Year of Eastwood #49

Flags of Our Fathers (2006)

Starring: Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford
Directed by Eastwood

Clint wants to set the record straight with Flags of Our Fathers. That iconic image you see of the brave U.S. soldiers raising the American flag atop the treacherous terrain of the desolate Japanese island is a big lie.

Not that these heroes didn’t fight an intense, bloody battle to seize control in the war against the Japanese. No, Clint goes to detailed lengths to demonstrate the struggle, and the Americans lost many lives in order to put an end to the great World War, but that photo doesn’t tell the whole story.

Back home, the U.S. was struggling to finance the war. The country had just begun recovering from the Great Depression when the U.S. was pulled into World War II when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. After years of struggle, American forces had finally pushed back Nazi forces in the battle over in Europe. But the troops were exhausted and the money was running out. The photo that came out of Iwo Jima of the troops raising the flag was seen as a golden opportunity to increase morale of the country and encourage it’s citizens to reach deeper into it’s pockets to invest in the campaign.

As the image began to circulate back home, the government decided what was needed was for some of these brave soldiers to come back and make personal appearances in the states to encourage patriotic Americans to buy more bonds. But as anyone who has examined the photo can tell you, it’s not easy to identify any of the actual faces in the photo. Add to that, many of the soldiers in the photo had been killed later during the ongoing conflict. Then questions began to surface about the validity of the actual photo.

So here’s the rest of the story, Mr. Harvey … there was an initial surge to the top of the hill and the men indeed raised a flag at the top which signaled to the other troops that victory was within reach. Pictures were taken of the events. But in a fine example of military intelligence, an officer ordered that the flag be recovered for his own collection and replaced with a second flag. So when later troops scaled the mountain and reached the peek, the orders were followed and another flag was put in its place. Once again, the photographer recorded the events. No one figured the photos would become such an icon of American history. And the photo that became the icon was in fact taken during the second raising of the flag.

Once the soldiers were identified in the photo, three of them were returned to the U.S. and unknowingly were swept into the maelstrom of publicity created by the reaction to the photo. The soldiers, torn between the duty to serve their country and their modesty of the actual events, struggled to hold on to their rightful pride in what they had sacrificed to protect our freedom. Each time they were paraded about, the guilt of taking credit for what others had done wore them down. Eventually, the tragic hero of the story - Native American Ira Hayes - turned to the bottle and was pushed out the door by the same government whom he had fought so bravely to defend.

The “true” story of Iwo Jima resonates with the recent actions of the U.S. government. Still deeply involved in a war in which the facts have been manipulated to persuade the public, people today have grown tired of a government that uses deception and lies to drive its foreign policy. Once again, Clint’s adept skill at directing a compelling story and his straightforward style never gets in the way of the real-life drama that demonstrates that every iconic image of what defines America has a complicated story behind it.