I’ll quit writing about this now, but I finished James Bradley’s Flags of Our Fathers this morning around 1. The last quarter of the book deals with the bond tour that followed in 1945 for the three flag-raising survivors and their life after the war.
It’s a very, very good book.
I was left as I turned out the light with this haunting line from another Iwo Jima medic who also served in Korea and Vietnam:
“The dreams have lasted for years. At seventy-three I still get ’em. I’ve been in three wars and I haven’t got past Iwo yet.”
Good book, right? What struck me when I read it was how much I knew about D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge and so many of the European events of World War II. But I knew very little about the battles in the Pacific.
The descriptions of Iwo Jima actually made it hard for me to sleep for a few days.
Now we’ll have to take you to the Museum of the Marine Corps the next time you visit.