Once, toward the end of his life, at a family gathering, Bradley asked him about the photo.

“Jeez, if only there hadn’t been a flag on that pole,” was his response.

After his father’s death in 1994, a letter was found that he wrote to his parents two days after the flag raising, Bradley said.

In it, he wrote: “I had a little to do with raising the American flag at Iwo Jima, and it was the happiest moment of my life.”

“I cried when I read that letter,” Bradley said, “wondering why he had never been able to share that happy moment with me, a son.”

Bradley went on a quest to find out what happened at Iwo Jima and why his father never talked about it. He began to devour books about the subject.

The effort led him to interviews with the families of the other men in the photo and dozens of stories about them that had never been told. Only three of the six men in the photo survived the war.

One of the most remarkable stories involved a Texas mother who saw the photograph on the cover of her local newspaper and told her son, “Look at there, Eddie. There’s your brother Harlon,” Bradley said.