The Boys Of Iwo Jima

by Michael T. Powers

Each year my video production company is hired to go to Washington, DC, with the eighth grade class from Clinton, Wisconsin where I grew up, to videotape their trip. I always enjoy visiting our nation’s capital, and each year I take some special memories back with me. But this fall’s trip (2000) was especially memorable.

On the last night of our trip, we stopped at the Iwo Jima Memorial. It is the largest bronze statue in the world and depicts one of the most famous photographs in history – the World War II image of six men raising the American flag at the top of Mount Suribachi on the island of Iwo Jima, Japan. About one hundred student and chaperons piled off the buses and headed toward the Memorial. I noticed a solitary figure at the base of the statue, and as I got closer he asked who I was and where I was from. I told him my name was Michael Powers and that we were from Clinton, Wisconsin.

“Hey, I’m a Cheesehead, too! Come gather around, Cheeseheads, and I’ll tell you a story.”

James Bradley just happened to be in Washington, DC, to speak at the Memorial the following day. He had just said good night to the image of his dad on the statue and was about to leave when he saw the buses pull up. I videotaped him as he spoke to us, and received his permission to share what he said from my videotape. It is one thing to tour the incredible monuments filled with history in Washington, DC, but it is quite another to get the kind of insight we received that night. When we had gathered around, he reverently began to speak.

“My name is James Bradley and I’m from Antigo, Wisconsin. My dad is on that statue, and I just wrote a book called Flags Of Our Fathers, which is #5 on the New York Times Best-Seller list right now. It is the story of the six boys you see behind me. Six boys raised the flag.”

He pointed to the guy putting the pole in the ground and told us his name was Harlon Block. “Harlon was an all-state football player. He enlisted in the Marine Corps with all the senior members of his football team. They were off to play another type of game, a game called ‘war.’ But it didn’t turn out to be a game. Harlon, at the age of 21, died with his intestines in his hands. I don’t say that to gross you out; I say that because there are generals who stand in front of this statue and talk about the glory of war. You guys need to know that most of the boys in Iwo Jima were 17, 18, and 19 years old.

“You see this next guy? That’s Rene Gagnon from New Hampshire. If you took Rene’s helmet off at the moment this photo was taken and looked in the webbing of his helmet, you’d find a photograph. A photograph of his girlfriend. Rene put that in there for protection, because he was scared. He was 18 years old. Boys won the battle of Iwo Jima. Boys! Not men.

“The next guy here, the third guy in this tableau was Sergeant Mike Strank. Mike is my hero. He was the hero of all these guys. The called him the ‘old man’ because he was so old. He was already 25. When Mike would motivate his boys in training camp, he didn’t say, ‘Let’s go kill the enemy’ or ‘Let’s die for our country.’ He knew he was talking to boys. Instead he’d say, ‘You do like I say, and I’ll get you home to your mothers.’

“The last guy on this side of the statue is Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian from Arizona. Ira walked off Iwo Jima. He went to the White House with my dad and President Truman told him, ‘You’re a here.’ He told reporters, ‘How can I feel like a hero when 250 of my buddies hit the island with me and only 27 of us walked off alive?’

“So you take your class at school, 250 of you spending a year together having fun, doing everything together. Then all 250 of you hit be beach, but only 27 of your classmates walk off alive. That was Ira Hayes. He had images of horror in his mind. Ira Hayes died dead drunk at the age of 32, ten years after the famous photo was taken.

“The next guy going around the statue, is Franklin Sousley from Hilltop, Kentucky, a fun-lovin’ hillbilly boy... Franklin died on Iwo Jima at the age of 19. When the telegram came to tell his mother that he was dead, it went to the Hilltop General Store. A barefoot boy ran that telegram up to his mother’s farm. The neighbors could hear her scream all night and into the morning. The neighbors lived a quarter of a mile away.

Finally he pointed to the statue’s image of his father, John Bradley from Antigo. “My dad lived until 1994, but he never gave interviews. When Walter Cronkite’s producers or the New York Times would call, we were trained as little kids to say, ‘No, I’m sorry, sir, my dad’s not here. He’s in Canada fishing. No, there’s no phone there, sir. No, we don’t know when he’s coming back.’ My dad never fished or even went to Canada. Usually he was sitting right there at the table eating his Campbell’s soup, but we had to tell the press that he was out fishing.

“You see, my dad didn’t see himself as a here. Everyone thinks these guys are heroes, ‘cause they’re in a photo and on a monument. My dad knew better. As a medic on Iwo Jima, he probably held over 200 boys as they died, and when boys died on Iwo Jima, they writhed and screamed in pain.

“When I was a little boy, my third grade teacher told me that my dad was a hero. When I went home and told my dad that, he said, ‘I want you to always remember that the heroes of Iwo Jima are the guys who did not come back. Did NOT come back.’

“So that’s the story about six nice young boys,” Bradley finished. “Three died on Iwo Jima, and three came back as national heroes. Overall, 7000 boys died on Iwo Jima in the worst battle in the history of the Marine Corps. My voice is giving out, so I will end here. Thank you for your time.”

Suddenly the Monument wasn’t just a big old piece of metal with a flag sticking out of the top. It came to life before our eyes with the heartfelt words of a son who did, indeed, have a father who was a hero. Maybe not a hero in his own eyes, but a hero nonetheless.

Michael T. Powers resides in Wisconsin with his wife Kristi. His stories appear in 22 inspirational books including his own, Heart Touchers: Life-Changing Stories of Faith, Love, and Laughter, where this story is included in somewhat different form. Visit www.HeartTouchers.com for a sneak peak at Mike’s work in progress, or to join the thousands of readers of his inspirational email list.

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Public Schools - Child Abuse American Style

by Nancy Levant

    American schools have nothing to do with educating children. They have nothing to do with preparing children for higher education. American schools are now under the auspices of the United Nations and their New World Citizen campaign. American children are being reprogrammed, and any American parent who can´t see it is too stupid to be a parent.

    Let´s start from the top. The first fact is that the United Nations has called for “rational tolerance” in schools, universities, homes, and in the workplace. The definition of rational tolerance is primarily this – no Christianity, no morals or ethics based upon Christian traditions and doctrine, and no imparting of Christian beliefs to children.

    Our government, the world´s primary financial supporter of the U.N., agreed to implement the U.N. Agenda 21 plan for global governance – this thanks to Clinton, Gore, and Bush – Democrats and Republicans mind you. In doing so, the federal government agreed to enforce the U.N. agenda for schools, education, and its Socialism doctrine and indoctrination plan.

    Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, New Freedom Initiative and Commission, the compulsory mental health screening scam coupled with the U.N. partnership-stakeholding-non-profit bureaucracy then invaded the American public school system using a Communist-based army called the NEA and AFT (National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers), who are both listed on the Communist Party USA´s website. All federal and state funding sources of public schools now mandate the use of curricula that teaches “rational tolerance” to our children. Let it also be noted that most states and school districts require NEA membership of public school teachers. Let it also be noted that the NEA is the most powerful lobby and labor union in the United States though it is directly linked to the Communist Party.

    In schools, the belief in God is now referred to as a “traditional tale” in language arts. The belief in “Gaia or Gaea” is now taught as the belief in Earth and a more “rational” ideology versus the irrationality of God. Now the trail of removing prayer, Christmas, and Easter from schools makes sense – finally. The U.N. mandates global citizens who are rational atheists.

    The U.N. also called for a tracking and monitoring mechanism to track the progress of reprogramming American children - hence, the compulsory mental health screening initiative. This we need to clearly understand.

    You will notice how every American classroom now has children divided into groups via group seating and group tables – approximately 6 children to a desk. You will also notice how teachers now place their desks off to a corner and out of the central visual spectrum of students. You notice that there are several other adults in today´s classrooms – classroom mothers, aids, and student teachers.

    You´ve, no doubt, heard the term “group work” that is now required of all school children. According to the U.N., “consensus” and “solidarity” are to be taught to children as a basis for global citizenship. Loyalty to, and the ability to function in a group, is the basis of learning consensus-based government. This is the same system used by partnerships and stakeholding groups who come into our communities, invite us to a group gathering, and manipulate us into agreeing with pre-planned missions to, for example, take our private property for nature´s (or Gaia´s) sake.

    Consensus government is the opposite of democratic government. Consensus government plays upon the fear of being the outsider in the group. And Socialist-Communist governments, which have all failed miserably, have been consistent in two trains of thought – no religious faith, and go along with the government in every way, shape, and form, or be an enemy of the government, be arrested and removed from the general population, and/or be permanently eliminated. If in doubt, read 20th Century Russian or Chinese history. You will notice how children who do not function well in today´s grouped classrooms are sent out of the classrooms to “special-ed” groups. That is because individuality is isolated, punished, documented, and labeled with an IEP (Individual Education Plan). In truth, these children are sent to smaller groups or problem-child education “specialists.” In Communist Russia, removal from the group was called Siberia.

    American schools are also teaching rational tolerance for homosexuality. Why? Because any intolerance from the masses is capable of producing dissention. Therefore, to create a compliant global citizenry, moral ethics have to be lowered. Acceptance, consensus, and solidarity are the name of the reprogramming game. And in order to ensure that children are coming along nicely in their social re-engineering, proficiency tests, aptitude, and cognitive tests have been mandated by our federal government to track the progress of the change-over from the independent American citizen to the dependent, group-needy and atheist Socialist citizen.

    Teachers, who once taught children to read, write, and perform mathematical calculations, now assign group work to children who self-teach via consensus and group agreements. Teachers, who are now governmental agents, document each child´s progress in his or her group. They document their group behaviors, their compliancy to the group goals and missions, and they also document the behaviors of their students´ parents and their acceptance of the New School Order.

    Equally, school counselors and “advocates,” that now occupy offices in our public schools, call your children out of their classrooms to “talk.” These counselors and advocates ask children about how they feel, what their home lives are like, whether or not they attend churches, play sports, what electronic devices they have in their homes, where they vacation, how they get along with their parents, and other non-education issues. And they document students´ answers. This, in the eco-conservation stakeholding world is called “envisioning,” and your children are also being “envisioned” by trained Socialist advocates and counselors in their meetings behind closed doors.

    To date, parents have the option of opting-out of such intrusions into their children and home lives, but according to one local school principal in my neck of the woods, that right is soon to be eliminated via legislation and, no doubt, hidden legislation. I have also read recent accounts of parents being arrested for not complying with school curriculum requirements such as R-rated movies and homosexuality acceptance training.

    The compulsory mental health screening of school children has one and only one function – that of the federal government and the U.N. profiling the progress of the new global citizenship and the ability to pull off global Socialist governance in the United States. They are looking for time frames, trouble-makers, trouble-making families, future corporate employees, and specifically, they are looking for the children who will be successful and compliant Socialists and families who they believe will not take to the transition. Now, add to all this RFID technology, its coming uses, and the current attempts to bring this technology into our public schools.

    I say to you the following – you are at risk of losing your children due to your belief in God and democracy. I have read articles from think tanks, such as the Brookings Institute and the Aspen Institute, that claim that the teaching religion is child abuse and subversive behavior. These think tanks are the advisors to our government and they are absolutely dedicated to global governance.

    We cannot stop what has been set into place in our public school system. The only way to even attempt to stop what is happening to our children is to take them out of public schools and to home school. Unless there is a mass, and I mean mass, exodus of children out of the U.N. school system in America, children will rapidly continue to lose their American identity and Judeo-Christian value systems. There is no other answer and no other way to protest the unconscionable acts of our government but to crash the public school system in America.

    Any parent who is not removing their children from today´s public schools is in agreement with the U.N. take-over of our nation. It´s just that simple and just that factual. You are going to have to decide, today, whether you stand for America or whether you stand for Socialism, Gaia, sexual re-education, and the U.N. recreation of our nation. There is no middle ground!

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The Real Problem...

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Why the Individual is the Fundamental Unit of a Just Society

America was founded on the belief that respect for individuals, apart from family and other associations, is paramount to a just and virtuous society. In recent decades, this belief has given way to a "more civil," group-centered, "soft communism" doctrine that places individuals on unequal grounds before the law.

This philosophical shift will, if allowed to continue, result in the abandonment of justice and common sense, and lead toward the complete Balkanization and ruin of America. House Joint Resolution 2, "Family Impact Statement on Legislation," the recently-passed Constitutional Amendment 3, and thought crimes legislation are discussed as examples of this degradation.

Read the rest at this link.

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