Flags of Our Fathers (18 page)

Clifford Langley, Doc’s good friend and co-corpsman, recalled being on liberty in Los Angeles one night, in Doc’s company, when they came upon Ira, drunk and surly, thrashing about in the grip of two Military Policemen. The two corpsmen talked the MP’s into releasing Ira into their care. But that didn’t end Ira’s wayward night. “We couldn’t control him,” Langley said. “He was yelling, ‘Get away from me, you can’t tell me what to do.’ Doc finally said, ‘If he doesn’t want our help, let’s let him go,’ and we did. He got picked up by the MP’s again and thrown into the brig.”

Ira often wore a poncho stuffed through his belt—it is visible in the flagraising photograph—in the Pima manner. His bunk was usually sloppy, his shoelaces usually untied.

Ira was mostly silent and his mates could only guess his thoughts. Except for Kenneth Milstead, who heard Ira’s pain in the dead of the night:

I would have guard duty with Ira often. We’d be sitting there alone guarding some gate, no one around, just pitch black. Ira was always depressed. Over and over he’d repeat, “I have nothing to go back to. There’s nothing waiting for me at home when I get back.” It was just his nature to be depressed. He didn’t talk much to most guys, so they couldn’t tell, but when he talked to me it was with this down-in-the-dumps attitude. I would just try to change the subject and get into something else.

But his letters home frequently revealed a brighter side. In early July, writing from “Tent City No. 1,” he sounded for all the world like a kid at summer camp: “I’d rather stay in a tent than barracks. In the barracks you have to keep your place clean all the time…What’s more we got wooden decks, 6 men to a tent, lights and we have our own radio.”

By the end of the first week in August, his mood had turned fatalistic: “Well I was offered another chance to go to communication school and be promoted fast and get away from this rough life. But I said no. My place is with a rifle. I didn’t come in here to lead an easy life. They better get us overseas quick and the war would be over with. Don’t worry about me. I’m a man now, no young guy.”

The “man now” behaved a lot differently from the boy who had been impressed by the sermon on alcohol. George Scott of Easy Company remembered a late night after liberty when he was sitting in the tent talking quietly with some buddies. Ira lurched into the tent and, without warning, hurled a bayonet in Scott’s direction. It stuck in the ground. “We all looked up in silence at him,” Scott recalled. “He just stood there scowling. I don’t think he intended to hit me. He was just angry. He was generally angry. There was a chip on his shoulder; he was separated somehow.”

Perhaps Ira’s unlikeliest pal was Franklin Sousley.

Franklin arrived at Camp Pendleton “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” as his Kentucky people would have put it: a good ol’ boy of eighteen, rawboned and drawling, his rust-colored hair uncombed. He had grown physically formidable in boot camp; he stood six feet now, all of it muscle and bone. But the jokey sweetness was still intact: Franklin was as lighthearted as Ira was dour. He would have his new buddies in stitches within minutes, singing his homemade songs. His countrified “Marine Corps Hymn” had become a minor smash around the camp, and now he had written a new tune: this one a half-comic, half-serious warble called “Oh, Lord, Make Me Lucky (Take Me Home to Kentucky).” When he wasn’t vocalizing, Franklin was spinning yarns about the country folks back home, folks who lived in towns with names like Big Bone Lick and Dog Walk.(“I never believed those names,” mused Joe Rodriguez, “until I went there in 1982 and saw that it was true.”)

His buddies loved to send up his countrified ways. “He was the only one in the whole bunch,” Bill Ranous liked to joke, “who thought that K rations tasted good.”

Kentucky and his homefolk were never out of his mind. In July he wrote a touching letter to his hardworking mother: “You wrote that you were sick. I want you to stay in out of that field and look real pretty when I come home. You can grow a crop of tobacco every summer, but I sure as hell can’t grow another mother like you.”

Mike Strank added his own bawdy twists to the good-natured teasing of the Kentucky hillbilly. One Sunday morning, as the sergeant stood talking to some of his fellow veterans in the Easy Company compound, Franklin came loping into view. “Here’s a good one,” Mike whispered out of the corner of his mouth; then, in a louder, conversational voice, he remarked: “Well, I got my masturbation papers today. Now I can go overseas again.”

Franklin, ever on the alert for inside lore, was all ears. “Where,” he wanted to know of Mike, “do you get those masturbation papers? I want to go overseas, too.” Mike was the picture of helpfulness. He directed the boy to the nearest officer in charge of records. And off Franklin charged, full of high hopes.

Mike Strank functioned on many levels. He was a weekend drinker, a good-time Charlie, and on Monday mornings he was all business again. He was widely regarded as one of the best squad leaders in the regiment: His squad, with Harlon, Ira, and Franklin in it, was also considered among the best in the regiment.

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.