For those who don't know, the film is centered on the iconic photo shot depicting several soldiers raising the Amercian flag in Iwo Jima. It turns out the picture is taken twice with different men, staged – much like reality TV today. Although several of the soldiers in the picture soon die, it becomes a symbol for patriotism and apparently helped raise good ole American morale.

The film intersperses Private Ryan style flashback scenes with the fallout that the surviving soldiers from the photo faced as they are paraded around the country to help sell war bonds. They are in a sea of pomp and circumstance, hardly knowing why. Increasingly, they question what and who is really a hero.

But none of the above is what is most important to me about this movie. For me, this movie is about IRA HAYES. He is one of the soldiers who raised the flag -- a Pima American Indian. Note that at the time of World War II, American Indians couldn't vote in this country. Clint Eastwood did what struck me as a very realistic depiction of the "chummy" type of racism someone like Hayes would have experienced. Everyone, of course, calls him "chief," asks him if he used his tomahawk. All with a smile and smack on the back. Hayes mostly shrugs this stuff off, but you can see the building anguish when he is not allowed in bars because of his ethnicity and when people visit his Reservation to get their photo taken with the Indian who raised the flag. It is as if he is a circus attraction. As Hayes descends into alcoholism, it feels less like a stereotype and more like a cruel, and almost inevitable, outcome of racism and mindless war.

The actor is Adam Beach, of Smoke Signals, the lovely film written and produced by Sherman Alexie. Beach is probably the most successful young Indian actor working today. And after that abomination Windtalkers in which he starred with Nicholas Cage, this is a refreshing change in how white directors depict Indian characters. The performance is also terrific; frankly the center of the film. (The other leading characters are comparatively quite flat.) But Eastwood treats Hayes with unromantic realism, while keeping an eye to the human, humane, and to our senseless cruelties -- big and small.
Learn more about the movie and about Ira Hayes:

Ira Hayes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ira_Hayes

Adam Beach on playing Ira:
http://www.canada.com/topics/entertainment/story.html?id=36430f2d-4b16-4cdc-9d8a-b6ddd0b1a64f&k=63921

and

I only learned about the song when googling Ira Hayes. I will download it!

The movies focuses on the firefighters, the people who love them, a few facts and stuff, and gets away from blaming or jingoing for world war (cept for the nancy-boy retarded soldier I mentioned) and it's really a warm film.
The scenes of collapse and chaos after the collapse in the heat and twisted metal are very realistic and you can put yourself in there.
It turns a theoretical event into something you can picture, and does so without an obvious guvmint motive.