Flags of Our Fathers (Movie Tie-in Edition) - James Bradley

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
This is the true story behind the immortal photograph that has come to symbolize the courage and indomitable will of America

In this unforgettable chronicle of perhaps the most famous moment in American military
history, James Bradley has captured the glory, the triumph, the heartbreak, and the
legacy of the six men who raised the flag at Iwo Jima. Here is the true story behind
the immortal photograph that has come to symbolize the courage and indomitable will
of America.

In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima-and
into history. Through a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire that left the beaches
strewn with comrades, they battled to the island's highest peak. And after climbing
through a landscape of hell itself, they raised a flag.

Now the son of one of the
flagraisers has written a powerful account of six very different young men who came
together in a moment that will live forever.

To his family, John Bradley never spoke
of the photograph or the war. But after his death at age seventy, his family discovered
closed boxes of letters and photos. In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley draws
on those documents to retrace the lives of his father and the men of Easy Company.
Following these men's paths to Iwo Jima, James Bradley has written a classic story
of the heroic battle for the Pacific's most crucial island-an island riddled with
Japanese tunnels and 22,000 fanatic defenders who would fight to the last man.

But
perhaps the most interesting part of the story is what happened after the victory.
The men in the photo-three were killed during the battle-were proclaimed heroes and
flown home, to become reluctant symbols. For two of them, the adulation was shattering.
Only James Bradley's father truly survived, displaying no copy of the famous photograph
in his home, telling his son only:
"The real heroes of Iwo Jima were the guys who
didn't come back. "

Few books ever have captured the complexity and furor of war
and its aftermath as well as Flags of Our Fathers. A penetrating, epic look at a
generation at war, this is history told with keen insight, enormous honesty, and
the passion of a son paying homage to his father. It is the story of the difference
between truth and myth, the meaning of being a hero, and the essence of the human
experience of war.