Flags of Our Fathers (5 page)

Harlon was the child most influenced by Belle and her beliefs. He grew up feeling sure of what was right and wrong. He accepted that the Bible was the literal word of God; the Ten Commandments an absolute guide. Harlon was confident with this ordered view of the world. He was smart—he skipped second grade—and entered his teenage years a chesty, likable boy, somehow at the center of everything. And a free spirit. Often when his chores were finished he was off horse-racing bareback with his Mexican pal Ben Sepeda in McAllen. “Harlon rode a white horse, a solid white horse,” Ben remembers. “Harlon was daring and determined. We’d ride bareback over to my house. My mom would make us corn tortillas and jellied tomatoes. Harlon used to bring a jar along to take some jellied tomatoes back with him.”

Harlon was sure of himself and his beliefs. He didn’t feel he had anything to prove. And Harlon couldn’t be cowed. His friend Russell Youngberg remembers the time that somebody vandalized a stepladder at the Seventh-Day Adventist school. Harlon and his buddy Russell were among the three suspects. The principal called them into his office and told them they couldn’t play on the playground until they’d fixed the stepladder. Russell Youngberg kept quiet, but Harlon spoke right up. He was terse and to the point: “We didn’t do it, and we won’t fix it, and you can’t make us, and it ain’t fair.”

The straitlaced principal reddened, but held his tongue. And Harlon Block’s Seventh-Day Adventist education had approached the beginning of its end.

In Harlon’s sophomore year the mysterious vandal struck again, writing obscenities on the wall of an outhouse next to the school. The principal launched his inevitable inquisition. When he got to Harlon, the boy nonchalantly allowed that he knew who’d done it, but he wasn’t going to tell. For this, the principal kicked him out of school.

Harlon, and apparently the whole family, were ready for a change. They moved to the neighboring town of Weslaco, a flat, square speculator’s grid slapped down on the Valley floor. Its name was a crunching of its founding firm, the W. E. Stewart Land Company.

At Belle’s insistence the other Block children continued at the Adventist school. But Harlon didn’t want to return. He felt he had absorbed all they had to teach him. More important, Harlon was athletically inclined and the Adventist school did not have a sports program. He wanted to make his mark in the sport that attracted the local crowds and created excitement in Weslaco, indeed, in all of Texas: football. Harlon wanted to be in on the action, part of a team.

Belle didn’t like such talk. She felt Harlon should make an effort to get back into the Adventist school. And football! Well, football was a game of violence and the games were on Friday night, the beginning of the Sabbath, so football was out of the question.

Belle presented her views forcefully to Harlon, who shrugged noncommittally like all teenage boys who are being told what to do. Belle appealed to Ed to discipline the boy, to focus him back on the church and get his mind off football. Ed, who thought Adventism was all well and good but didn’t take it as literally as Belle, didn’t see the harm in attending a public school. And he was excited by the idea of his son playing football.

Belle was aghast. They argued, but Ed pointed out that they didn’t have to decide this right away: Because of the difference in the schools’ schedules, Harlon had a seven-month delay before he could enter Weslaco High School. So Ed bought some time and told Belle he’d talk with Harlon as they worked together hauling oil.

A few years earlier, as the Depression deepened, milk prices had sagged. Oil had been discovered forty miles west of McAllen, and Ed had a money-making idea. He bought one, then two, finally four new oil trucks. The Rado refinery in McAllen gave anyone with a truck free gasoline if they’d haul the crude from the oil fields. It made for long, grueling days but Ed was a hard worker with a family to feed.

As his sons matured, he got every one of them involved in hauling crude oil from the hill-country wells to the refinery in McAllen. So when Harlon had time on his hands and was old enough—before he was old enough, Belle thought—Ed enlisted him as one of his drivers. It was brutal work: long trips several times a week, even weekends.

Harlon took the remainder of the school year off to haul oil with his father. Belle was alarmed, but Harlon relished the independence and the opportunity to do man’s work. He and his father shared the labor and grew close—“best friends,” as Ed would later say. Harlon was the perfect number-two man, ready to take over when the need arose.

Ed loved nothing more than Harlon’s company, and he was torn when their months of working together drew to a close. But he couldn’t wait to cheer his most athletic son as he starred on the gridiron.

Belle felt she was losing Harlon—he was the only Block child to leave the Adventist school—so she worked hard to involve him in the daylong Sunday socials—“convenings”—the church held. But Harlon was good-looking and gregarious and attracted the attention of the girls.

Belle was troubled by what she saw as the waywardness of her son. And she was horrified when Harlon brought home a .22-caliber rifle. A gun in Belle’s home! Harlon’s friends all had guns to shoot rabbits in the fields, and Harlon wanted to have some fun. Belle came home one day to find Harlon innocently instructing his younger brothers in its use. Belle told Ed he must discipline Harlon, and Ed spoke to him, but his heart wasn’t in it. What was so wrong about a Texas boy having a little gun? Belle’s ideals were compromised a little more.

And there were many times when Belle wasn’t told of Harlon’s hijinks. Harlon’s brother Mel remembers when Harlon and some friends, in an attempt to make their own liquor, mixed yeast and grapefruit juice in mason jars and hid them behind a pillar in the barn. “For two weeks those jars were exploding,” Mel told me. “We found this concoction dripping all over the barn. Dad thought it was funny. Mom never found out.”

Harlon’s developing brawn made him a natural for the Weslaco High football squad when he transferred there. He quickly became a star despite a certain naïveté regarding the game’s finer points. Leo Ryan recalled a practice early in Harlon’s first season when the two of them had drawn their equipment from the team manager and were ambling out to the hard-dirt field. Leo noticed that his friend was limping along on bowed legs. “Hey, big guy,” he said, “what’s the problem?”

Harlon spoke right up: “My
thaghs
hurt.” He glanced down to a point below Leo’s waist. “I sure wish I had me some of those
boards
you have in your thaghs.”

Leo had to think about that for several moments before he realized that Harlon was referring to the protective pads in Leo’s uniform pants.

Harlon was tough; he could take it. In one game the archrival Donna High School players somehow learned of the painful boils covering Harlon’s back and shoulders. The Donna boys pounded on Harlon but he didn’t flinch. Harlon caught a breathtaking pass that scored the winning touchdown against Weslaco’s biggest rival.

In fact, Harlon spearheaded Weslaco to an undefeated season. With him as punter, pass-catcher, and blocking back, the Panthers ground their way through every other team in the Valley with an offense as dry and drab as the red dirt under their cleats. They quick-kicked a lot out of the short punt formation, and as far as Leo Ryan could remember, they had only one running play. It was called “Harlon’s play,” which was strange in that it called for Harlon to block out for the fullback Glen Cleckler. But when the Panthers needed an artillery strike—a pass to gain some first-down yardage—Harlon’s big milk-hauling hands were usually wide open and ready for the ball.

Harlon, the middle child, loved being part of a team, going along with the guys. He was a real contributor, but not a leader or initiator. He wasn’t a quarterback calling the plays or a team captain. His main job was to block for others, to be a real teammate.

He played hard enough to catch the attention of the editors of the student newspaper, the
Weslaco Hi-Life:
“Hard-hitting, pass-catching, 165 pounds, 5 feet 11 inches describes Harlon Block, right end of the Panther line. Although this is his first year in Weslaco High School and his first year of athletics, he is probably one of the more natural athletes in the Valley.”

Harlon made “All South Texas” along with Leo Ryan and B. R. Guess in that undefeated 1942 gridiron season. Leo always felt that the team might have triumphed in the Texas playoffs if their bus hadn’t been confined to the Valley by the gasoline shortage. Still, it was a team to remember. Their photograph appeared in the local papers, all open collars and parted hair and confident grins.

But Belle hadn’t seen Harlon star on the gridiron. Belle insisted the family observe the Adventist Sabbath from Friday sunset to Saturday sunset. During Harlon’s Friday-night football games she sat quietly at home, concerned for his soul. This proud Christian woman never could quite enjoy the way Harlon was throwing himself into life as a budding young man. She was fearful for his spirituality; she seemed to worry that she was losing him. He was playing around too much; he was always gone, Belle complained to Ed.

Harlon was a hell-raiser in Belle’s eyes, but he was pretty tame by most people’s standards. He was bashful in groups and blushed at off-color jokes. Leo Ryan said Harlon worried about his looks and never thought the girls liked him—“Y’all go on ahead without me, now; I’m not gonna get a date,” he would tell Leo and the guys.

But the girls sensed something special in him. His brother Ed Jr. told me that the girls flocked to Harlon. And in many of the curling black-and-white photographs of Harlon that I’ve managed to collect, there is a happy-looking young woman standing close to him.

But the dalliances were innocent, kid stuff. His favorite girl, the one many think he might have married after the war, was Catherine Pierce. “We’d go to the movies together,” Catherine remembered. “And we’d go to church functions. We liked each other, we dated, but we never so much as held hands.”

Harlon would soon be off to war, soon be a symbol to the world of male bravado. But it’s doubtful that in his short life Harlon Block ever kissed a girl.

Ira Hayes: Gila River Indian Reservation, Arizona

I came to realize that much of what there is to know about Ira Hayes can be gleaned by studying him on the flagraising photo.

First of all, his silence, his utter quietness. Sit and look at the photo for an hour, an afternoon, a day. Sit quietly with Ira’s not addressing you. Then you know the utter silence that was Ira Hayes, a boy whose favorite game was solitaire.

For another clue look at Ira’s position on the photo. He’s the last figure to the left, the boy whose hands can’t quite reach the pole. That’s Ira, different, apart from the rest, unable to grasp the pole just as he was unable later to get his hands around his life.

If you feel you don’t know enough about Ira, you know how I felt in the summer of 1998. I had interviewed many people—school chums, ex-Marines, his three living relatives—but I still didn’t have a handle on him. I didn’t know who he was, what made him tick. So I flew to Arizona in search of the “real” Ira Hayes. And I learned that he cannot be found.

I drove south out of Phoenix until I was on the Pearl Harbor Highway, as Interstate 10 is called as it nears Ira’s reservation. I drove through the dry, silent heat along flat pink desert land, a plain of mesquite bushes and deep green saguaro cactus that recedes until it hits the Santan Mountains.

I drove until the four-lane highway crossed a meandering ravine about fifteen yards wide. A sign marked the ravine. It read:
GILA RIVER
. I pulled my car over and looked down from the highway into what used to be the Gila riverbed. I saw only a wide, dry, empty nothingness. The Gila River hadn’t flowed under that highway for decades.

I gazed out at Ira’s land, the Gila River Indian Reservation. It’s not big, with maybe 15,000 inhabitants. Framed by the mountains in the distance, a glance gives you the feeling you can see it all. Behind me, as I stood overlooking the dry riverbed, cars, RV’s, and campers of my society whooshed by. Sometimes a horn sounded to warn me not to back up onto the busy highway. The noises contrasted with the stillness, the utter silence of the reservation before me. After looking down once more at the river that wasn’t a river, I got back into my car, off to find Ira Hayes.

Ira was a Pima Indian, a member of a small, proud tribe that had inhabited this quiet land for centuries. He was born Ira Hamilton Hayes on January 12, 1923, to Nancy and Jobe Hayes. He was the oldest of the six Hayes children. Two children, Harold and Arlene, died as babies. Two other children died before they were thirty, Leonard in a car crash and Vernon of spinal meningitis. Ira made it to thirty-two years of age. Nancy and Jobe lived longer than all their children except Kenny, who was born in 1931 and was sixty-seven when I met him.

At birth Ira was already “apart,” separated from other Americans by law and custom. Arizona, a state for only eleven years at the time of Ira’s birth, did not recognize Pima Indians as citizens. Pimas could not vote; they could not sue anyone in the courts.