Flags of Our Fathers (19 page)

A local woman, a cook named Tsugi Kaiama, came to the rescue of the boys’ palates with an inviting delicacy: 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?”

Thinking 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.

Their destination was an “Island X.” That’s all they knew. For the Marines fighting America’s War in the Pacific it was a familiar stereotyped pattern. Months of training, the invasion of an island no one had ever heard of, followed by more training and another invasion.

In Europe troops liberated cities and were cheered as conquering heroes. But the Pacific was a different story. After slogging through fetid jungles and fighting across coral outcroppings, the survivors of battle had only memories of their fallen buddies as they gazed out at the sea from the transports returning them to their base for more training.

But the boys on their way to “Island X” were in for an unusual treat. Along with almost five hundred ships, theirs stopped at Pearl Harbor for a final liberty before battle.

Honolulu!

Mike mingled with old Raider buddies in bars packed wall to wall with leathernecks acting as if they would never see another beer. For many of them, this would be true. Ira and Joe Rodriguez walked down jammed Bishop and King Streets through Honolulu’s “Chinatown” where men outnumbered women a hundred to one. Doc and Rene waited in long lines at the USO near the Royal Palace Grounds, where there were writing facilities, game rooms, food and soft-drink bars. Franklin took the opportunity to permanently proclaim his love of the Corps: On Hotel Street he had the Marine emblem tattooed on his right arm.

When a shore barge sidled up to Harlon’s ship to take him ashore, he caught sight of a familiar face in the crowd of Marines. He silently climbed down the ladder, jumped into the barge, and surprised his old buddy Glen Cleckler with a slap on the back. Glen Cleckler, the Panther fullback who had churned through the big holes opened up by Harlon’s blocking.

The two boys went larking in the city; there they ran into a couple of other Weslaco boys. So many boys from Weslaco! It seemed like the whole Marine Corps was there! “This must be the Big One,” the young boys shouted, referring to the invasion of Japan.

But as the group’s hilarity wore on into the night, Harlon’s mood turned serious. It was while the friends were milling out of a movie theater that he turned quietly to Glen. He slipped his ring off his finger and some photographs out of his pocket and pressed them into Cleckler’s hand. “Give this to my mother,” he told his buddy. “My luck has run out. I don’t think I’m coming back.”

Like the others who had heard this, Glen at first laughed it off. He tried to hand the items back, but Harlon looked hurt, so Glen shrugged and kept them. “I didn’t know what to make of this,” Cleckler told me, “but Harlon was dead serious.”

A few days later, just before he left Hawaii, Harlon had one more encounter with a Weslaco Panther teammate, Leo Ryan. Harlon searched for Leo until he found him in a naval hospital tent in “Camp Catlin” on Red Hill outside Honolulu. Leo was in horrible shape: heavily bandaged and temporarily blinded from the effects of a Japanese shell in the battle of Tarawa.

Leo was lucky to be alive. In fact, he had been left for dead, in a pile of bodies stacked like cordwood that had been his Marine comrades until the 155-millimeter shell had exploded in their midst on Tarawa. The concussion had torn his nose to shreds, changed the wrapping of his face, unhinged one side of his jaw, and blown both eyeballs out of their sockets—they were hanging down his cheeks, held only by their stems, when the corpsman found him.

Unconscious and motionless, he was placed on a pile of corpses. He was in this state when a medic had spotted him and ordered the erroneous telegram notifying Jean Ryan that her husband was dead. Only later, when another medic walked by and noticed movement, was Leo pulled out of the pile, given treatment, and evacuated to Oahu. Against all odds, he not only recovered but also eventually regained his eyesight.

Now, in this hospital tent in a virtual city of hospital tents—they were sectioned off into streets, there were so many—the two boys spoke quietly as a heavy rain fell. Harlon spoke as the blinded Leo, his face wrapped in gauze, listened. The glory of their undefeated football season seemed a long way in the past.

Harlon confessed the same fatalistic thoughts to Leo as he had to the others. He was as calm in delivering them as he had been with his brother Ed and sister Maurine. He had mulled it over: He would do his duty. He would fight. He would die. “I have beat the odds because I haven’t been hit yet,” he told Leo. “But I won’t be so lucky again. My odds have run out.”

But there was more. He spoke of his liberty in Weslaco months before as “a gift from God, an act of fate that gave him his last opportunity to tell people that he would not return.” Corporal Block then spoke of his reemerging religious beliefs. He realized he had to go out and kill the enemy, but he was not comfortable doing so. Harlon spoke of the validity of the Fifth Commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” and how it was the government that now demanded he kill. “Eleanor Roosevelt had complained that the Marines were a bunch of savages after a few had broken up some West Coast bars,” Leo remembered. “Harlon was hurt by this, sensitive to being taught to kill against his religion and then being branded a killer.”

In late January the huge fleet moved slowly out of Pearl Harbor, forming a convoy seventy miles long. Amidst the machinery and manpower on one transport ship, the USS
Missoula,
are six particular boys: six boys with the wind in their hair, unsuspecting of their own impending place in mythic history.

The boys are pushing toward their destiny now. Doc, Ira, Mike, Franklin, Harlon, and Rene are rushing to their appointment with an entrenched, dedicated defender of a sacred homeland. Peaceable American boys, citizen-soldiers about to engage with a myth-obsessed samurai foe. This will not be a mere battle. It will be a colossal cultural collision, a grinding together of the tectonic plates that are East and West. The Western “plate” will be the cream of American democracy and mass-production: in voluntary manpower; in technology, training, and industrial support. The Eastern “plate” will be the elite minions of a thoroughly militarized society whose high priests have taught that there is no higher virtue than death in battle.

The results of this collision will alter the fates of both East and West for the next century to come.

This giant fleet of American warships—a modern armada—churns across the ocean day and night for a journey of four thousand miles. It moves with the inevitability of a railroad schedule. It stops for nothing, it deviates for nothing. The United States, having been surprised at Pearl Harbor and then raked in battle after battle by the onrushing forces of imperial Japan, has finally stabilized and gathered its strength. Now the American giant is fully awake and cold-eyed. It is stalking an ocean, rounding the curve of the earth, to crush its tormentor.

Accommodations on the
Missoula
are less than comfortable. There are only small spaces on the boat to mingle, so most of the men have to remain in their bunks, along with their pack, rifle, and helmet. The boys’ sleeping compartment is a cargo hold belowdecks where floor-to-ceiling bunks have been installed. Woe to all below when the man on the uppermost bunk gets seasick.

The days are long. Pinochle games dot the fantails and the upper-deck gun platforms. Some of the men squint at paperback books—Perry Mason mysteries, Zane Grey westerns. Others thoughtfully clean and reclean their weapons. Briefings are common; captains and sergeants going over the plan of action on the beach with their huddled squads and platoons, again and again. The troops know their drill. They’ve practiced it for a year. They go over it again, one more time.

One kid prowls the decks offering to sharpen knives. He’ll sharpen anybody’s knife. It doesn’t matter if he’s sharpened it before. It’s something to do. Something to pass the hours.

The
Missoula
carries all of Easy Company amidst its 1,500 troops. By the time this fleet converges with a second one, hurrying northward from down near Australia, the total number of ships will exceed eight hundred. They are carrying three reinforced Marine Divisions. All of these ships, all these men, converging on an eight-mile-square island six hundred miles south of Tokyo.

The movement of over 100,000 men—Marines, Navy support personnel, Coast Guard units—across four thousand miles of ocean for three weeks is a triumph of American industry galvanizing itself in a time of great national peril. At the outset of the war, Japan’s naval strength was more than double that of America’s. But across the American continent, the idling factories steamed and sparked to life. Most of the vessels came splashing off the industrial assembly lines in the six months before this assault. And they have been augmented by reinforcements from around the globe. The call has gone out to every theater of the World War, and every theater has sent what it could spare. Support has come from MacArthur in the Philippines, from the China and India commands. Eisenhower in Europe looked up from his maps and wondered, “What
are
they doing out there?” and consigned transports that had borne troops from England to the beaches at Normandy.

And it has not been just a matter of hardware. The civilians of America have mobilized behind these fighting boys. Behind each man on board the ships are hundreds of workers: in the factories, in the cities and towns, on the heartland farms. Rosie the Riveter. Boy Scouts collecting paper and metal. The young girl who will become Marilyn Monroe, sweating away in a defense plant.

Here is some of what those mobilized civilians have generated for this tremendous force:

For each of the 70,000 assault-troop Marines, 1,322 pounds of supplies and equipment. Some of it sounds weirdly domestic: dog food, garbage cans, lightbulbs, house paint. Some of it suggests an island business office: duplicating machines, carbon paper, movie projectors. Some sounds like kids’ camping gear: toilet paper, socks, shoelaces, paper and pencils, flashlights, blankets. Some begins to suggest a sterner mission: flares, plasma, bandages, crucifixes, holy water, canisters of disinfectant to spray on corpses. And some of it gets exactly to the point: artillery, machine guns, automatic rifles, grenades, and ammunition. The transport ships carry six thousand five-gallon cans of water, enough food to feed the population of Atlanta for a month, or the assaulting Marines for two months. The Marines brought along 100,000,000 cigarettes.

Two days out of Honolulu the identity of “Island X” is revealed.

Some troops in World War II will have the honor of liberating Paris, others Manila. Easy Company has been assigned an ugly little hunk of slag in the ocean, nearly barren of trees or grasses or flowers. It is a dry wasteland of black volcanic ash that stinks of sulfur (“Iwo Jima” means “sulfur island”). Bulging at its northeast plateau, tapering down to Mount Suribachi at its southwestern tip, it resembles an upside-down pear with Suribachi at its stem. Pilots who had photographed the island from above thought it resembled a charred pork chop.

Mount Suribachi in the south is an extinct volcano, and the lava flow from Suribachi’s volcanic eruptions formed the rest of the island, oozing along the slender neck and pooling out over five and a half miles to a width of two and a half miles at its widest part. The only practical landing beach begins at Suribachi’s base and extends two miles along the eastern shore. The land rises, then, as the island’s width expands, toward a 350-foot mountain, Motoyama, that commands the northwesterly corner. Plumes of steam-driven, rank sulfur still jet from Motoyama, evidence of volcanic substrata.