One of the most iconic images from World War II—Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima—is featured on today’s #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp showing that image issued on July 11, 1945, about five months after the picture was taken and about a month before Japan surrendered.

The stamp recreates Joe Rosenthal’s iconic, Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of six Marines raising the flag over Mount Suribachi on February 23, 1945. The photo was taken five days after about 30,000 American Marines had landed on the 8-square mile island, which is located about 750 miles south of Tokyo. The Americans wanted to control the island and its three airfields to provide a staging area for air and possibly naval attacks on the Japanese main islands.

As it turned out, the island proved to be of little strategic value. This because the fight for the island, which lasted for about five weeks and involved 70,000 American troops and about 21,000 Japanese soldiers, was some of the fiercest and bloodiest fighting of the Pacific War of World War II. Almost 7,000 American soldiers lost their lives on the island and about 20,000 were wounded. And only 216 of the the 21,000 Japanese soldiers defending the island were taken prisoner. The rest, presumably, were killed.

In a 2000 speech on the 55th anniversary of the battle at the Marine Corps memorial (a statue recreating the Rosenthal photograph), James Bradley, son of one of the men in the picture (and author of a notable book about the battle) recalled that his father never spoke about the battle when he was alive. After his father died, Bradley began researching the battle and the lives of the six men shown in the iconic photograph. Here’s some of what he said about what he learned in the course of doing that research:

“I learned how young you were.

My dad is not the guy putting the pole in the ground; he’s the next guy up. But behind him, obscured by him, on the other side, is Rene Gagnonv [who] had a photo of his girlfriend in his helmet. He needed the protection because he was scared. He was 17 years old. Ira Hayes, the last man on the statue whose hands cannot reach the pole. Proud of being with you Marines, he wrote home from the boat taking him to Iwo Jima: ‘These boys I’m with are all good men. I would not take 1000 dollars to be separated from them.’…Harlon Block, at the base of that pole, enlisted in the United States Marine Corps with all of the senior members of his high school football team.”

I learned how determined you were on Iwo Jima.

My dad wrote a letter home three days after the flag raising. He wrote, ” I didn’t know I could go without food, without water, or sleep for three days, but now I know it can be done.”

…And I learned about the heartbreak that you went through.

Franklin Sousley, the second figure in….was fatherless at the age of nine. He was dead on Iwo Jima at the age of nineteen. His aunt told me that when the telegram arrived at the General Store in Hilltop, Kentucky a young, barefoot boy ran that telegram up to his mother’s farm. The story is that the neighbors could hear his mother scream all night and into the morning. The neighbors lived a quarter of a mile away.

I learned about the challenges that you faced.

You did the impossible. You fought an underground, unseen enemy….I have been to Iwo Jima. It’s five miles long. If you’re in a car going 60 miles an hour, it takes you 5 minutes to conquer it. It took you—slogging, fighting, dying—36 days.

I learned that my father’s company, named “Easy” Company, had 84 percent casualties.

Sixteen percent of my dad’s buddies made it off unharmed. Bob Schmidt told me that when they buried the dead on Saipan, they buried by individual grave. When they buried on Iwo Jima they buried by row—rows of a hundred boys. He told me that they needed surveyors to mark the lines….Corpsman Hoopes instructed me, “You tell your readers that my uniform was caked with blood and it cracked. And it was not my blood.”

I think it’s time we Americans put this battle into perspective.

…Normandy was terrible, but at the end of one day, at the end of 24 hours, you and I could have had a tea party on the beaches of Normandy. It was completely safe. Boys died on the beaches of Iwo Jima—on the beaches—for two weeks. [And it was] the only battle that when Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw the casualties he gasped, and he cried?

…I would like to salute you guys, but I know how difficult that is because you are as humble as you are brave. Jessie Boatright said to me, ‘You know Bradley, you think we did something special out there in the Pacific, but we were just ordinary guys. Ordinary guys just doing our duty.’

…I would like to salute you guys. You guys who won America’s Battle. You ordinary guys. You heroes of Iwo Jima.”

So no snarkiness today from me. Just great respect for the many, many people who fought there, especially those who died or were wounded. And a reminder that before we consider putting other young people (American or otherwise) in harm’s way, we should review accounts of battles like Iwo Jima to make sure that we are asking them to fight for things that we all agree are truly important.

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.