of local servicemen filled the air at Hilltop as he cavorted and studied and helped Goldie in her struggles with the farm. There is no indication that Franklin paid it much attention. He was only six when Japan invaded Manchuria; Hitler’s sweep through Europe had begun when he was only thirteen. By the time he’d graduated from high school, in June of 1943, there was reason to be hopeful in both theaters. The staticky radio broadcasts that he and Goldie listened to—when they weren’t tuned in to Waite Hoyt calling the Cincinnati Reds on summer afternoons and evenings; Goldie was a big baseball fan—were telling tales of victory both in Europe and in the Pacific.

  In the first American land battle of the war the Marines had captured Guadalcanal that past February, and the Germans had surrendered at Stalingrad. In March, the British Eighth Army under Montgomery broke through the Mareth Line in Tunisia; a couple of months later, German and Italian troops surrendered there. The Allies were driving toward Sicily at about the time Franklin’s small graduating class was receiving its diplomas. And from the Pacific, the radio commentators had been sending stirring reports of U.S. Navy and Marine victories with names such as Midway and Tarawa.

  All of that sounded just fine to the people in the hills and hollows of eastern Kentucky. Franklin began dating in his last year of high school, escorting Frances Jolly or Marion Hamm to church, to the movies, or just for a walk in the woods.

  But upon graduation, Franklin Sousley was more concerned with finding a way to shore up his struggling mother’s finances than dating or fighting for his country. Goldie came first, so he went straight to work at a Frigidaire plant in Dayton, across the Ohio border to the north. He lived in a small apartment at 107 Park Drive.

  He was sending money back home to Goldie from his paycheck as an eighteen-year-old staker and propeller assembler in Plant No. 2 when, in January 1944, Uncle Sam sent him a telegram. On that day, rather than accept his fate as an Army infantryman, Franklin Sousley—the hijinking hill boy who’d fight a running sawmill—made up his mind to become a U.S. Marine.