-raising photograph was taken.
             The book starts out with James describing going back to Japan to visit his father's grave and having a war memorial for the marines who died on Iwo Jima. Then he begins to write about the lives of each of the flag-raisers before they were Marines. He talked about how the Marines who landed on February 19, 1945, were normal World War II servicemen. They were children of the Depression from all across America. The thirty-six-day battle for Iwo Jima has rarely been told in such detail. Bradley describes how a few of the men landed from the sea and fought their way through the black lava sand while being hit and bombed by an enemy they could not see. Of the eighty-four Medals of Honor the Marines received in World War II, one-third of them were rewarded during the battle of Iwo Jima. After two days on the beach, a band of Marines climbed atop of Mount Suribachi to raise a flag for their fellow Marines and the world to see. One of them was John Bradley, winner of the Navy Cross and the father of James Bradley. He rarely mentioned the battle, insisting repeatedly that the heroes on Iwo Jima were not the living, but the dead. Three of the six flag-raisers did not leave Iwo Jima alive. The other two died from disappointment and grief. John Bradley was the only one who lived a happy life. John Bradley spent most of his life as a funeral director in the small town of Antigo, Wisconsin, but everybody there knew that he was one of the six men who raised the famously photographed flag on Iwo Jima during World War II. He almost never talked about that deed. Until he died, his large family in Antigo never even knew that he had won the Navy Cross. His silence created a sense that there were secrets about him to be discovered, and it led one of his sons, James, to discover the untold story of his father and the stories of the other five men who were captured in that famous image.
             Flags of Our Fathers is the pro...