thedrifter
12-11-06, 07:21 AM
Wartime experience shared through photos
December 11,2006
ANNE CLARK
DAILY NEWS STAFF
Editor’s note: This column first ran on Feb. 23, 2005.
A reader sent me a digital photograph the other day. The picture is grainy, but it captures the extraordinary moment that U.S. Marines raised our flag atop Mount Suribachi, sixty years ago today. I wasn’t looking at Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph, but rather one taken by a pharmacist’s mate during what would be the first flag raising on Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945.
He took the picture from the base of the mountain, pointing up; and high above him you can see Marines scattered along the top of the mountain’s curved, rugged range.
A few are clustered around a flagpole, and the American flag is flying straight out, ahead of a stiff breeze.
If Rosenthal’s picture symbolized the Marines’ tenacity, then the pharmacist’s mate’s photo literally showed the mountain they had to climb.
This pharmacist’s mate took many pictures during his time on Iwo Jima, Saipan and the Marshall Islands.
He mounted them in a scrapbook when he returned from war, giving his family fascinating glimpses into his life while he was away.
He took pictures inside his camp’s operating room, showing surgeons standing on a dirt floor and huddled over a patient by the light of a single ceiling lamp.
A good artist, the pharmacist’s mate even drew maps of Iwo Jima island, carefully marking out the airfields.
He died last month. It was his daughter who sent me the photograph. She said he rarely talked about his service, so he let the pictures speak for him.
Similarly, my dad took photos of his tour in Vietnam, documenting collapsed bridges and lush green fields, a busy village market and farmers herding buffalo.
He took a series of pictures showing American convoys winding over dirt roads, with villagers walking alongside them.
As a jostling, curious group of children gathered around my dad, a tall and baby-faced American soldier, he took their picture. He also posed for at least one, standing before a Vietnamese mountain range as the morning fog rose above them.
Looking at his pictures is a way for me to share my dad’s experience, to know about his wood-framed quarters, the metal bed on which he slept and the friends he made.
How else would I know about that year in his life? How else do we appreciate what they gave up?
Which brings me to my Marine, who took three disposable cameras into combat in Iraq and returned with ... nothing. Not even the shells of the cameras.
I don’t blame him for this.
When you’re sleeping three hours a night in sandy holes and have a country to liberate and buddies to keep alive, you have other things on your mind. But I’ve often wondered about what he saw.
Like most war veterans, he doesn’t talk about it much.
Maybe one day, when things are more stable in Iraq, he’ll take me there and show me where he traveled, where he stopped when the sandstorm whipped up, what he saw at An Nasiriyah, where he spotted his first Iraqi farm and the Iraqi child who waved to him from the side of the road.
I want to ride over the bridges he crossed. But if I can’t have that, I dearly hope he’ll snap some pictures next time; for history’s sake, and mine.
Anne Clark’s husband returned from deployment last week. His digital camera is somewhere at the bottom of his seabag.
Contact Anne at 353-1171, ext. 228, or aclark@freedomenc.com.
Ellie
December 11,2006
ANNE CLARK
DAILY NEWS STAFF
Editor’s note: This column first ran on Feb. 23, 2005.
A reader sent me a digital photograph the other day. The picture is grainy, but it captures the extraordinary moment that U.S. Marines raised our flag atop Mount Suribachi, sixty years ago today. I wasn’t looking at Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph, but rather one taken by a pharmacist’s mate during what would be the first flag raising on Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945.
He took the picture from the base of the mountain, pointing up; and high above him you can see Marines scattered along the top of the mountain’s curved, rugged range.
A few are clustered around a flagpole, and the American flag is flying straight out, ahead of a stiff breeze.
If Rosenthal’s picture symbolized the Marines’ tenacity, then the pharmacist’s mate’s photo literally showed the mountain they had to climb.
This pharmacist’s mate took many pictures during his time on Iwo Jima, Saipan and the Marshall Islands.
He mounted them in a scrapbook when he returned from war, giving his family fascinating glimpses into his life while he was away.
He took pictures inside his camp’s operating room, showing surgeons standing on a dirt floor and huddled over a patient by the light of a single ceiling lamp.
A good artist, the pharmacist’s mate even drew maps of Iwo Jima island, carefully marking out the airfields.
He died last month. It was his daughter who sent me the photograph. She said he rarely talked about his service, so he let the pictures speak for him.
Similarly, my dad took photos of his tour in Vietnam, documenting collapsed bridges and lush green fields, a busy village market and farmers herding buffalo.
He took a series of pictures showing American convoys winding over dirt roads, with villagers walking alongside them.
As a jostling, curious group of children gathered around my dad, a tall and baby-faced American soldier, he took their picture. He also posed for at least one, standing before a Vietnamese mountain range as the morning fog rose above them.
Looking at his pictures is a way for me to share my dad’s experience, to know about his wood-framed quarters, the metal bed on which he slept and the friends he made.
How else would I know about that year in his life? How else do we appreciate what they gave up?
Which brings me to my Marine, who took three disposable cameras into combat in Iraq and returned with ... nothing. Not even the shells of the cameras.
I don’t blame him for this.
When you’re sleeping three hours a night in sandy holes and have a country to liberate and buddies to keep alive, you have other things on your mind. But I’ve often wondered about what he saw.
Like most war veterans, he doesn’t talk about it much.
Maybe one day, when things are more stable in Iraq, he’ll take me there and show me where he traveled, where he stopped when the sandstorm whipped up, what he saw at An Nasiriyah, where he spotted his first Iraqi farm and the Iraqi child who waved to him from the side of the road.
I want to ride over the bridges he crossed. But if I can’t have that, I dearly hope he’ll snap some pictures next time; for history’s sake, and mine.
Anne Clark’s husband returned from deployment last week. His digital camera is somewhere at the bottom of his seabag.
Contact Anne at 353-1171, ext. 228, or aclark@freedomenc.com.
Ellie