James Bradley wrote the book "Flags of Our Fathers," on which one of Clint Eastwood's new films is based. "Flags" tells the true story of what is arguably the most famous photo in warfare, taken as his father and five other marines raised the Stars and Stripes on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima in 1945.
Three of the men never got off the island alive. The rest became reluctant, unhappy heroes, ferried from city to city to whip up morale and sell war bonds. Only his father, sustained by the small-town values eulogized in the book, got through the events relatively unscathed.
Bradley knows Japan well, having studied at Sophia University in Tokyo, and has a degree in East Asian History. In the book, he describes lecturing his dad on the reasons why Japan went to war at a Thanksgiving dinner in 1975.