They were so different, these six: the whooping young Texan cowboy astride his white horse; the watchful Arizona Indian on his reservation; the happy-go-lucky Kentucky hillbilly skinny-dipping in the Licking River; the serious Wisconsin small-towner walking his third-grade sweetheart under the shade trees; the handsome New Hampshire smoothie checking his profile in the drugstore window; the sturdy Czech immigrant playing his French horn in the teeming Pennsylvania steel mill town.

 I wanted to know them as Marines, as fighting men who were also comrades.
But more than that, I wanted to know them as boys, ordinary shirt tail
kids before they became warriors.
I wanted to know their family histories. And I wanted to know how "The Photograph" affected their families' lives down into the present time. As a flag raiser’s son who had lived in the uneasy shadow of that photograph—a shadow cast by an image that itself was never visible in our household. I knew something about its lingering power within a family. I hungered to know what the Bradley household might have had in common with those of the other five.

The questions I asked generated many tears. But they opened up some bright, glowing chambers of the past as well. The whole topic of boyhood, for example, here was a many-faceted realm I had not quite expected to enter, but one that gave me endless fascination nonetheless, the lost realm of American boyhood in the years just before the Second World War.
Most of them, after all, were scarcely out of boyhood when they enlisted.
Their lives up until then had been kids' lives: hunting, fishing, paper routes; the movies, adventure programs on the radio, altar duties at church; first wary contact with girls. And, since money was scarce, helping out in their fathers' businesses and tobacco fields, lending a hand in the coal mine, at the mill.

Hard times aside, the 1930's was a terrific decade to be an American boy.
Whether in the hills of Kentucky, or on the gridirons of south Texas or astride the carnival calliope in small-town Wisconsin. Boyhood then was a deeply textured universe all its own, a universe of possibility and hope. Of fervent patriotism as the distant, hazy war clouds gathered.
An American boy's life in the thirties, whether at work or play, was about connection and community in ways that are hard to imagine today. It was about dreams, vivid and optimistic dreams of a future as radiant as Buck Roger’s cosmos. As such, these dreams provided powerful incentives for courage and loyalty in battle in the minds of thousands of ex-boys in uniform---boys very much like the figures in the photograph.
They were so different, these six: the whooping young Texan cowboy astride his white horse; the watchful Arizona Indian on his reservation; the happy-go-lucky Kentucky hillbilly skinny-dipping in the Licking River; the serious Wisconsin small-towner walking his third-grade sweetheart under the shade trees; the handsome New Hampshire smoothie checking his profile in the drugstore window; the sturdy Czech immigrant playing his French horn in the teeming Pennsylvania steel mill town. All forming their dreams of a future that would not be and yet so similar.
They were nearly all poor. The Great Depression ran through their lives. But then so did football, and religious faith, and strong mothers. So did younger siblings, and the responsibility of caring for them.
Nearly all were described again and again as quiet, shy boys, yet boys whom people cared about. Boys who somehow made a difference in their families and their communities.
Nearly all generated memories among brothers and sisters and childhood sweethearts that remained crystalline at century’s end as at the moment they occurred.
And all of them together illuminated a great deal that was wonderful and innocent in an America that was soon to leave behind its own childhood forever.

Credit: From the book, FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS by James Bradley