2010-03-17 Raising the Flag

After the performance of Quiet Heroes last Sunday, I realized there are two Iwo Jima monuments in this town. That's quite a lot for a small city, isn't it? One is in our main cemetery. It's a special area they've made for the burial of service people.

So I decided to check these monuments out sometime in the next few weeks. I stopped into the cemetery first.

Feels weird to go into a cemetery with no particular reason...not for a funeral or to visit a loved one. Makes me feel kind of odd, and I didn't want to be disrespectful, but I really wanted to examine the monument. I drove in after work and wandered over to the monument...from afar, you can see they did a sort of perfect reproduction of the original picture.


But of course, the picture only ever had a certain amount of detail, so the artist has probably had to compensate for unknown faces...


And sculpting the tangle of arms and legs and bodies that it took to raise the flag...


They didn't even know that the amazingly famous photo of the flag being raised over Iwo Jima was going to be so compelling...photographer Joe Rosenthal supposedly almost missed taking it. He just snapped the shot, threw it into a postal bag to Guam, where a technician spotted it and got it to the AP Photo Editor. It was distributed 17 hours after taking it, making it one of the most famous and recognizable images of the war.

The story of the men who raised the flag is sad. Three of them never even made it out of the Pacific, dying during the war. One died an alcoholic, haunted by his past, forced for years to "perform" for war bond drives. Another died in middle-age, never having collected on the many promises made to him by hangers-on, while he was famous.

The last was the only man in the picture to have lived into old age. John Bradley lived, had a family and a life...when he died his son, James, wrote the book Flags of our Fathers. It was only after his dad's death that he even found out his dad had won the Navy Cross for his actions. His father always said that the real heroes of Iwo Jima were the ones who never returned.

I'm not super-interested in military history, but learning this little bit of history about 6 men in one picture made me realize this is only one story of many that we'll never know about war.