5 Marines and a Sailor

warpig883
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Posts: 1814
(12/30/01 9:14:13 pm)
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Just thought you guys might enjoy this summary of 6 heros.

On Feb. 23, 1945, the fifth day of the battle, they raised the second of two flags planted that morning on the summit of Mount Suribachi, an extinct volcano that overlooked the landing beaches and had been made by the Japanese into a hellish nest of gun emplacements, pillboxes, fortified caves, tunnels and storage depots.


Ira Hayes, a "non-citizen" and immigrant of sorts in his native land, a Pima Indian born on a small cotton farm in the Gila River reservation in Arizona--geography his people had occupied for more than 2,000 years.

--Harlon Block, born on a farm in the Rio Grande valley of Texas, a superb athlete raised in a pacifist Seventh Day Adventist home where killing and even the possession of weapons were forsworn. "It is doubtful," Bradley writes, "that in his short life Harlon Block ever kissed a girl."

--Franklin Runyon Sousley, a good old hillbilly boy from Eastern Kentucky, a practical joker who, it was said, would "fight a running sawmill." His father died when he was 8 years old, leaving him as the man in the family.

--Rene Gagnon, child of French Canadian mill workers in Manchester, N.H., a shy, self-conscious "mama's boy" who "never chummed with the guys" and, like his parents, faced a lifetime in a factory until the Marines got him in 1943.

--Jack Bradley, father of the author of this book, an altar boy from a devout Catholic household in Antigo, Wis. His high school ambition (fulfilled after the war) was to be a funeral director, a counselor and friend to the bereaved. He joined the Navy to
avoid combat, wound up as a medical corpsman with the Marines and came home with a Navy Cross, an honor unrevealed to his family until after his death.

They were teenagers, Bradley writes, "scarcely out of boyhood when they enlisted. Their lives up till then had been kids' lives: hunting, fishing, paper routes, the movies, adventure programs on radio . . . first wary contacts with girls . . . Most of them were poor. The Great Depression ran through their lives." They grew up fast in the war, discovering that doing their duty to God and country involved unimagined pain, terrors and awful deeds.





We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans... -- Bill Clinton, US President (USA Today, 11 Mar 1993, page 2a)

AntiqueDr
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(12/30/01 9:22:47 pm)
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Call him drunken Ira Hayes,
It wont matter anymore
To the whiskey-drinkin' Indian
or the Marine that went to war...



We Buy Guns! 1 - 100, Antique or Modern!
www.apaxenterprises.com

warpig883
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Posts: 1816
(12/30/01 9:29:41 pm)
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Jonny Cash immortalized him in that fine song.
We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans... -- Bill Clinton, US President (USA Today, 11 Mar 1993, page 2a)

RGRWJB
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Posts: 7
(1/1/02 12:35:05 am)
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Another good hero taken by the disease we call alcoholism.

Tac401
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(1/1/02 11:56:30 am)
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Indeed, indeed, what a shame!