Flags of Our Fathers (8 page)

A Marine’s Marine. But not because of his ferocity in combat—although he was a cool and deadly fighter. Not because he screamed, “Follow me and we’ll kill a lot of Nips!” or ranted about “dying for your country.” Mike Strank earned respect by emphasizing the well-being of his young charges, at least to the extent possible in the face of torrential gunfire.

“Follow me,” Sergeant Mike used to tell the boys in his squad, “and I’ll try to bring all of you back safely to your mothers. Listen to me, and follow my orders, and I’ll do my best to bring you home.”

He was born Mychal Strenk on November 10, 1919, in Jarabenia, Czechoslovakia. A friend of the family, Ann Basophy, who was born in the same small farm village, recalled that Vasil and Martha Strenk subsisted in a one-room house with a dirt floor, along with Vasil’s parents and grandparents.

The following year Vasil emigrated to America and changed his last name to Strank. Sponsored by an uncle, Alex Yarina, he passed through Ellis Island and made his way to the Pennsylvania mining and steelworking town of Franklin Borough, on the Conemaugh River sixty-five miles east of Pittsburgh and two miles east of Johnstown.

Franklin Borough, chartered in 1868, was at its peak population in 1920: 2,632 people. A complex built in 1898 by the Cambria Iron Company and soon to be taken over by Bethlehem Steel offered plenty of hard work for gritty, industrious immigrants: twenty-two open-hearth furnaces, two mills for rolling sheared plates, a universal plate mill, and a continuous bar mill. Three years later Bethlehem would add business offices, five blast furnaces, a billet mill, a slab mill, a powerhouse, boilers, a chemical laboratory, a sintering plant (in which iron could be heated into a steely mass without melting), and a steel car department.

At their height, the Bethlehem mills and mines around Franklin Borough employed more than 18,000 workers. They clustered in soot-caked towns and villages throughout Cambria County and along the western slope of the Alleghenies. Franklin Borough became a safe haven for East Central European immigrants and their offspring; by the early 1930’s they would form a majority in the little town, a village-within-a-village, really. They would provide three of the town’s six civil officers and half the members of the Franklin Fire Department.

Vasil worked the mines for three years before he could afford to send for Martha and the baby. They followed him to America in early 1922. Three-year-old Mychal passed innocently under the portals of Lady Liberty, the most recognizable image of America until he and his comrades supplanted it twenty-three years later.

By the end of that year Mychal had a brother, John. Pete would follow in 1925, with sister Mary still eight years in the future.

The family lived in a two-room rental apartment inside the Slavic enclave. The rooms were a kitchen and a bedroom. To Martha especially, this was luxury: a castle, she said, compared with what they had endured back in Jarabenia. Mike, John, and Pete shared one bed; their parents slept close by in the other. Vasil trudged off to the mine at three
P.M.
every day in his lamp-hat and fatigues, carrying a pail that had a thermos of water in the bottom and his lunch on top. He wore the same clothes all year round, returning home black with coal dust from head to toe. But proud. This was progress!

Franklin Borough offered the Strank family a symbolic vision of America, but a far different one than quiet Appleton offered the Bradleys. Here was a fiery, noisy landscape of New World mechanization. The whole town could see the vast skeletal structures of the mills. Many families lived virtually next door. The mines, cut into the banks of the hills, completed the enveloping industrial view. Night never came to the mill town; the blast furnaces with their open hearths blazed away twenty-four hours a day.

The day, on the other hand, could seem like a perpetual twilight. The coal-dust haze from the mines formed a thick presence in the sky, blotting out the sun. The first duty for any Franklin family upon waking was to sweep the front and back porches free of the soot that had fallen overnight like black snow. A woman who grew up there remembered walking through “an inch of crunch” on her way to school every day.

Life in the town reflected this pounding, gritty pace of constant sweat and production. When the Stranks arrived, Franklin boasted fourteen beer gardens, but no church, and no doctor. Yet the Eastern Europeans who toiled there did not see any of this as deprivation. For them, it was a new chance in a new and vigorous land; a chance to rise, or at least for their children to rise. They preserved their culture and their religious values in the two-room rented dwellings where they lived under the steel mills’ glare, each little apartment building a link in the improvised chain of a new community.

Without realizing it, Vasil Strank might have begun the molding of his eldest son into a Marine’s Marine right in the bosom of his tiny household.

Mychal—now renamed Mike—shared a bed with his brothers John and Pete. Returning from his late shift at the mine as he did, at about one in the morning, Vasil seldom saw his three little boys awake—they would leave for school while he was still sleeping, and he would be gone to begin his shift by the time they returned. This routine could not have been easy for Vasil. “His family was really the boys,” his son John recalled.

And Vasil abided by a strict Old World value system. Discipline in the family was paramount. When one of the boys had misbehaved, Martha would report it to Vasil upon his return home at night, and he would wake up a few hours later, along with the boys, to administer punishment.

Vasil insisted on a special rule for this punishment: No matter which boy had committed the offense, all three would be disciplined equally. In this way, Vasil thought, he could transfer the burden of discipline from himself to the boys; make them see that they had a shared interest in the good behavior of each.

Vasil probably did not know that he had intuited one of the fundamental principles of military training; in particular, Marine training. Roughly fifty percent of procedure in a Marine basic-training program is about disconnecting the young American boy from his concept of himself as a unique individual, a lone operator. He is remolded into an integer in a team. Shared responsibility—an abiding sense of the unit—is essential to survival in combat. Thus, if a recruit should faint from exhaustion during a forced march, the rest of his unit is trained to run in circles around his body until he comes to. Equal discipline.

As the eldest of the three brothers, and the brightest—his intellectual skills would soon blaze brilliantly to the surface—Mike not only grasped the concept of teamwork and equal responsibility, he became a liaison between his father and his two younger siblings, an explainer of his father’s rules and wishes to Pete and John. In short, a sergeant.

Mike Strank resembled his mother, as Jack Bradley resembled his. Like Jack, Mike absorbed his mother’s fervent Catholic faith. Before bed each night, he and his two brothers would kneel on the floor, before a vivid painting of The Last Supper, and say their evening prayers in Slovak. They looked out for one another. They took to making sure they wore the same color shirt to school each day. Like uniforms.

Slowly, the Strank family gained a foothold. While Vasil labored, and Martha raised geese on the hill behind the apartment, plucking the feathers to make pillows, the boys attended school, where they picked up the new American language. Schools were good around Franklin Borough and Johnstown; Bethlehem Steel, a benevolent despot, paid for good buildings and teachers and even an indoor swimming pool. But no one could completely shield the immigrant children from nativist bigotry. Ann Bosophy, the Stranks’ fellow immigrant from Jarabenia, recalls cringing on the schoolroom floor after being struck by her first-grade teacher. Her sin was unthinkingly slipping into the Slovak tongue.

Mike never made that mistake. He did not know English when he began first grade; by the end of the year he was so proficient in it that he skipped the second. He even learned to joke around in the new tongue. He took up the French horn and learned it. Quickly. It was amazing, his relatives said: The boy never forgot anything. He could open the evening newspaper, read a page of it, and the next morning tell you exactly what all the articles said. A photographic memory.

He was shy around girls, Ann Strank, Pete’s wife, recalled. Not outgoing. You would only notice him if you knew him. But then, not many of the boys in that town were at ease with girls, or vice versa. Men, he liked. Men, he understood. And men liked and understood Mike Strank.

His shyness had nothing to do with timidity. He saved his brother John’s life in the mines once. It happened in 1933, when Mike was fifteen and John was eleven. Coal miners’ children were allowed to go inside the tunnels sometimes, during breaks, and collect random shards of coal to fuel their families’ stoves. One day, Mike and John were walking along in the darkness, feeling for lumps of coal. John, trailing his big brother, was idly banging his coal shovel against the wall. On one bang the shovel made contact with an exposed high-power wire. John screamed, but could not let go; the electricity fused his hand to the shovel. Mike spun and hurled his body against the little boy like a football lineman throwing a block, knocking him free. John fell to the ground screaming in terror, but safe from the deadly current.

A few years later, during the second Johnstown Flood of 1936, Mike calmly faced a current of a different kind. With most of the townspeople in near-panic as the Conemaugh River waters rose dangerously near the peak of the 1889 disaster, Mike calmly made his way down the steep incline to have a look for himself. Scrambling back up, looking bored and deadpan, he told his rapt little brothers, “It’s gonna come, and it’s gonna go. And that’s just the way it is.” The little brothers were awed and calmed by Mike’s air of detachment.

By 1933 the Stranks had saved enough money to buy, for cash, a ten-room duplex on the side of a hill above the Conemaugh. The family kept five rooms for itself and rented out the other five. This would prove Vasil’s greatest claim on the good life in America. The Stranks were living in unimaginable luxury now: When Mary came along a little later that year, she was delivered by an actual midwife. Her arrival in the family gave the three boys an expanded cycle of duties at night: One would wash the dishes, one would dry them, and the third would take the baby out for a stroll. (Jokester Mike at times would turn this into a Three Stooges routine, slipping his dried dishes back into the sink for John to wash all over again.)

Games of marbles on the kitchen floor. Touch football on the hard town streets; leather basketballs heaved at quivering hoops tied to telephone poles. Pennies saved for baseball cards and the collection plate. At night, the three brothers sprawled near the kitchen stove, studying—Mike tutoring each of them in turn. “Mike would help Pete and me with our homework,” John Strank remembered. “He’d tutor us on the floor, near the stove where it was nice and warm.” The good life for the Stranks began to feel as though it would never end.

It seemed that the mills, like the rest of America, would keep on expanding forever, belching ever-brighter flames. Franklin Borough had grown so confident of its unending prosperity that it built a new municipal building, so opulent in its gleaming white brick that it was nicknamed the Taj Mahal. The movie star Gene Kelly had come to town; he did a song-and-dance routine with the local sheriff at its dedication.

But things were not destined to go on like that forever. The year of the “Taj Mahal” dedication and Gene Kelly’s soft-shoe was a year of upheaval. The year was 1929.

The Depression had sunk into eastern Pennsylvania well before Mike Strank graduated from high school in 1937. Soup kitchens had replaced the bustling activity in the mines and the mills; a steelworkers’ strike had failed badly. Thousands of Slavs foraged for new jobs.

The smoke, dust, grime, and blackened skies of Mike’s childhood seemed permanent features of the landscape. Even for a bright boy like Mike, college was beyond hope, the costs unimaginable. (His “Ambition,” as noted in his 1937 high-school yearbook, was: “To Be President.”)

Some workers had come to Franklin Borough while he was in high school; men who said they belonged to something called the WPA. President Roosevelt had created it so that people could work their way out of poverty. These WPA men had built a band shell in the town; sidewalks; some sewers. Mike learned that the men were being paid the impressive sum of fifty-seven dollars a month. He decided that he would see what Mr. Roosevelt had available for him.

He ended up in a similar brainstorm of the President’s, one that perfectly suited his energy and developing physique: the Civilian Conservation Corps. The CCC was designed to wean young men off street corners by getting them involved in shoring up the nation’s natural environment. Through the 1930’s, youthful CCC workers planted millions of trees across America; they released nearly a billion game fish into the country’s rivers and lakes; they built wildlife shelters, created camping grounds, and dug thousands of miles of canals for irrigation and transportation.

But the CCC had a greater function—one that did not fully reveal itself until America went to war. It served as a premilitary training experience for some three million boys, many of whom would flood into the armed services after Pearl Harbor. Administered by the Army, the CCC introduced its recruits to camp life, to military discipline, to physical fitness, and to a sense of loyalty to comrades and to a cause.

All this was certainly true of Mike Strank. The former French horn player, scholar, and good Catholic boy disappeared into the CCC in 1937 weighing 140 pounds and reemerged two years later a strapping 180, tanned and handsome. He had headed first for the Petrified Forest in Arizona; then he came back to Pennsylvania, working as a laborer on highway projects for another year.

He would have stayed on happily in the CCC, swinging an ax and hauling concrete under the great American sun, but the government denied his application for an extension: His father had by then found work a couple of days a week, and the family was no longer technically destitute.