It must have felt surreal to the boys. Heroes? They had just returned from the protracted horrors of one of the deadliest and most intense battles in history, where heroes around them had acted with unimaginable bravery, suffered, and died almost by the minute. And here was an American populace driving itself into a frenzy over... what? Over an accidental photograph of a forgotten moment, an insignificant gesture in a month filled with significant ones.

As Ira [Hayes] would write, in wonderment, in a letter to his parents: "It's funny what a picture can do."


James Bradley (c. February, 1954-) is an American author, specializing in historical nonfiction chronicling the Pacific theatre of World War II. Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley with Ron Powers. May 2000. p. 275