thedrifter
04-27-08, 07:13 AM
The everyday heroes: The lonely tale of The Battle of Iwo Jima
By T.D. MOBLEY-MARTINEZ
Sunday, April 27, 2008
James Bradley’s dad didn’t talk about it. The war. The Battle of Iwo Jima. His place in perhaps the world’s most famous photograph, taken as almost an afterthought by a young Associated Press photographer as five Marines and one Navy corpsman raised the flag over that bloodied island in 1945.
John “Doc” Bradley wasn’t the kind of man to dig things up. He kept the horror and the hardship to himself as his family of eight grew.
It wasn’t until after his death that son James’ unexpected quest began, one that he initially didn’t imagine would lead to a bestselling book, “Flags of Our Fathers,” or an Oscar-nominated movie directed by Clint Eastwood.
Both told his father’s story, but also the stories of the other five flag raisers, men whose lives were irretrievably changed by the war and the iconic image.
Bradley, 54, talks here about his dad, the terrible burden the war left on many veterans and seeing his dad’s life on the big screen. “Flags of our Fathers” will appear on HBO at 10 p.m., tomorrow, April 28. It is also available on DVD, for purchase or for rent.
ETC: So, the movie. Were you happy with it?
James Bradley: I didn’t set out to think whether I was happy or not. I don’t believe authors who say that, because they sold it to another creative person. They can raise $100 million and make a movie their way. They always say, “is it going to be true to the book?” Or accurate? They can’t be: Someone sits down and spends 18 hours with a book while the movie is only two hours.
What I expected was emotional accuracy. The emotional take-away of the movie and the book were similar and that made me happy.
ETC: And seeing your dad’s story — and your own — on the big screen?
JB: I grew up knowing my dad raised the flag. He must be 35 feet tall and bronze in Arlington. This is the fourth movie Hollywood has made about my dad.
This is not like I’m Stephen King and I had an original idea. This is part of history. There will be other films about Iwo Jima and the raising of the flag. It has a life of its own. (Pause.) This is the world’s tallest bronze monument. It’s been on three United States stamps and been on the back of American coinage. When Roosevelt died — and he had been president for generations — they issued stamps in purple and it was the No. 1 bestselling stamp. Then they issued a stamp of the raising of the flag and ... it sold out the first day. Like I say, it has a life of its own.
I’m used to that. This is the flag being raised over Iwo Jima.
ETC: Tell me a little about your dad.
JB: Well, you know, he was a guy that action speaks louder than words. He got up. He went to work. He supported his church. He loved his wife and had a big family. He liked to watch them water-ski. ... He was very uncomplicated and led a quiet life. He never said do this or go into this type of field. He was a supporter and listened. He didn’t talk about hard work, he just did it.
I have audiences that have said, “Did you really not talk about it? How could that be? But I say, how fascinating is your dad when you were 10? I was speaking at a college and said, “Do you really think a lot of your dad when he was 19? I just made the team, Dad, but tell me what you were doing when you were 19. You and Smokey went behind the tracks and flattened pennies?”
(Laughs.) What was of more interest was concerns about pimples and making the team. It was ... so distant.
(Pause.) You know, we were trained when the reporter called — Walter Cronkite’s office, the San Francisco Chronicle, Norwegian paper — we were trained to say, “Dad’s fishing in Canada.”
We didn’t know exactly why. We just knew that the press pestered my dad.
ETC: So what did your father tell you when you actually asked him about his role in the war, in the photograph?
JB: There’s a scene in the book where we’re watching Johnny Carson and he’s doing something about Iwo Jima and I don’t know, I’m 13 or 14. I asked him about it and he said he didn’t remember. I was exasperated. I said, “This is historical fact. It was a battle and the photograph was taken and you were there.” He leaned back in the chair and told me about the tortured death of a buddy.
I said, “Oh.” I couldn’t grasp it.
ETC: You just didn’t have a way to frame it.
JB: Now I could imagine how you might suffer. “Oh” was all I could say. Oh, disembodied.
ETC: It wasn’t until his death, though, in 1994, that you found the impetus for writing the book. Can you tell me about it?
JB: Well, my father died in 1994. In his private boxes, we found a letter that he had written home from Iwo Jima three days after the flag raising. It was a letter to his mom and dad in Appleton, Wis. It said that he had had a little to do with the raising of the flag and that it was the happiest day of his life.
I cried when I read that letter, wondering why he couldn’t share it with me. If he was underground, pushing papers at a desk and never saw anything, I would have thought that makes sense.
So I called one guy and another guy and I said “I’m James Bradley and you fought with my dad and he didn’t talk about and I’m wondering why.”
I think about it now and I’m not really ashamed, but they saw so much.
(Pause.) After my dad died, my mom told me that after he returned, he cried in his sleep for four years. Actively cried.
ETC: Had he told your mom?
JB: No, what she learned about him on Iwo Jima she learned from me.
(Pause.) Do you have kids? For women, I tell them you’re driving down the highway and you have two kids in car seat in the back and you get in an accident. The other car enters the backseat and cuts off the heads of your children. You turn around and you’re watching the wriggling body of your children, the bloody spurting and the heads on the seat.
And later, she doesn’t talk about it. Then people wonder why she never talks about it. “Maybe she’s brave or maybe she’s modest.” That’s not it. It’s the horror. These guys don’t want to bring this up and cry, buckle underneath it.
And they killed people. ... In war, you have to do it for survival, but it lives with you.
There are more reason not to talk than to talk.
ETC: So how did you get them to talk?
JB: I started with an advantage. For one thing, they fought with my dad. And over a period of years, even though he had opportunities to be a hero, he didn’t and he died pretty honorably. They saw that. I wasn’t an insider but I was a son of respected insider.
Also, my dad had been a funeral director and I had seen death. There were lot of times when they’d get off the subject. “He got killed how?” “Uh, the Japanese killed them.” “How did he die?” “Well, he got shot.” It was all passive.
I’d bear down. I didn’t think death was dirty. I thought it had a dignity.
One guy didn’t want to talk to me. I said “I bet you don’t want to talk to me because an 18-year-old friend of yours died and you feel like you might cry. I’ve been crying for months. But you’re pushing 70 and you only have so much time. If you die and don’t tell me about this guy, it’s like he never lived. If you tell me, you bring him back to life and bring him some dignity.”
In “Flyboys,” my second book, I write about five boys who got their heads cut off. The families were told cover stories, that they died on impact when their plane crashed. But their brothers lived for months as a POWs and had head their heads cut off.
I didn’t push it on them, the families, but I humanized it: If my brother died, I would want to know. Girlfriends, brothers, sisters and nephews — all to a person — wanted to know.
ETC: It must have been an emotional ride.
JB: You know, when I finished the battle stuff in “Flag” it goes on to the bond tour and the postwar and I felt like I came out of a dark hole. I realized that my sleep had been interrupted and I was eating more. A little lethargic. I realized it had that effect on me. Beyond that, you never know.
You know, “Flyboys,” which is about torture, cannibalism and death, there were a lot of nightmares there.
ETC: You did a lot of things in your life. You traveled extensively, spending a lot of time in Japan. You worked in corporate filmmaking. Did you ever imagine that you’d be a writer at this point in your life?
JB: I was living in New York. I toyed with idea of authoring book. When my dad died, it didn’t connect. As I wrote down the recollections of dad’s friends, as I was talking to them months into it, I thought, I should get this into a book because there a lot here that I didn’t know. It was a slow process.
ETC: After the interviews, did you see your dad differently? As a man and not just a dad?
JB: The thing is that I didn’t learn anything that I didn’t know. If you take my mom’s marriage to my dad and then I came, we’ve eyeballed the guy for 47 years. I didn’t learn he had another family or an account at a bank in the Caymans. There was no revelation about his life. It was his service that he never talked about.
ETC: Still, didn’t the stories of men who knew him in a completely different context add some dimension?
JB: Yes, it added dimension to him. But he would get a call at 3 in the morning, he’d jump out of bed, get ready and be in suit and out of the door. He’d do his duty. Guys would call wounded on the battlefield and he jumped up and did his duty. I’m saying “yeah, that’s consistent.” He didn’t fool around or get drunk. He was kind of a steady Eddie. He always talked about being a funeral director. That was consistent with dad. ... That just laid another layer of lacquer to what I already knew.
I call them everyday heroes. People always say, “Oh my God, they were such heroes on Iwo Jima.” Now I think they were good boys opening doors for mother, then good boys helping their buddies in war. They came back and they were building swimming pools or getting X-ray equipment for hospitals, but when they were good boys under fire, they call it heroes.
I have a son that was recently diagnosed with something that is changes his eating habits. He’s lost 20 pounds in three weeks. He’s 11 and disciplining himself like that. I don’t know if that’s more difficult than running under fire and saving someone’s life. That might be.
Ellie
By T.D. MOBLEY-MARTINEZ
Sunday, April 27, 2008
James Bradley’s dad didn’t talk about it. The war. The Battle of Iwo Jima. His place in perhaps the world’s most famous photograph, taken as almost an afterthought by a young Associated Press photographer as five Marines and one Navy corpsman raised the flag over that bloodied island in 1945.
John “Doc” Bradley wasn’t the kind of man to dig things up. He kept the horror and the hardship to himself as his family of eight grew.
It wasn’t until after his death that son James’ unexpected quest began, one that he initially didn’t imagine would lead to a bestselling book, “Flags of Our Fathers,” or an Oscar-nominated movie directed by Clint Eastwood.
Both told his father’s story, but also the stories of the other five flag raisers, men whose lives were irretrievably changed by the war and the iconic image.
Bradley, 54, talks here about his dad, the terrible burden the war left on many veterans and seeing his dad’s life on the big screen. “Flags of our Fathers” will appear on HBO at 10 p.m., tomorrow, April 28. It is also available on DVD, for purchase or for rent.
ETC: So, the movie. Were you happy with it?
James Bradley: I didn’t set out to think whether I was happy or not. I don’t believe authors who say that, because they sold it to another creative person. They can raise $100 million and make a movie their way. They always say, “is it going to be true to the book?” Or accurate? They can’t be: Someone sits down and spends 18 hours with a book while the movie is only two hours.
What I expected was emotional accuracy. The emotional take-away of the movie and the book were similar and that made me happy.
ETC: And seeing your dad’s story — and your own — on the big screen?
JB: I grew up knowing my dad raised the flag. He must be 35 feet tall and bronze in Arlington. This is the fourth movie Hollywood has made about my dad.
This is not like I’m Stephen King and I had an original idea. This is part of history. There will be other films about Iwo Jima and the raising of the flag. It has a life of its own. (Pause.) This is the world’s tallest bronze monument. It’s been on three United States stamps and been on the back of American coinage. When Roosevelt died — and he had been president for generations — they issued stamps in purple and it was the No. 1 bestselling stamp. Then they issued a stamp of the raising of the flag and ... it sold out the first day. Like I say, it has a life of its own.
I’m used to that. This is the flag being raised over Iwo Jima.
ETC: Tell me a little about your dad.
JB: Well, you know, he was a guy that action speaks louder than words. He got up. He went to work. He supported his church. He loved his wife and had a big family. He liked to watch them water-ski. ... He was very uncomplicated and led a quiet life. He never said do this or go into this type of field. He was a supporter and listened. He didn’t talk about hard work, he just did it.
I have audiences that have said, “Did you really not talk about it? How could that be? But I say, how fascinating is your dad when you were 10? I was speaking at a college and said, “Do you really think a lot of your dad when he was 19? I just made the team, Dad, but tell me what you were doing when you were 19. You and Smokey went behind the tracks and flattened pennies?”
(Laughs.) What was of more interest was concerns about pimples and making the team. It was ... so distant.
(Pause.) You know, we were trained when the reporter called — Walter Cronkite’s office, the San Francisco Chronicle, Norwegian paper — we were trained to say, “Dad’s fishing in Canada.”
We didn’t know exactly why. We just knew that the press pestered my dad.
ETC: So what did your father tell you when you actually asked him about his role in the war, in the photograph?
JB: There’s a scene in the book where we’re watching Johnny Carson and he’s doing something about Iwo Jima and I don’t know, I’m 13 or 14. I asked him about it and he said he didn’t remember. I was exasperated. I said, “This is historical fact. It was a battle and the photograph was taken and you were there.” He leaned back in the chair and told me about the tortured death of a buddy.
I said, “Oh.” I couldn’t grasp it.
ETC: You just didn’t have a way to frame it.
JB: Now I could imagine how you might suffer. “Oh” was all I could say. Oh, disembodied.
ETC: It wasn’t until his death, though, in 1994, that you found the impetus for writing the book. Can you tell me about it?
JB: Well, my father died in 1994. In his private boxes, we found a letter that he had written home from Iwo Jima three days after the flag raising. It was a letter to his mom and dad in Appleton, Wis. It said that he had had a little to do with the raising of the flag and that it was the happiest day of his life.
I cried when I read that letter, wondering why he couldn’t share it with me. If he was underground, pushing papers at a desk and never saw anything, I would have thought that makes sense.
So I called one guy and another guy and I said “I’m James Bradley and you fought with my dad and he didn’t talk about and I’m wondering why.”
I think about it now and I’m not really ashamed, but they saw so much.
(Pause.) After my dad died, my mom told me that after he returned, he cried in his sleep for four years. Actively cried.
ETC: Had he told your mom?
JB: No, what she learned about him on Iwo Jima she learned from me.
(Pause.) Do you have kids? For women, I tell them you’re driving down the highway and you have two kids in car seat in the back and you get in an accident. The other car enters the backseat and cuts off the heads of your children. You turn around and you’re watching the wriggling body of your children, the bloody spurting and the heads on the seat.
And later, she doesn’t talk about it. Then people wonder why she never talks about it. “Maybe she’s brave or maybe she’s modest.” That’s not it. It’s the horror. These guys don’t want to bring this up and cry, buckle underneath it.
And they killed people. ... In war, you have to do it for survival, but it lives with you.
There are more reason not to talk than to talk.
ETC: So how did you get them to talk?
JB: I started with an advantage. For one thing, they fought with my dad. And over a period of years, even though he had opportunities to be a hero, he didn’t and he died pretty honorably. They saw that. I wasn’t an insider but I was a son of respected insider.
Also, my dad had been a funeral director and I had seen death. There were lot of times when they’d get off the subject. “He got killed how?” “Uh, the Japanese killed them.” “How did he die?” “Well, he got shot.” It was all passive.
I’d bear down. I didn’t think death was dirty. I thought it had a dignity.
One guy didn’t want to talk to me. I said “I bet you don’t want to talk to me because an 18-year-old friend of yours died and you feel like you might cry. I’ve been crying for months. But you’re pushing 70 and you only have so much time. If you die and don’t tell me about this guy, it’s like he never lived. If you tell me, you bring him back to life and bring him some dignity.”
In “Flyboys,” my second book, I write about five boys who got their heads cut off. The families were told cover stories, that they died on impact when their plane crashed. But their brothers lived for months as a POWs and had head their heads cut off.
I didn’t push it on them, the families, but I humanized it: If my brother died, I would want to know. Girlfriends, brothers, sisters and nephews — all to a person — wanted to know.
ETC: It must have been an emotional ride.
JB: You know, when I finished the battle stuff in “Flag” it goes on to the bond tour and the postwar and I felt like I came out of a dark hole. I realized that my sleep had been interrupted and I was eating more. A little lethargic. I realized it had that effect on me. Beyond that, you never know.
You know, “Flyboys,” which is about torture, cannibalism and death, there were a lot of nightmares there.
ETC: You did a lot of things in your life. You traveled extensively, spending a lot of time in Japan. You worked in corporate filmmaking. Did you ever imagine that you’d be a writer at this point in your life?
JB: I was living in New York. I toyed with idea of authoring book. When my dad died, it didn’t connect. As I wrote down the recollections of dad’s friends, as I was talking to them months into it, I thought, I should get this into a book because there a lot here that I didn’t know. It was a slow process.
ETC: After the interviews, did you see your dad differently? As a man and not just a dad?
JB: The thing is that I didn’t learn anything that I didn’t know. If you take my mom’s marriage to my dad and then I came, we’ve eyeballed the guy for 47 years. I didn’t learn he had another family or an account at a bank in the Caymans. There was no revelation about his life. It was his service that he never talked about.
ETC: Still, didn’t the stories of men who knew him in a completely different context add some dimension?
JB: Yes, it added dimension to him. But he would get a call at 3 in the morning, he’d jump out of bed, get ready and be in suit and out of the door. He’d do his duty. Guys would call wounded on the battlefield and he jumped up and did his duty. I’m saying “yeah, that’s consistent.” He didn’t fool around or get drunk. He was kind of a steady Eddie. He always talked about being a funeral director. That was consistent with dad. ... That just laid another layer of lacquer to what I already knew.
I call them everyday heroes. People always say, “Oh my God, they were such heroes on Iwo Jima.” Now I think they were good boys opening doors for mother, then good boys helping their buddies in war. They came back and they were building swimming pools or getting X-ray equipment for hospitals, but when they were good boys under fire, they call it heroes.
I have a son that was recently diagnosed with something that is changes his eating habits. He’s lost 20 pounds in three weeks. He’s 11 and disciplining himself like that. I don’t know if that’s more difficult than running under fire and saving someone’s life. That might be.
Ellie