On February 23rd, 1945, five Marines and one navy corpsman were asked to raise a flag. They looked at the flag that was already flying and grumbled, like all men in the infantry do. Some officer in the rear didn’t like the flag that was flying from the top of Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima. He wanted a bigger one raised. So they grumbled and found a length of pole, affixed the bigger flag to it, and sent it skyward as the first flag was being lowered.

Press corps photographer Joe Rosenthal was fiddling with his camera, a medium format Speed Graphic, when videographer Bill Genaust said “There it goes, Joe”. Rosenthal swung the camera around and clicked. He wasn’t even sure if he got anything. He took a few other posed photos after the fact, but the one photo everyone remembers is the iconic image of six men, faces lost in shadow, struggling for just a moment to raise the Stars and Stripes on top of that steaming hunk of volcanic island 650 miles from Tokyo.

When the photo was taken, the island was still at war. The battle that was started on February 19th wouldn’t be considered over until March 26th, 1945. By the time the island was considered secure, the Marines would suffer 26,000 casualties and 6,800 killed. Three of the flag raisers would die on Iwo Jima. But the significance of that photo was not to be last among the dead. James Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy, upon seeing the flag raising, said “The raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.”

I have that photo framed in my “man room”, along with my Marine Corps mementos. Every now and then I just stand there and stare at it, and think of the men and their sacrifice. They were just doing their job. Yet those men, faceless in that image, captured the spirit of our nation in a way no image has since. In that immortal photo, they represented everything that has made up this nation since its inception: we have struggled, we have sacrificed, but we have overcome. We will prevail.

Semper Fi, brothers.