SOUTH BEND TRIBUNE, October 1, 2000

Headline: Just an ordinary American
By ANDREW S. HUGHES

"When I came upon the scene, they were just finishing attaching the flag to the pole and they were just ready to raise it up," John Bradley said in 1985 during the first and only taped interview he granted between the 1950s and his death in 1994.

His son James quotes from the unpublished transcript in his new book, "Flags of Our Fathers."

"I just did what anybody else would have done," John Bradley said 15 years ago. "I just gave them a hand. That's the way it is in combat.

You just help anyone who needs a hand.

"They didn't ask for my help. I just jumped in and gave them a hand."

Because he stopped to help five Marines raise a flag pole, the young Navy corpsman from became a hero to a nation that needed a symbol of valor and victory to justify its sacrifice of thousands of young men on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean.

He became a "flag-raiser," one of the six men captured by Joe Rosenthal's Speed Graphic camera as they raised the American flag over Iwo Jima from atop Mt. Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945.

After a whirlwind "Bond Tour" to raise money for the war effort in 1945 and appearing at the Nov. 10, 1954, dedication ceremonies for the Iwo Jima monument in Washington, D.C., John Bradley shied away from the fame the photograph allowed him. Throughout his life, he said the real heroes of Iwo Jima were the men who died on the small island located halfway between Guam and Japan.

"To me, it's a photo of six nice boys doing something that's inconsequential, but they happened to be caught in 1/400ths of a second that came to be a symbol for others," James Bradley said in a recent telephone interview.

He will read from "Flags of Our Fathers" Thursday at the bookstore on the University of Notre Dame campus.

"A big purpose in writing the book is for me to say to America, 'Don't look at the photo as if these are bronzed heroes different than us,' " he says. " 'These are ordinary Americans doing their duty.' "

What few people knew in 1945 was that the photograph recorded the second flag raising on Iwo Jima. The flag in Rosenthal's photograph was a replacement for a flag that had been raised earlier that day and removed for safekeeping as the important flag, the one that claimed the island for the U.S.

The Marines fought the Japanese for more than a month on Iwo Jima and suffered 25,851 casualties, almost 6,800 of them fatalities. Of the 353 Medals of Honor awarded during World War II, 27 of them were awarded for action on Iwo Jima. Most of the 22,000 Japanese defenders on the island died there.

By the time the battle ended on March 25, three of the six men in the photograph would be dead, and a fourth, John Bradley, would be injured.

Sgt. Mike Strank was killed by friendly fire March 1.

Harlon Block, who replaced Strank as their squad's leader, died just hours later, "sliced from his groin to his neck" by an unidentified object.

A sniper shot Franklin Sousley in the back on March 21.

John Bradley caught shrapnel in both legs on March 12.

Of the six flag-raisers, only Ira Hayes and Rene Gagnon left Iwo Jima without physical injuries.

Despite the heavy casualty toll, the victory on Iwo Jima helped to save as many as 27,000 American lives before the war's end by providing an emergency landing strip for about 2,400 distressed B-29 bombers. It also cleared the flight path from the American B-29 air bases on Saipan and Tinian to Japan by removing the Japanese military's ability to radio air raid warnings to Tokyo.

Almost 30 years later, James, the fourth of John and Betty Bradley's eight children, attended Notre Dame for two years. He served as president of his freshman class during the 1972-73 academic year and studied in Tokyo his sophomore year.

"So, I'm in my room in Dillon Hall, and I call my mom and dad and said I wanted to spend a year in Japan without connecting Japan to my father's experience at Iwo Jima," Bradley says. "Years later, I asked him what he thought about my wanting to go to Japan. He said, 'I thought if the good fathers at Notre Dame approved it, it would be fine with me.' "

After Tokyo, he left Notre Dame to travel the world for 18 months. He later received a degree in history from the University of Wisconsin.

Bradley, who lives in Rye, N.Y., makes his living as a motivational speaker with a concentration on the topics of leadership, "doing the impossible" and heroism.

"To write this book, I had to do a lot of research on the entire Pacific war, and I came to the conclusion that we could have lost out there," he says. "I could see that the Pacific war was not a matter of us building bigger ships faster, but us actually having a set of attitudes that won over the enemy, and that's what I talk about."

James, his mother, Betty, and three of his brothers, Steve, Mark and Joe, visited Iwo Jima in 1998. James says "a river of tears" ran down Mt. Suribachi that day.

"Mt. Suribachi is as tall as the Washington Monument," he says of Iwo Jima's highest point. "You're talking about a real intimate, small area, and the Japanese were underground. There's an unearthly feeling about Iwo Jima. I've been on islands before, but you stand on Mt. Suribachi and it's just surrounded by the Pacific."

Bradley began researching "Flags of Our Fathers" after John Bradley's death from a stroke at age 70 on January 11, 1994. James wanted to know about his father and the five other men in the photograph, a subject rarely broached in the Bradley household.

"It wasn't quite like we knew he was keeping something," Bradley says. "If a guy doesn't talk and you don't know anything, maybe there isn't anything there. You're looking back and seeing all this information unfold, but we didn't know he won the Navy Cross--'Dad, tell us about Iwo Jima.'

" 'Oh, I forgot most of that.' "

Bradley says his father did talk about the flag raising, but his simple, direct style-- " 'We put up a pole, and somebody came and took a picture' "--cut through the hyperbole outsiders usually attached to discussions of the flag raising and the photograph.

"There were three flags raised on Iwo Jima, but they raised the flag on every Pacific island," James says. "It's just that this was an accidental photo that caused people to be very emotional about what they saw."

Bradley says "the forces that called (the three survivors) together let them go" after the monument's dedication.

Hayes died January 24, 1955, after a night of drinking, gambling and, at the end, a fight with one of the other poker players, Henry Setoyant. Hayes' body was found "facedown in a pool of his own vomit and blood," and the coroner ruled his death accidental, "due to overexposure in the freezing weather and too much alcohol."

Bradley says Hayes' brother Kenny attributes his brother's death to the injuries he sustained in the fight--"he was simply too drunk to break his fall and get up," Bradley writes.

"If you read the words of Ira Hayes, he was definitely suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder," Bradley says. "He never said, 'I'm dogged by the fame.' What he said (figuratively) was, 'I got a horror movie in my head called "Iwo Jima," where guys that were close to me exploded in front of me.' "

Bradley says Rene Gagnon Jr. said his father rode an emotional roller coaster of "stop-and-go heroism" throughout his adult life. Gagnon would put his life on hold to make a public appearance as a flag-raiser, but it would take him "days and sometimes weeks (to come) down from it," Gagnon Jr. told Bradley.

"In his final interviews, he talked about the opportunities he missed, jobs promised to him that didn't come through, and he sounded a little unhappy, so he obviously hoped that it would translate into something," Bradley says.

He concludes his own father remained silent about the flag raising and the war in general to a minor extent because he distrusted the media and harbored bitterness over the torture one of his buddies, Ralph Ignatowski, endured as a captive on Iwo Jima. The main reason, however, was that the war "was simply too painful for words," Bradley writes, and his father forced himself to forget what he witnessed in the Pacific.

"He probably held 200 guys in his arms as they died, and then he was in a photo that he couldn't remember the circumstances (of it being taken)," he says. "A lot of people are amazed that he turned down the celebrity, but what was it? A flag raising, but he had images of guys who died in his arms. ... I started my research saying, 'How could my dad have been so silent?' Five years later, I say, 'How stupid could I be?' It was too horrible to talk (about)."