by John Calvin | May 25th, 2006
Tonight I am sitting at the NCHE Annual Conference at a special showing of “The League of Grateful Sons”, the inspiring new documentary film from Vision Forum, First Pacific Studios, and The Faith of Our Fathers Project. This awesome film is the story of the men who fought and lived or died on Iwo Jima in World War II, and whose memory and instruction had a huge influence on their sons and daughters. It was opened by Scott Brown, with his father, veteran Bill Brown, and his daughter Kelly, author of Coming In On a Wing and a Prayer. Last year, Scott Brown traveled with Doug Phillips of Vision Forum to Iwo Jima on the 60th anniversary of the bloody 1945 battle with many veterans of the battle, and their sons. Their mission: to record and preserve the memory of their fathers, men who lived to teach their sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons, like Bill Brown and , and those whose memory of triumphant manhood filled the place of their personal teaching in the lives of their descendants. The film came out of a research project started by NC homeschool graduate Kelly Brown, who began asking her grandfather about his youth, especially his experiences in World War II, and who has made it her life mission to chronicle the stories of fathers and grandfathers of the World War II generation, before they are all lost. Theirs was the last generation to grow up in a culture that was still largely Christian, and it was the fathers’ influence, in many cases, that made the difference between a family that held the faith, and those that capitulated to the growth of the “modern” culture.
This sweeping storu, shot on location in Iwo Jima, Hawaii, and Texas, chronicles the stories of:
–Johnny Boy Butler, who was 5 when his father was killed in action on Iwo, but who lived his entire life striving to live up to his father’s standard of victorious manhood.
–Leonard and Fletcher Isacks, whose grandfather died on the island, but whose copious letters on life, morals, politics, and the Christian life became the model for 3 generations of manly Isacks.
–“Colonel” Bill Henderson, who survived Iwo Jima and the moral and physical perils of the war through his desire to never disappoint his own father, and who has now seen his duty to devote the remaining years of his life to telling the stories to disciple the current generation.
They tell the tremendous story of the men who gave their lives to make the world safe for freedom, as well as the story of those men who have brought their sons and grandsons here, to tell them how to be men.
Scott Brown said he wanted desperately to travel to Iwo Jima, to walk where his father walked, and to see the places his father saw. He realized that was a desire that God put in every boy’s heart, the desire to walk in his father’s footsteps. The sons who came back to Iwo Jima, to remember their fathers, living or dead, to walk in their fathers’ footsteps, are those who Doug Phillips calls the “League of Grateful Sons”.
This is their story.
In His Service,
John Calvin