Flags of Our Fathers hits firmly in the historiographic tradition of 'Boomers writing about their Greatest Generation parents', as James Bradley literally writes about his father John Bradley, Navy Corpsman and one of the six people in the famous flag raising photo on Iwo Jima. This book began in silence, the elder Bradley said almost nothing about his service or his role in the photo to his family, and exceeds the mold in a serious evaluation of the wounds of war.

Bradley follows the six people in the photo, his father James Bradley, Sergeant Michael Strank, Harlon Block, Franklin Sousley, Ira Hayes, Harold Schultz, and Rene Gagnon, from their Great Depression childhoods, through enlistment and training, and then into the Battle of Iwo Jima. Iwo Jima was a nightmare. The entire island was riddled with fighting positions connected by a network of tunnels. Bombardment from sea and air did nothing to the bug in defenders. They would have to be pried out by Marines with rifles, grenades, and flamethrowers, at horrendous casualties. The five week was responsible for 26000 American causalities and a third of the Medals of Honors earned by the Marines Corps in the war. It was a frightful slaughter.

The Photograph is famous, but in a grim irony, entirely unmemorable at the time. The flag was raised on Mount Suribachi four days after the initial landings. Marines who had spent three days in grueling combat climbed the mountain without contact, and set up a smaller flag without photographers present. Bradley and a platoon of Easy Company was sent up with a larger flag later in the day. While simply being on Iwo Jima was heroic, the moment that the flag was raised was one of quietude. The Photograph was taken by Joe Rosenthal as a lucky snap, and became an instant icon.

Three of the six men in the photograph were already dead, killed in action, but the others were whisked off the island and became publicity figures for the 7th War Bond Drive. The survivors handled the publicity in different ways. Rene Gagnon never managed to capitalize on it in the way he thought he should, and died at 54 of a heart attack. Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian, had a tragic descent into alcoholism which Bradley reads as driven by untreated PTSD. John Bradley tried very hard to forget the war, building a life as a funeral director and pillar of the community in northern Wisconsin. When reporters called, his children were instructed to say he was fishing in Canada.

Flags of our Fathers is a solid social and personal history of a key moment in the war, with some moving antiwar rhetoric.