Book Review

Flags Of Our Fathers

By Kris T

Flags of Our Fathers

By James Bradley with Ron Powers

Bantam Books

Price: Rs 270

Pages: 562

                The Battle of Iwo Jima was one of the most significant battles of the Second World War, a battle where more American and Japanese servicemen were killed in a relatively short span of time, than in any other battle in recent times. The island of Iwo Jima, an insignificant speck in the vastness of the Pacific, is an unseemly, barren, volcanic over hardly worth squabbling over. Yet the island saw some of the fiercest fighting in a no-holds barred battle that was one of the turning points of the Pacific war. Iwo Jima immediately brings to mind the iconic photo by Joe Rosenthal of marines raising an American flag.

                Written by the son of one of the flag raisers, John ‘Doc’ Bradley, then a Navy (medical) Corpsman, during the 35 day long battle, the book is the result of the son’s lifelong fascination with his father’s wartime past. James Bradley knew only vaguely that his father was a war hero and was one of the three flag-raisers who had survived Iwo Jima, however all his childhood attempts to find out more from his father were effectively stonewalled by the elder Bradley. John Bradley refused to give any importance to the battle, merely stating that he had only lent a hand in raising the flag because he was there, and the real heroes were those who didn’t return.

                However it was only after Doc died, that his son discovered memorabilia of the battle stuffed in three cardboard cartons. Among the items, James discovered a Navy Cross awarded to his father for gallantry while tending to wounded Marines under fire. With that, commenced his quest to find out more about the young John who, barely out of his teens had gone off to fight a war on a desolate island in the midst of the Pacific, far from home, along with hundreds of other young boys. Many of these boys did not return home, and of those who did, several had horrific wounds. Almost everyone was scarred by the terrible memories of the deaths of childhood friends and buddies who died in front of them. For the Corpsmen it was worse as they tended to the hideous injuries and in many cases helplessly watched men die in their arms, unable to provide them with any more comfort than a shot of morphine. Everyone dealt with the memories in his own way, some like the Pima Indian, Ira Hayes who hardly spoke, took to the bottle, to wipe out the nightmares and steadily went downhill, while others like Danny Thomas who frequently woke up screaming had to be hypnotized. Some complained of being a hero one minute and a “John Doe” the next. Some tried to capitalize, unsuccessfully, on their hero status and unable to face the realities of post-war USA, grew increasingly disillusioned.

                Hounded by the press and an American public thirsty for the gory details of war, Doc returns home to small town Wisconsin and sets up a successful funeral home. Determined to leave the past behind and get on with life, he removes all vestiges of his military service, instructs his children on the art of deflecting phone calls from newspapers, movie-makers and the general public, and, plunges headlong into community service, refusing to talk about his past. The story only unravels after his death when a driven James begins his equally determined search commencing with the lives of the other boys in the famous photo.

                The story takes the reader across small town rural America in the thirties, from the farms, factories and reservations into the homes of recently arrived European immigrants. The author describes the factors that motivated young boys across the length and breadth of USA to volunteer for military service en masse, as groups of friends and entire football teams decided to join up. Perhaps the war provided a distraction for America struggling to emerge from the crippling effects of Depression. The patriotic fervor generated provided the sorely needed heady feeling of euphoria, missing for so long in their lives. The author has also dealt with, in some detail, on the ethos behind the making of a Marine and why the people of USA placed so much faith in these fighting men, such that the phrase, “Send in the Marines”, is understood as a serious attempt to set the problem right. The importance that the American government attached to the Marines, can be gauged by the fact that the Commander-in-Chief, President Roosevelt himself, came to observe the training and preparations for the forthcoming operation on more than one occasion. The mission remained a closely guarded secret till the troops were actually on their way.

                The author lays bare the brutality of a war where any pretence of rules had been long abandoned by both sides and where the Japanese military’s scant concern for the lives of its foot soldiers indicated the level of savagery they were prepared to mete out to their enemies, as well as, the lengths they were prepared to go, to defend their homeland. It is a telling statement that of the 22000 Japanese defenders, only 212 could be taken alive. Iwo Jima had deaths on a scale that horrified USA. It was the first American victory where their casualties outnumbered the enemy’s. In fact, it was a strategy of the Japanese to make the cost of victory so high as to become unacceptable to the American public, who, could then be expected to put pressure on the government to avoid a full scale attack on the Japanese mainland.

                Iwo Jima was significant because it was for the first time in the war that an American flag was raised on Japanese soil and indeed was the first foreign flag to have been implanted in the Empire in nearly five centuries. The other significance was strategic. The island stood directly in the flight path from the Marianas to Japan and air squadrons based there could easily intercept the heavy B-29 bombers on their missions to Japan, being too far for their own fighter escorts to follow. Conversely, in American hands, it provided an ideal staging post for the B-29s to refuel and to base P-51 Mustang fighter escorts for the bombers.

                The other interesting feature of wartime USA was the 7^th Bond Tour, the “Mighty Seventh”, a method employed by the US Treasury to raise funds for the war by selling War Bonds to the general public. The three surviving flag-raisers, other war veterans and even Hollywood stars toured the countryside and raised a sum of $26.5 billion, far exceeding the target of $14 billion that the treasury had set.

                The author has been less than charitable about the role played by the US Navy in the operation, particularly the actions of the “naval chieftans”, initially Ray Spruance who reduced the Marines’ demand for a ten day naval bombardment to three, which got further diluted due to the weather, and later, Chester Nimitz who proclaimed the island to be conquered on March 14^th 1945, prompting a Marine to remark, “Who does the Admiral think he’s kidding? We’re still getting killed!” However, such things are typical in the fog of war, an atmosphere that the author has succeeding in creating.

The Responsibilities Of Parents

THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF PARENTS

                A small snippet of information in the newspaper today caught my eye – “Child Dies While Parents Shop In Mall”. The tiny four line tidbit reported that a four year old girl died in the play area of a mall in Goa, while her parents were busy shopping.

               

As with many other young parents longing for a breather from the demanding non-stop duties of bringing up young children, the unfortunate couple too must have opted to shop in the air-conditioned pseudo-sophisticated ambience of a mall. Having been engulfed by a false sense of security on entering the mall, they would probably have deposited their young child in the play area, assuming that she would automatically be safe there.

                

Actually this news ought to have been on the front page of the newspaper, as a lesson to other young parents, for the level of care and alertness among the vast majority of parents leaves a lot to be desired.

                

I consider it a fallacy fostered by newspapers and magazines, that mothers provide the best care to children. It is not uncommon to see young children accompanied by their parents walking along roads. However instead of using common sense to see that the children are shepherded along the edge of the road away from the traffic, the little ones can invariably be seen scampering along close to moving vehicles, while the Mums would be in a gossipy gaggle themselves at a safe distance, unmindful of the presence of vehicles and stone deaf to their horns besides every other thing on the road. The Dads or the accompanying elderly uncle can usually be spotted five yards ahead chatting or taking in the sights, but equally oblivious.

                

On the rare occasion, when a mother or father is actually holding a child by the hand, chances are that the child will be on the inside of the road nearer the traffic rather than away from the traffic. But these are probably the less educated lot, who if not forgiven, can be expected to make these mistakes.

               

On the other hand, take airport lounges – educated, well off parents with the typical NRI ‘chhaap’ of grungy collarless T shirts, 3/4^th shorts and chunky sandals (to say nothing of the acquired accent), with a couple of kids in tow are a common sight. The children, miniature versions of their elders, can be seen tearing around the terminal on a baggage trolley, yelling to each other in their Americanized twang. Quite likely Mom and Dad would be window shopping, oblivious to their offsprings’ antics. After all they are trying to do things the American way where you are expected to treat little kids like young adults. Yeah right. One wonders, can these educated people not discern the distinction between an airport lounge and a playground. Or have they completely lost it in their bid to acquire the sheen of a foreign culture? Unfortunately what they increasingly appear to acquire is the corrupted version of western culture for it certainly isn’t an American or European trait to let children run wild in public places, causing a nuisance to others.

                

Recently while dining with some friends at a fine dining restaurant on Marine Drive, we were repeatedly distracted by a noisy family including a hyperactive youngster at a nearby table. The child obviously bored with the conversation of the elders was trying to amuse himself in the manner of most two or three year olds, that is by hopping up and down on the seat and playing with whatever struck his fancy. Suddenly we heard a loud crash. The child had pulled a vase off the shelf and it shattered to pieces. The restaurant staff silently cleared the pieces and equally discreetly, handed over a bill of Rs 25000, politely explaining that all their artefacts were genuine antiques. As we left, the staff was in the process of packing the pieces in a bag which was handed over to the family like a doggy bag to take home.

                

The point is, did they need to bring a small child into a fine dining restaurant? Assuming that they had their compulsions, could they not have restrained the child seeing the ambience of the restaurant? Couldn’t the vacuous parents have spent some time teaching their pride and joy how to behave? Obviously they hadn’t, which is why they were unable to control him in the restaurant or they were simply too spaced out to have bothered. Either way, the Rs 25000 must have pinched as it ought to.

                

An increasingly large number of parents are unable to draw a line on indulgence and attempt to pass off obnoxious behavior of their children as cute mannerisms. Many fail to realize that the chubby two year old who, till recently cutely snatched things from other children has indeed grown into an obese twelve or thirteen year old with boorish habits. Besides, it has nothing to do with both parents working, as some would imagine. There are enough examples of housewives simply being unable to shake themselves out the torpor induced by soaps and consequently unable to see the writing on the wall. Left unchecked, these habits only get worse as the child develops.

                

Sometimes, even grandparents who are expected to be more mature, fail to discern this loutish behavior and even encourage it. On one occasion, I had to politely listen to grandparents fondly relating the antics of their grandson, wherein the child would walk into any shop in their local market, pick up whatever he fancied and walk off. No doubt, the bill would be settled later, but no one except my wife and myself seemed to see anything but sunshine in such actions. Surely it did not take a gigantic intellect to appreciate that, unless corrected early, the boy was headed on a collision course.

                

The recent TV ads highlighting the need to inculcate a sense of civic awareness among adults and children alike have hit the nail on the head. The ad depicts some foreign tourists at the receiving end of a banana peel flung carelessly out of a car window, and, the scene of a car stopped on Mumbai’s iconic Sealink while a mother assists her child to answer the call of nature on that busy roadway unmindful of her child’s and her own safety.

Some years ago in Delhi I read about a motor accident where an infant child was killed. The infant was in the arms of an adult who was sitting next to the driver. The driver did not see a bulldozer parked on the edge of the road at night and rammed into it. The child died because he flew out of the adult’s hands and hit the windscreen. The news item stayed in my mind. More recently, while driving in Mumbai, I observed a taxi ahead to have child clearly unbelted on the front seat next to the driver, while two ladies sat on the rear seat one of whom was the mother, busy in their conversation. The child would happily stick his hand or his head out, or would climb up on the seat and look around, quite enjoying himself. The taxi driver wasn’t particularly bothered either, for him it was just another passenger. However with the memory of that Delhi newspaper, I couldn’t continue to do nothing, so at the earliest opportunity, I pulled up alongside and sternly told the ladies to restrain the child. While they did make some effort, I don’t know how long it lasted.

We may sing paeans in praise of India Shining and we may take justifiable pride in the development of our nation, but the vast majority of us are content to merely bask in the radiated glow of other individuals and organizations who have actually contributed to the India story. These people and organizations have achieved their lofty heights through an unseen discipline and observance of strict rules imposed on themselves. The vast majority prefers to befuddle looking at the world through rose tinted glasses preferring instead to let someone else do the work. On any street, groups of men can be seen clustered around a street tea stall happily spouting statistics of projected GDP growth and how India will eventually overtake China, while calmy spitting paan juice into the road. Why then do young people still hanker for jobs in Dubai and the holy grail of Indians living abroad – the US Green Card, if conditions abroad are not what they used to be, and salaries in India are competitive? 

To my mind, the western world still has one thing that we haven’t yet trained ourselves for – civic awareness and public discipline. While we may crow about having a young workforce backed by traditional Indian values and middle class virtues, unless we as individuals reintroduce the habits of discipline in ourselves and in the younger generation, we may find ourselves floundering. Just as motivated troops can turn defeat into victory, an unruly workforce can just as easily be the undoing of any organization. We, as parents and citizens need to take our responsibilities seriously.

They Drive Us Up The Wall

            Around ten years ago I acquired the privilege of being driven to work. It made a significant difference to the quality of my life. No longer was I worried that I might get bumped by an impatient driver, while waiting at a traffic light, nor did I have to look for a safe place to park while I could go about my business without worrying about the car being towed away, deflated, locked, scratched by urchins or boxed in by a monstrous lorry.

            So when, on taking up a new assignment after a stint at sea, the staff in the new office politely enquired what time I would like to be picked up, I puffed up with false pride. The next day, having donned my whitest whites, and having finished breakfast, I turned to the paper to wait for my car as I had assumed all important people do. I had visions of a shiny white staff car with a smart chauffer waiting on me. My wife was less impressed and wanted to know why I was sitting around. I’m waiting for my car, I responded a trifle pompously. Wifey looked dubious.

            The shiny white staff car turned out to be a maroon Maruti van reeking of agarbatti incense. The interior had upholstery designed to shock the unsuspecting , and enough plastic decorations to fill a long distance bus. The chauffer turned out to be a scruffy, shifty eyed youth, with his foot firmly planted on the accelerator. Nor was the car my exclusive preserve, there were two others as well. Off we went trailing clouds of sweet scented smoke, with the radio belting out the latest hindi film songs.

            The driver was a law unto himself. He was convinced that the raison d’etre of the three officers in the van was to bail him out whenever he was in trouble. He considered himself the deciding authority on how much the vehicle could be used during the day, something I didn’t know till one day when I wanted to send the car for a job and he calmly told me he couldn’t go as the vehicle had run too much that day. I was sure that I hadn’t exceeded the daily allowance of 80 km but I let it pass. Later I discovered that the vehicle’s owner had instructed the driver not to drive more than 50 km, so that he could save the remaining mileage for his own use.

            On another occasion, while visiting a public office for some long pending jobs, I happened to see our man in a heated conversation with two traffic constables. On seeing me he began to wave frantically, but as I was rushing to catch the clerk before his lunch hour, I carried on without stopping. Later, I returned to find a very grumpy driver, who took a dim view of my not responding to his calls. Apparently he had parked under a NO PARKING sign and was trying to talk his way out, hoping that I would take his side. When the policemen saw that I did not respond, they promptly confiscated his driving license. My reasoning that it was his responsibility to park the vehicle in the right place didn’t find much favour with him. Obviously fed-up with my stubborn attitude, he decided to seek his fortunes elsewhere and said good-bye to our office shortly after. I wasn’t sorry to see him go.

            The next driver was a more pleasant person. However the stray dogs that lived near our office didn’t think so, for every morning when we arrived we would be escorted by a furiously barking, growling pack that provided a similarly enthusiastic send off whenever the van left office. The driver had obviously contributed to the dogs’ discomfort at some stage and they made their opinions known in no uncertain terms. He had another peculiar driving habit that I noticed when he once drove me and a friend to an exhibition that was at some distance from the office. I saw that whenever we approached a traffic signal, if the light was red he would speed up and come to a screeching halt before the light. On the other hand, if the light was green, he would slow down and cross it at snail’s pace, evoking a furious cacophony of horns from the cars behind, trying to cross before the light turned red. I could never understand this logic. Fortunately apart from this strange habit, no doubt learned under the tutelage of another equally experienced tutor in the back lanes of UP, he was a cheerful fellow who drove carefully.

            One day he disappeared to be replaced by a young boy who didn’t look a day over twelve. The response to my query about the other driver was a laconic, “Gaon gaya hai”. He told me he didn’t know the way to office, which wasn’t unusual, so I began to guide him. Initially I thought he hadn’t heard as he didn’t respond to my directions. But after two missed turns, and a close shave, I realized something was wrong. So I upped the volume a bit, and when he didn’t respond to my hollered, “Left, LEFT, LEEFFT” either, I told him to stop. I discovered that he had absolutely no notion of ‘left and right’. Translating the directions into Hindi was no help either and eventually after a few more near misses and several seat clutching moments, I made it to office. By then I had assigned a whole new meaning to the term ‘road rage’.

            I firmly announced to the Master Chief that I refused to ride in the vehicle till the driver was changed. Master Chief Sa’ab proceeded to haul him over the coals and discovered that he had a license that was exactly two days old, issued from some remote town. The driver was sent packing and the contractor received an earful, but I could have strangled the RTO inspector who had awarded him the license, no doubt for a consideration.

            Another driver whom I nicknamed the ‘Champ’ was a virtual reservoir of quirky habits. He would drive along placidly, till someone overtook him. That was the trigger to turn him into a speed demon. Unmindful of the fact that the car he was driving was a puny Wagon R or occasionally an Indica, he proceeded to take on hulking SUVs and mean looking BMWs as he raced after the offender, with a determined expression on his face, shooting out bolts of black energy from under arched eyebrows at any other driver who dared overtake. Fortunately the Mad Max effect rarely lasted beyond the next traffic light and within a few seconds he would revert to his usual bovine, cud chewing self from a remote village in Bihar.

            The Champ had as much sense of direction as a mud-pie and expected us to guide him every step of the way, unmindful of the fact that he had driven us to INOX or Atria Mall a dozen times, while he drove along mechanically in a semi-somnolent state. On reaching the destination, he would recline the driver’s seat as far as it would go, with his feet propped up on the window and would be asleep in a minute. One merely had to look for a car with two unwashed feet dangling out of the window to locate him. While driving, he occasionally forgot to shift beyond third gear even on an open highway, till I’d remind him that he had a few gears left. The Champ could then be seen to glow with embarrassment. Equally, while driving uphill, he would refuse to downshift, even with the car slowing to a crawl, preferring instead to urge the car on with the strange mannerism of arching his back and trying to push his seat forward! Probably it had something to do with a childhood spent riding bullock carts.

            Eventually when I would be unable to stand the misery of the engine any further, I would voice a suggestion to change gears. The Champ would then awaken from his reverie and could be seen to visibly bristle at the perceived slur on his driving skills and experience.

            The Champ had the knack of selecting the most unlikely candidate when he needed to ask directions. Chances were that the person picked would be either drunk, or a complete stranger or otherwise unable to comprehend the question spoken in a thick Bihari accent through a mouthful of paan. Stopping the car at the edge of the road, he would first hope that I would oblige him by asking directions, so that he wouldn’t have to exert his gray cells. When occasionally that didn’t work, he would struggle to lower the left side window, by which time the targeted person had usually walked away. It would take some stubbornness on my part to force him to stop the car, spit out his paan and walk across to a rickshaw stand to seek directions. Invariably by then we would be a few kilometers off course.

            In due course, I graduated to a white staff car, not as shiny as I had hoped, but entirely my own. It didn’t matter that the car wheezed and rattled along, the door had to be slammed shut with force, winding the window glass up or down was a test of strength, the a/c required me to imagine cool air wafting through the vents and during rains, the wipers would wearily trudge their way up to the top of their arc and then flop downwards as if exhausted by the effort. The driver was pleasant, courteous and experienced, who not only knew his way around the city, but also knew how to get the maximum out of the car. The vacation ended all too soon. He was soon hijacked by an officer senior to me. The replacement was equally well trained, but he had the bad habit of jumping red lights, probably taking advantage of his uniformed passenger and the bonnet flag and star plate. I suppose it was my fault, I ought to have pulled him up sooner, for one day the inevitable happened – he jumped a traffic signal as was his habit and was promptly flagged down by a traffic constable. The policeman was very polite and although he addressed his concerns in no uncertain terms to the driver only, I was convinced that I had faulted. Thereafter I made it a point, whenever assigned a new driver, to make it clear that he was expected to obey traffic rules in letter and spirit and that he could expect no support from me if he broke the rules.

            All of us who have the privilege of being driven to work, have to realize that the men who work as drivers have not had the benefit of higher education and while some of them are undeniably brash and incorrigible, many of them drive the way they do only because they know no other way. Others have acquired the bad habit of using the car’s official status as a shield for breaking traffic rules and displaying road arrogance only because their passengers enjoyed the juvenile fun of breaking rules with impunity, when actually they should have checked the trend. As for the rest of their driving habits, its better to bury yourself in a magazine to avoid getting blood pressure by getting too critical of their driving habits.