DIXON — Victor Charlo is a poet and educator. At one point, he wanted to be a soldier. That desire — and its remission — came about as a result of his brother’s death.
Charles Charlo was a radioman. He carried his radio to the top of a mountain, one of four volunteers to plant the American flag atop a peak on Iwo Jima — a symbol to sustain the hearts of the troops through that brave and terrible fight.
Victor was only a child when his brother died. But he can recall the past.
“I was six years old, but I remember. I remember a lot.”
Vic was working in the field with another brother, feeding his uncle’s cows, when the telegram came about his brother’s death.
His mother’s keening cry carried on the evening wind.
“We heard mom do that cry, that keen. So we hurried up and did our chores,” he said. True to the discipline instilled in them, the boys finished the cows, even though they knew what lay ahead.
The family was Salish-Chippewa-Cree. They’d always lived in the Flathead. Before the war, their father had worked with the CCC, helping to build Kerr dam. The influence of recruiters on the older boys frightened Victor’s mother, so the family moved south to Evaro.
“We lived right on the Northern Pacific Railroad,” Victor said. His father worked for the railroad, as did Charles before enlisting. The jobs, Victor said, were essential to the war effort, and his brother was exempt from war duty.
“Charles didn’t have to go, because he had one of those essential-for–the war jobs. He worked on the railroad with my dad,” Vic said.
But friends, peer pressure and societal pride led the young man, not even 18, to sign away his life for his country. Charles became a Marine, the toughest branch of the service. He was sent to Japan, to the heart of World War II.
Charles landed on Iwo Jima just weeks before the war would end. He wouldn’t live to see it.
In a letter to his family, Charles told of volunteering to be flag bearer, to stake a psychological victory against the entrenched and hidden Japanese by raising the American flag upon the highest hill. The men climbed a volcano, holding the flag against enemy fire.
“As soon as they got that flag up, all hell broke loose,” Victor stated.
The soldiers stayed there while the battle raged. “At that point, retaining the flag up there was the most important thing.”
The Marines expected the battle to last just days, Victor said, but instead it lasted weeks.
The troops had been bombarding the strategic landing strip for weeks, and they thought they had killed all the Japanese there, he said. But the enemy had lain low, silent as an ambush. The Japanese soldiers had hidden in bunkers known as “pill boxes,” little concrete lairs where they could outwait the onslaught of bombs. The Marines had no idea. In addition, the Marine’s heavy equipment was mired in the sand. The Japanese had the tactical advantage.
Raising the flag against them was a sign of American indomitability, Victor said. His brother was called to play a part. But just two weeks before Hiroshima melted, Charles Charlo was killed by a sniper’s bullet.
When a child dies, the whole family is affected. Charles was the eldest of 13. He was the golden boy of his large family, the promised son into whom all the hopes were placed.
Victor's father could not read. When the telegraph came of his hope’s death, he carried the paper home to his wife. The boys’ mother read, and wailed.
The family was dampened from that time on. They lived under an umbrella of sadness. Victor said his mother would smile again, but she never regained the joies de vivre lost when her eldest son died.
The family was weaker after that, Victor said. It was like the tree his brother didn’t kill.
A few years before, Charles had gotten a brand new cross cut saw. The boys took it out into the woods, and Charles cut through a tree, but not all the way. “Now this tree,” he told his younger siblings, “will live, just not well.” Victor said his family was like that tree after Charles died.
“It really hit everybody,” Victor said. “Everybody was just devastated. And that lasted for a very long time.”
The family wouldn’t get Charles’ body back until two years after the war. The gap delayed their healing, and reopened the wounds of his loss. As a result, some of the rage of war swept into Charles’ siblings. Other brothers joined the military.
Victor, too young for World War II, was drafted into Vietnam.
At the time, Victor was a seminarian. Schooling at Loyola High School led him down that path. But a yearning to avenge his brother’s death made him accept the military’s calling.
“What I was thinking at that time was I was going to go to war and get revenge,” Victor said. Instead, the military rejected him.
4-F’ed due to a bad back, the young man’s intent was turned around. Victor then pursued a path of social change and education.
With degrees in Curriculum Administration, Latin, and English, he joined the government’s Office of Economic Opportunity, training tribal leaders in self-governance. Victor was the regional trainer for seven states west of the divide.
He was a coordinator with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, in the era of Black Panthers and Martin Luther King.
He worked with Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign, living in “Resurrection City” trying to bring about social change. But Victor refused to fall into the rhetoric of violence that began to overtake the social change movement. He returned to Montana.
The present could have been very different, if that one event hadn’t occurred.
There’s no telling the cost of a life. In the Charlo family, the loss of Charles equated to years of mourning for his mother and for his siblings, the overhanging pall of a lost son’s glory.
Yet if Victor’s brother had never left the family, never ventured forth into unknown and dangerous shores — would the history and iconography of America be the same?
Charles Charlo gave his life to give America an indelible image of freedom, of four soldiers grasping a flag atop a mountain in the midst of war. Victor Charlo took that spirit of freedom into his work for social change and tribal self-governance. Now, he works with the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes preparing educational materials so that schools on the Flathead Reservation meet the standards set in Indian Education for All. And he writes the poetry of his life, which his daughter translates into Salish.
His has been a full life, maybe enough for two.
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