Seeing the new movie "Flags of Our Fathers," I was reminded of Walt Whitman's observation, "The real war will never get in the books." And I wondered if the famous poet, who worked as a nurse during the Civil War, would feel as pessimistic about the power of film to help us see what he saw.

In his 2000 book, "Flags of Our Fathers," author James Bradley, son of one of the men who raised Old Glory atop Mount Suribachi in 1945, struggled over the course of more than 500 pages to communicate the reality of Iwo Jima — and then to communicate the unreality of the subsequent celebration of that flag-raising.

As the film, too, makes clear, the unrealities were many. First, the flag-raising that we have all seen, immortalized by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal's photograph, was actually a second flag-raising of the day. And as a result, confusion ensued as to which Marines raised which flag, causing considerable pain to families back home.

Second, the flag-raising, triumphant as it was, did not cap off the fighting. The flag(s) went up Feb. 23, and yet the island was not secured until March 26 — during which time three of the six men who raised the second flag were killed in combat.

So now to the third unreality, which the film explores in considerable detail: The three survivors — two Marines and a Navy corpsman, Jack Bradley, father of James — were pulled out of the war zone and brought home to the United States for a series of patriotic rallies, specifically aimed at selling war bonds. The surviving trio even staged a mock "climb" up a plaster mountain in the middle of Soldier Field in Chicago.

It's easy — even for Hollywood director Clint Eastwood — to make fun of the hype and hoopla associated with such propaganda exercises, but let's face it: There was a war on, and the American people needed to stay firm in their resolve for what might well have been years more of fighting. Yes, Germany was near defeat, but until the United States managed to explode an atomic bomb, in July 1945, we faced the prospect of a long slog against Japan, population 75 million. On Iwo, for example, 21,000 Japanese defenders inflicted 27,000 casualties on the United States, including 6,821 killed. So, selling lots of war bonds, in anticipation of bloody years to come, seemed like a pretty good idea.

But, of course, such macro-calculations were far from the minds of young Jack Bradley and his two comrades, Rene Gagnon and Ira Hayes. The men are shown wracked by various degrees of guilt: Why did they get plucked out for special treatment? Why were they living it up stateside in fancy hotels when others were left to fight and die in the Pacific? As Jack says, over and over during the film, "We're not the heroes. The real heroes are the men who died on that island." In fact, after the PR tour, Bradley settled into a quiet life in Wisconsin and raised a large family. He died in 1994, having said almost nothing about Iwo Jima for the previous half-century. Indeed, it was only after his father's death that James Bradley began the six-year effort to reconstruct his father's deeds, as well as the deeds of all the men of the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions at Iwo.

So there's no small irony here: The elder Bradley had no desire to tell his story, perhaps because he felt that the real war, as he experienced it, would never get in the books. But the younger Bradley did just that — he told his father's war story in copious detail. And now there's a whole movie, featuring you-are-there special effects, about Jack Bradley and his band of brothers. Maybe the real war didn't get in this movie, but this is close as anyone alive today can hope to get.

James P. Pinkerton is a columnist for Newsday.