James Bradley wrote Flags of Our Fathers, the book on which the eponymous Clint Eastwood movie is based, writes David McNeill.
It tells the true story of the most famous photo in warfare, taken as his father and five other marines raised the Stars and Stripes flag on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima in 1945.
Three of the men never got off the island alive, while the rest became reluctant, unhappy heroes, ferried from city to city to whip up morale and sell war bonds. Only Bradley's dad, sustained by the small-town values eulogised in the book, came through the experience relatively unscathed.
Flags of our Fathers has sold well over a million copies in several languages, including Japanese. Bradley's follow-up, Flyboys, tells the story of eight US pilots who were shot down and beheaded in the second World War and the one pilot - George Bush snr - who got away.
The author knows Japan well, having studied at Sophia University before graduating with a degree in East Asian history from the University of Wisconsin. In the book, he describes lecturing his dad at a Thanksgiving dinner in 1975 on the reasons why Japan went to war.
"I was only too happy to enlighten my father and the assembled family as to the 'real' reason we fought Japan in the second World War: American insensitivity to Japanese culture and FDR's severing of their oil lines forced Japan - an industrial beached whale - to attack Pearl Harbor in self-defence."
What was going on that Thanksgiving? "I was in love with a Japanese girlfriend and the country. I changed my views, but I hold no animosity in my heart for the Japanese. I have friends in Japan. I have been all over the country. My daughter just finished a year teaching in Kyushu. I came to the conclusion that it was the war that made people bad. The enemy is always bad and always treats you bad. Imagine what the many documented innocent Afghanis feel about America now.
"War was never something spoken about in my home and I'm much more aware of it now, after studying it. I only saw one side. Now I know that this is what war does; young guys get away from home and they do things they wouldn't do in their own backyard. That is any country's boys. Flags could be about any army. The militarists got control of the military system in Japan. If you have militarists in control of the education system from kindergarten you can bend people to your will."
Why did he write the book? "I knew I could do Flags and that it would do well because it was about the flag-raising, which is the most reproduced photo in the history of photography. I just happened to have had the inside story on the number-one photo in history. The book is not so much about Iwo Jima as it is about the bond tour.
"I just wanted to show my father and these guys as ordinary human beings. My father never talked to reporters, they never approached him as an ordinary man and asked him what was it like to be a coreman or a soldier. But they didn't do that. He was approached as a hero. They treated him as somehow heroic and that he had done something extraordinary.
"There is no Japanese flavour other than they happened to be the enemy. Guys who went through war came back and were perplexed to find themselves heroes. Once you put people in war away from home where they don't speak the same language and come from different cultures, there is a very cruel set of behaviour that results."
Did he like the movie? "It's wonderful and the families of the flag-raisers were happy. Clint Eastwood got it right about the flag raisers and the flag-raising. It was difficult to watch because I was very close to it; I was thinking about the stories I'd been told. Flags is mostly about the reaction to the US. Most of the movie is about the time they spent in America."
Do he see any parallels with the current war on terror? "I see very few parallels. The parallel would be if we invaded Japan in 1938. Look at what a democratic experience the second World War was for America. There was a war budget so the government had to get money for the war, and it had to continually make the case for the war. Veterans, politicians and military all stood up there with the media and said this is what we're going to do and this is what we need the money for.
"If the public had withdrawn support we would have been in real trouble. Roosevelt was asked many times to declare war in the late 1930s, early 1940s, but he had an antenna to realise that he wasn't going to go to war without getting the public behind him. I fail to see the comparison today."
There is a perception that the Japanese army was "crueller" than the US. "You know, the biggest single killing in human history was the fire-bombing of Tokyo. Is that crueller than chopping off heads with samurai swords? The moral judgment is easier if you're killing from a distance. I put in the horrible killings of Japan and the horrible killing of the US and let the reader decide.
"Have you read On Killing (The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society) by David Grossman? It is the only book about the process of military killing. He talks about how killing with a knife in the gut affects you in a different way to firing a rifle, or a shell over the mountain, or a bomb from a plane. No army has a monopoly on cruel."
