Read Online Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley, Ron Powers - Free Book Online

Sara Bernal. “He was like his father.”
    “Ira was a quiet guy,” Dana Norris confirmed. “Such a quiet guy.”
     
    After grade school on the reservation, Ira went to board at the Phoenix Indian School. There he mixed with Indians of other tribes but retained the sense of himself as distinct, a proud Pima. “He’d come and hang out with his Pima friends,” Dana Norris remembers. “He felt most comfortable around his own kind.”
    In three days on Ira’s reservation I spoke with many people who knew Ira. They told me the outlines of Ira’s life; they remember the boy, but he was so totally self-contained they just shook their heads when I asked them about Ira’s attitudes, his beliefs, any distinguishing traits.
    Esther Monahan remembered him clearly. A fellow Pima, she attended the Phoenix Indian School with Ira. She saw him daily in their Pima homeroom. But she couldn’t recall Ira’s ever saying anything. Anything at all. She told me:
    “Ira wasn’t like the other guys. He was shy and wouldn’t talk to us girls. He was much more shy than the other Pima boys. The girls would chase him and try to hug him, like we did with all the boys. We’d catch the other boys, who enjoyed it. But not Ira. Ira would just run away.”
    In time, Ira’s school day would begin with news of faraway battles. “Every morning in school,” Eleanor Pasquale remembers, “we would get a report on World War Two. We would sing the anthems of the Army, the Marines, and the Navy.”
    Ira enlisted in the Marines nine months after Pearl Harbor, when he was nineteen. His community sent him off to war with a traditional Pima ceremony.
     
    Fifty-six years later, I was embraced by a similar Pima ceremony on my visit to Arizona. It was a dinner at the Ira Hayes American Legion Post, about a mile from where Ira’s house once stood. I listened to young and old Pima speakers relate proud stories of their culture and felt the warm embrace of community we rarely experience in our Anglo gatherings.
    Near the end of the ceremony I was asked to come onstage, and Eleanor Pasquale presented me with a Pima painting. In the center is the legendary Pima figure Su-he (pronounced Soo-heee ), and in the background is the famous flagraising photo.
    Eleanor, a dignified lady who knew Ira, explained the significance of the painting to me. Su-he is a stick figure in the center of a maze. The maze represents all the challenges of life and the center is where peace and security reside. “Like Su-he, if you keep going you can find the center, your peace.”
    And what about Ira in the background, I asked.
    “We hope in death he has now found his peace,” she answered. “The peace that he couldn’t find on this earth.”
    Rene Gagnon: Manchester, New Hampshire
    He is the figure hidden by my father in the photo. He stands shoulder to shoulder with John Bradley, only the tip of his helmet and his two hands visible. And in his life he often remained in the background, obscured by others. He was shy, unaggressive, not a standout type of guy. He had little to say when asked a question.
    He never imagined life as something to grab hold of and shake. Molded by huge unseen corporate and military forces, he saw his life as that which “they” decided it should be. Life was a question of “luck” or “contacts.”
    He wasn’t a man’s man, he never chummed with the guys. The only steps he took in his life were at the suggestion of the women in his life, his mother and later his wife. He always lived with one of them, and other than his time in the Marines, he spent no time out on his own. He followed his wife’s advice in search of the lucky break that never materialized. He listened to her until it was too late. And by then he was trapped for good.

    Rene Gagnon arrived on March 7, 1925, the only child of French-Canadian mill workers Henry and Irene Gagnon. French Canadians formed a dense ethnic enclave on the west side of Manchester, New Hampshire, in those