Bruce
Menin tells the story of The Flag Rising at Iwo Jima through the perspective of
Ira Hayes...Bruce
Menin tells the story of The Flag Rising at Iwo Jima through the perspective of
Ira Hayes...
You’ve
all seen the picture. They say it was once the biggest selling postage stamp in
American history. I don’t know this for a fact, although it may be true -
selling is something that my white brothers know a great deal about. That isn’t
bitterness; I know that I have none. It is just something that is true. They
sell; The People have always bartered or given.
I helped raise the flag on Iwo Jima. Twice. One time with my friends who died
and once for the press photographer. Like I said, you have all seen the picture.
I am the last one in the line, the picture taken just after I had let go of my
part of the flagpole. The People are always the last ones in line.
Please understand. I am not a hero. All the heroes I ever saw died around me on
Iwo Jima. Most white people don’t understand what The People know; that the
heroic do not come home from the battlefield. Just the survivors return. What is
heroic about grinding your manly parts into the earth like she was a faceless
woman, hoping that your ass does not get shot off? Most of the time we were on
Iwo Jima, that was me and my friends humping for survival.
I was Ira Hayes. For 32 years I was a Pima Indian from Arizona. My place of
birth and the spot where I died were within two miles of each other. In between,
the wind and the great waters and the great steel engines carried me farther and
wider than any of my tribe before me. I still don’t know which is the tale of my
life, the distances and the killing and the drinking or dying on the reservation
where I was born as if none of it had happened.
When the white man’s Christ was turning water into wine, my Pima grandfathers
were turning water and desert into corn and beans, squash and wheat and feeding
a nation, our small nation, occupying the valleys of what would be called
Arizona. We were, and still are a peaceful people, except when it came to
Apaches, who killed without thinking or feeling. We have never been great
warriors. We are good farmers, though; we had been given the great gift of
calling crops and food from the land. Warriors destroy to protect ideas, but
farmers work with the land to feed all peoples. Warriors and farmers have
different jobs. Perhaps ours is in the eyes of the Great Spirit no better than
theirs.
Later, the white man stole our water, turning our fields back into dust and
dirt, and made our hearts hungry for the food and the ways of our grandfathers.
My people know the starvation of the displaced. We have lost the Great Spirit’s
most precious gift; we can no longer coax from the earth the food we need. What
are a people once they have lost their gift?
I suppose the Pima were luckier than most. At least when they organized the
reservations, we got to live on land that had been ours for 2,000 years. Without
the water, of course. And without the water, the land was more fit for lizards
and rabbits than for Akimel O’oodhan, The People of the River.
I only remember dust and hunger from my childhood, belly hunger. And also hunger
of the heart, which comes when the old ways have been taken and there are no new
ways to replace them. To be fair, many white men also went hungry in those days,
because they were times of depression but the Pima had known such times for many
years before they caught up to our white brothers.
As a young man, I picked cotton, which you cannot eat though it grows well
enough in our soil. After many jobs like that, jobs that lasted for a week or
two, I made my mind up to leave high school and join the CCC so that I could eat
regularly. After that, I enlisted in the services. I did not consider myself to
be a brave warrior and still do not. Though this great country does not have
room for us as citizens, The People are welcome to serve as warriors for it.
I ended up in the Marines, to my good fortune. I say good fortune because I met
the three best white men I have ever known in my life. It was bad fortune, too,
because they, and many I knew less well died fighting in the Pacific. These
friends were Mike Strank, who was our Sergeant, Harlon Block, who also was a
Sergeant at the end, and Franklin Sousley, who was from Tennessee. I say their
names so that they are not forgotten. They were the best friends I ever met in
my life, and no day has gone by when I have not missed them. One of these men is
buried here with me, in the white man’s valley of death, and it a great comfort
to my heart to have him so near.
There were others who helped us raise the flag, Bradley the sailor, and Rene
Gagnon, but I never really knew them until the War Bond tour.
After enlisting, I was taken to California, where I received my training. There
I met my friends, my white friends. I met many, and they treated me with the
respect that is possible between men sharing a common pursuit. I became most
close to those in my squad, and it is the men in the photograph that I knew best
of all.
I was trained as a parachutist. My white friends called me Chief Falling Cloud,
although they knew I was not a chief. I was not afraid to jump from the plane
and was able to talk my friends through their fear of doing so. Harlon, from
Texas, was most scared.
I would say to Harlon, “Watch me, I am Coyote flying across the sky to make
mischief! Join me, my friend, and together we can both try to shit on the moron
General as we fly.” And he would laugh, and curse me and call me Chief, and
follow me out of the plane. Imagine a white man following one of The People out
of an airplane and into the sky! The Marines in those days brought all of us to
such closeness and high regard.
Our squad leader was Poppa Mike Strank, who like me was not born in the United
States. He was a father to us. Funny that we saw as a father a man, who was 23
years old, but he was older than all of us; we were boys and he had been a
Marine for over four years. The People understand that the skills of a father
know no age. We trusted him. At the end of training, he was offered a promotion,
but he said to his superiors he would not accept it; he told them that he had
trained us and he was obligated to fight with us. We would follow him into hell,
and as Frank would often say, we did.
I remember with great wonder my first boat ride across the Pacific. I had never
seen so much water. I could see more water at once than a dozen of my
grandfathers put together had seen in all their lives.
Frank Sousley, my friend from Tennessee, would join me on deck after the others
had finished playing cards and gone to sleep. We would smoke our cigarettes,
wrapped in the largeness of ocean and night sky. We both came from homes where
there was no great water; the others had seen it before and were less impressed.
Even at the end, on Suribachi, Frank and I would look past the bodies and out to
the great Pacific surrounding Iwo, and both whisper “damn”.
I can remember one conversation from the boat over. Franklin’s father had died
when he was eight, and he became the man of the family. He held many jobs to
help; it was the depression. He said his best job was a paper route.
“I’d get up afore the sun rose, and sort out my route,” he said, lighting
another cigarette. He took a long drag, and blew it out slowly.
“I remember how big the night sky was, and how peaceful. Y’know, there was an
art to foldin’ them papers, Chief, getting’ them just right so they’d sit flat.”
He held his arms in front of him, and then crossed one over the other. Just as
he had completed the first fold in his imagination, the boat cut across a wave,
and shuddered. He dropped the paper, and grabbed the rail, and we both laughed.
“Tell you what, though, Chief, I still lost me some money on that route. When
the bosses decided to charge more for the paper, I didn’t have the heart to pass
that on to my customers. They was poor, and for some that didn’t have no radios,
the paper was the only way to get their news.” He shook his head, and looked out
across the water.
Then I remember he asked me if I’d ever had a paper route myself.
“No,” I told him. “Not enough people on the reservation could read to make it
worthwhile.”
He was silent, and I was unsure whether he was embarrassed for me or for
himself. He flicked his cigarette into the great waters, and put his arm around
my shoulder.
“Well, Chief,” he said. “Tell you what. You ever need something read to you,
come on over and I’ll be proud to do it. I’ll keep it just our secret. Won’t
tell no one.”
Although I could read, I was touched by his generosity. I remember thinking “not
bad for a white man.” I don’t believe he ever knew I could read, but my heart is
glad that it would not have mattered to him.
Several times on the passage, he and I spent all night on deck. Later, before we
got to Hawaii for training and then assignment, the four of us went out to watch
the sunrise. We played cards, and talked of home and families. Sometimes, we
were silent, and did not look at each other. Before the sun rose, I looked into
each face to see if the Great Spirit had given them a mark to foretell their
futures. I saw nothing, and to my shame believed that I had strayed too far from
the ways of the grandfathers, and had lost the skill of reading signs. That
night though, if I had been able to read the hearts of Generals, I could have
told my white friends that within six months all but the Red Man would be with
the Great Spirit. Though I don’t think I would have said this out loud; and even
if I had seen a spirit sign upon them, I would not have spoken.
One night on Iwo, Mike and I pulled guard together, and we watched carefully. We
talked, eyes not looking at each other but scanning the darkness, ears listening
for sounds beyond our words. Mike spoke to me softly.
“Chief,” he said. “What will you do when the war is done?”
I knew, because I had been thinking about it.
“Well, Sarge, I am going back to the reservation to find the water for my
people.” I reached for and then opened my canteen, and took a short, quiet sip.
“Find it?” I passed the canteen to Mike, and he also sipped quietly.
“Yeah,” I said. White men stole it about fifty years ago. The whole river was
diverted, and our land went to sleep. Developers at the turn of the century.
Wasn’t ‘til Roosevelt that we got barely enough water back to grow something on
our land.”
I remember digging into the ground with my boot while I was talking with him.
Like I was trying to get just a little closer to Mother Earth and farther away
from bullets and ordinance. Funny. In my memory of my month on Iwo, I am always
digging with a boot, or a cupped hand. Like I was a gopher.
Mike was silent for a while.
“You were in the Civilian Conservation Corps?”
“Yup. How did you know?”
“The part about the water, and doing something for the people. That sounded
familiar.”
“Yup. You too, Sarge?”
“Uh huh.”
“You know, Sarge, getting the water would be doing something for myself, too.”
He smiled at me, and shook his head. He picked up a dry clod of earth, and
crushed it in his hand.
“Yeah, Chief, I suppose it would. But it would also still be doing something for
your people.”
“What did you do in the CCC, Sarge?”
Mike laughed. He started pawing at the ground beneath us, shifting handfuls of
dirt from one side of him to the other.
“Dug ditches as drainage for new roads in Pennsylvania. It was that or the
mines.”
“Different Corps, but you’re still digging ditches here on Iwo, Sarge.”
We both laughed quietly. After a while, Mike whispered again.
“Chief, I’m sorry about that. You know, the water, and the way we’ve treated
your people.”
I laughed at him, and thumped him on the chest with my hand.
“Mike, your people were still in Czechoslovakia when it happened. You didn’t
take the water.”
“Well, in a way we did.”
“Mike, listen,” I told him. “You’ve treated me like a man, the way I was taught
to treat others when I was young. You have respected me, and the tales of my
people. That matters. Maybe after the war, ditch-digger, you can help me find
the water for the reservation.”
Mike smiled, but did not say anything.
When we landed on Iwo Jima, we were under fire immediately. Mike pointed to
Mount Suribachi and told us that if we wanted to live through the next two
weeks, we’d have to take that mountain. When we got closer, it looked alive,
like a beehive. It had tunnels throughout that had been dug by the Japanese, and
you couldn’t tell where one would come out, or which were booby-trapped. People
kept popping out of those holes in the ground, and drawing fire. You couldn’t
tell whether they’d been hit. My white friends were nervous, but again, I was
not.
Later, at the base of the mountain, Harlon and I were sharing a ditch we had
dug.
“How can you be some damned calm, Chief?” he said. “I mean, every one of those
old holes could spit out a squad of those crazy armed midgets, and we could get
shot up like a turkey afore Thanksgiving!” I could see his hands shake as he
opened a chocolate bar.
“I see it as a good sign, Harlon”, I told him.
Harlon was always interested in hearing about good omens; he took them quite
seriously.
“Huh! Give, Chief, don’t be holdin’ out on your compadre here.”
“Well. The Pima have a story about our coming into this world. I once heard an
old man tell it. Before The People came, there was a world filled with animals
going about their business. There was only one animal that lived in the earth,
and that was the Gopher.” I made a silly face, showing my front teeth, and
waving my hands near my nose. Harlon laughed.
“Now Gopher dug some for food, and some for shelter. But mostly Gopher dug
because it was born to dig, and digging was something it was very good at.”
“Kind of like ol’ Jim Thorpe and the Olympics, right?” I knew that Harlon was
listening, and was trying to please me with his comment. I liked him very much
for that.
“Hmmm. He was a better digger than Thorpe was a runner, I think.”
Harlon just whistled.
“So one day Gopher is digging and digging, and he breaks through into a great
cave filled with rainbows and pinon trees. The Gopher stops to scratch his head,
and recon where he was, because he had never seen such a place before.”
“After a moment, an old man wearing a blanket of many colors, carrying bags
filled with seeds walked up to Gopher and said, ‘it’s about time you got here.
The People have been waiting for a very long time.’”
“Which people, Chief?”
“My people, Harlon. The Pima. Indians.”
“So this Gopher, he dug your people outta the ground?”
“Well, Harlon, the story goes that the first Pima grandparents followed the
Gopher to the surface of the earth, emerging from one of his tunnels. They
planted the seeds they had with them, and the rest is history. At least, our
history.”
Harlon was silent, and must have been thinking for a while.
“Chief?”
“Yes, Harlon?”
“Mind if I kinda borrow this omen? Y’say it’s a good one?”
“The best, Harlon.”
“Great. Can’t have too many good omens. If I see one myself, I’ll share it with
you. Thanks, Chief. Means a lot to me.”
Harlon seemed to find great peace in this tale. No matter how hot the fighting
was, he never got flustered. He seemed to trust in the omen, to feel protected
by it. Right up until the moment he died, which was just hours after Mike.
The People say that when an eagle feather falls from the sky, a powerful warrior
has been taken by the Great Spirit. Many feathers fell around me on Iwo Jima,
though not mine and not those of my closest white brothers, not for more than a
week after we raised that flag. Later, for three of them, while I watched and
held their heads and hands, I saw the feathers fall. They are the heroes. I
alone was the survivor; perhaps not even that. Had the Great Spirit allowed me
to be taken with them, I would not have argued. As it is, part of me died with
them, a part I could not live long without.
I remember on Iwo Jima there was another of The People, a Cheyenne who talked
constantly and foolishly. His name I forget, but his boasting I remember. He too
was a Marine, and I think his mouth made it hard for him to grow close to his
squad. Some-times, after we had fought a skirmish, the two squads would lay
spent against the hillside, smoking cigarettes, talking softly and waiting for
the shaking to go away. And then the Mouth would boast of his prowess.
“I killed ten today, ten stinking Japs,” he would say. The white men, to their
credit, kept score only of the days of their enlistment.
During the battle, when he would kill, he would call out in that yipping
Cheyenne shriek that sounds like a dog that has stepped on a Gila Monster. I
remember that piercing sound over the gunfire and cries of dying, the sound of
Coyote returned to punish us for our foolishness. I preferred the company of my
white friends to such a fool.
So after we had been there for about two weeks, we raised the flag, me and
Frank, Harlon and Mike. We needed help, so we called another guy over, Rene
Gagnon, and still another guy, a sailor, John Bradley. The flag was heavy;
almost one hundred pounds, and we were exhausted. I got no more to say about it.
You know, when we landed on Iwo, there were 200 of us. We moved on about a month
later, and there were 27 of us left. I don’t know why I should be surprised that
Mike, Harlon and Frank died. We nearly all did.
About a week after we raised that flag, we come under fire. Mike brought us down
into a small ravine to get out of the spray from a machine gunner up above. We
heard the boom and whistle of ordinance, sounded like it come from one of our
ships off the beach, and then there was a huge explosion. We got pretty beat up
by the rocks and pebbles shook loose. We ran to Mike, and rolled him over, and
there was nothing but a whole in his chest where his heart had been. Gone.
Harlon shook his head, and I remember he took off his helmet, and held it over
Mike’s chest. I remember him saying, “Boys, the only way they could kill Ol’
Poppa Mike was to take his heart, ‘cause that was the biggest part of him.” We
didn’t get to bury him; we just had to keep moving. The Navy would never admit
that they probably killed him, but we knew.
Harlon got a battlefield commission right there, and became Squad leader. He and
I were advancing on a mortar position later that day, and I heard him scream
just up ahead. When I got there, he had been cut from his balls to his neck,
probably by mortar fire. I held him, trying to keep his insides from spilling
out; screaming for a medic, and Harlon grabbed my arm and said to me “Chief,
they kilt me.” He was surprised, and died with that look on his face. I shut his
eyes and said a prayer to the Great Spirit. I had known that the omen I had
shared with him was just for me, but I never could tell Harlon that.
Later that week, Frank and I were having a cigarette, in broad daylight, near
the skirmish line, and I heard a crack, and Frank crumbled right next to me.
Like we were just standing on a street corner back in San Diego. I bent over and
asked him how he was doing. “I’m alright, Chief, I don’t feel nothin’ at all!”
Then he closed his eyes and died. This time, with my three friends gone, I said
no prayer, cursing Coyote with all my heart.
I remember very little of Iwo after that. Bradley, who we would see once in a
while, got hit with shrapnel and was evacuated. I ran into Rene Gagnon once more
on Iwo, and I could see in his eyes a darkness, a cloud gathering. If he saw the
same in mine, he never said.
Me and Gagnon were pulled from the Island and sent stateside.
By then, the picture was big news, and they bandaged up Bradley and sent him,
me, Gagnon and some correspondent all around the United States to sell War
Bonds. I’d have rather been back at Iwo, back with the only three friends I’d
ever really had. Thirty-two cities, and awards, and keys to the city, and
memorial services, and drinks, everywhere drinks. Toasts to the heroes of Iwo.
I did not know Bradley at all on Iwo, but he and I felt the same about the Bond
Tour. We were disgusted by it; we were not the heroes, and it was wrong to
celebrate what we had done. We were told to raise the flag, and we did. Nothing
heroic about that. The real heroes died on Iwo. The real heroes died there and
were still there.
Gagnon liked the tour as I recall. Said we earned every one of those drinks, and
nothing was going to stoop him from drinking them.
Nothing stopped me, either, although Bradley tried.
All the time on the tour, I kept thinking of Sitting Bull with the Wild West
Show of Bill Cody, meeting Queens, acting fiercely. He play-acted for the white
man, and made mockery of his people and his time; he liked the white man’s money
more than his own pride or that of The People.
Sitting Bull was a bastard. They say that on the boat ride over, at night he
would sneak over from his stateroom and pee on Bill Cody’s door. On the Bond
Tour, there were too many doors I would have peed on; and I probably did on a
few that I don’t remember.
By the time the tour was over, I felt awful inside, lost and angry and full of
so much shame. I do not remember being in Japan; I do not remember much of the
next ten years back on the reservation.
I remember my own shame when I returned to the land where I was born after the
war. I remember white people driving onto our reservation, and asking around,
and then coming up to me wanting to know if I was the Indian who’d raised the
flag. I would say I was there, and they’d stuff a ten-dollar bill in my pocket
and leave. Most days, I drank up those ten dollars before the sun set.
In the end, I’d come back to the reservation to seek water for my people, to
look for the old ways. I looked in many wrong places, mostly in bottles and in
the toasts and other false offerings made to the face of a hero, made to one who
does not have the heart of a hero. In the end I found water, not enough to feed
my people and raise the sun on the old ways, but enough to put out the fire that
burned in me since Iwo Jima.
I lie far from my home, in green grass, which does not suit me. Around me lie
many brothers-in-arms, who fell fighting in wars different than my own. There
are also a few of my brothers-in-blood, first people who lay with me here in the
field of dead whites. Sometimes we talk, even though they are from other tribes,
some I never knew like Mohawk and Nipmuc.
Harlon and Frank remain on Iwo. Poppa Mike was brought here from Iwo before I
arrived. Though he is a hero, he has not forgotten me; he greeted me as a
brother, and regrets not looking for the water on my people’s lands with him. If
it is the will of the Great Spirit that I spend eternity with him, and not my
blood brothers and sisters, I am happy. But who knows what the will of the Great
Spirit really desires? Was it the desire of the Great Spirit that three white
men should be as close to me as brothers, and that my blood-brothers, my
brothers and sisters of the land, would stand by and watch me die of shame, and
drown in two inches of water?
Gagnon is now here, too. We took the same path from Suribachi to this white
man’s valley of death. The cloud is lifted from his eyes, and he smiles now.
And the mouthy Cheyenne warrior also is buried here, although he surely does not
rest yet. Some nights, when the wind is right and Sister Moon shines sweetly, I
hear him.
“Pima, soft little Pima,” he cries.
I do not answer.
“Pima, great killer of Apaches and Japanese, kisser of white men’s asses, where
are you?”
Still, I do not answer.
“Pima, I know you are here. Listen to me. Here by me lies a white one who died
sitting in a latrine at Guadalcanal. Should I carve that on his marker stone,
for the great white chiefs to see when they visit us?”
And maybe he laughs with a shriek, like the one he threw to the sky on Iwo Jima
when he wanted us to believe he had killed a Japanese. Maybe it is him, it could
just be the wind I hear, scouring our graves clean of leaves and scattering the
dried withered flowers and faded shreds of flags that are the gifts given to
forgotten warriors.
|
|
 |
 |
|
 |
|||
