Victor was just 6 years old at the time, and his mother's cries of anguish frightened the little boy.
“We knew something bad had happened,” he recalls, “but we had to continue feeding the cows before we could go home.”
Victor was too young to be able to read the telegram - the dreaded “We regret to inform you” message of war - but he knew what had happened.
His oldest brother, Marine Corps Pfc. Louis “Chuck” Charlo, had been killed in action on the Island of Iwo Jima.
“I was the only one who wasn't crying, and I remember wondering why I didn't,” Charlo says. “It just felt like, wow, this is the end. And for a long time after, it felt like that.”
He remembers when Chuck, barely 17 years old and with an “essential” job on the railroad that would keep him from being drafted during World War II, came home with the box of chocolates for their mother, Mary.
“We were all so happy for him because my dad had gotten him this job on the railroad where he wouldn't have to go fight,” Victor says. “And three or four months later he's back with this box of chocolates and trying to talk my mom into signing the papers so he could join the Marines.”
Mary said no. Over and over, again and again.
No.
“I don't know how long it took, but he finally got her to,” Victor says.
Seven months later Chuck was a hero.
And he was dead.
“My mother blamed herself for signing those papers,” Victor says, “but you couldn't blame anybody. He really wanted to go.”
Just days before he was killed, trying to save a fellow Marine who had been hit by enemy fire, Pfc. Louis “Chuck” Charlo - great grandson of the great Salish Chief Victor Charlo - became a part of one of the most famous and enduring images of any war.
Chuck was one of the handful of Marines to raise the first American flag on Iwo Jima.
That there were two flag-raisings is now the stuff of lore.
First Lt. Harold Schrier led the Marines, which included Charlo, up Mount Suribachi. Just before the men left, 2nd Battalion Cmdr. Chandler Johnson handed Schrier an American flag - from, coincidentally, the USS Missoula, named after the county where Charlo had been born - and told him, “If you get to the top, put it up.”
The Marines made the ascent and raised the flag. Staff Sgt. Louis Lowery of Leatherneck magazine was there with his camera to record the event.
On the beaches below, the 54-by-28-inch flag was but a speck in the sky.
But, way down there, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal decided he wanted the flag as a souvenir. When Johnson got wind of that, he decided to secure the original flag for his battalion before Forrestal could get his hands on it.
Johnson dispatched Lt. Ted Tuttle to find a replacement flag, and as Tuttle hurried off, Johnson had a thought.
“Make it a bigger one,” he yelled at Tuttle.
Tuttle found one twice as large, and another batch of Marines was sent up Suribachi to save the original flag for the battalion and replace it with the bigger one.
Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal went with that group, and his dramatic picture of the Marines as they struggled to push the much larger flag into place atop Iwo Jima is arguably the most famous wartime photograph ever.
Back home, Chuck Charlo's family had no idea he was involved in one of World War II's landmark events.
“We had an uncle who had a bus run between Missoula and Kalispell,” Victor says. “He'd collect newspapers left on the bus and throw them off at our house. We didn't have a car or anything - horses and a wagon is how we got around - so that's how we kept in touch with the war, with those newspapers my uncle would drop off. Mom would read the stories to us.”
One week after he helped raise the first American flag on Iwo Jima, Charlo and his platoon were advancing through an area called the “meat grinder” when a fellow Marine was shot.
“ ‘Chief' went out to him and managed to get him on his shoulder,” wrote his platoon leader, Ray Whelan, in 2004, “and was well back to cover when he was hit by machine gun fire. They were both killed.”
This new information - that 18-year-old Pfc. Louis “Chuck” Charlo was killed not only in action, but trying to save the life of a fellow Marine - has him being recommended for the Silver Star, the Navy Cross and the Congressional Medal of Honor.
And so it is that Monday, at approximately 11:30 a.m. at Charlo's gravesite at the Catholic Cemetery in St. Ignatius, the James R.W. McCarthy American Legion Post and the Mission Valley Honor Guard will pay tribute to Charlo and his two surviving siblings, Victor and Mary Jane.
Last October a member of the post, Archie Olsen, suggested Charlo be singled out for recognition this Memorial Day weekend.
“That started the ball rolling,” says Homer Courville, adjutant commander. “We wanted Dave Samuelson, a local artist, to do a painting of the flag-raising that we could give to Vic and Mary Jane, but ran into a brick wall.”
The famous image is copyrighted by the Associated Press. The Legion post opted to purchase a print instead.
Cmdr. J.C. Courville - whose own son, Lance Cpl. Jesse James Courville, will begin his second tour of duty in Iraq in September - will tell the Charlo story, and make the presentation.
In doing so, he says, it will be the post's and Honor Guard's way “of thanking all veterans, and praying for the ones over there now.”
For Victor, the ceremony will take him back to that day in 1945, when his brother was buried.
“I remember they had him at the funeral home, which back then was not too far from the graveyard,” Victor says. “I remember we got a ride into St. Ignatius, and my mom kept saying, ‘It can't be him, they've got to open the coffin,' but they wouldn't do that. I sometimes think about that, how she had to know, is it really him?”
At the cemetery, they made young Victor stay in the car while Chuck was buried.
“I watched from there,” he says. “It was the first time I ever heard the firing of rifles, or a bugle playing taps.”
More than 63 years later, they'll do it again for Pfc. Louis “Chuck” Charlo, the descendant of chiefs, an American hero - and a teenage boy who died for his country.
Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at vdevlin@missoulian.com.
Honoring the fallen
The James R.W. McCarthy American Legion Post, and the Mission Valley Honor Guard, will make a presentation to the surviving brother and sister of Pfc. Louis “Chuck” Charlo - who was one of the Marines to raise the first flag at Iwo Jima during World War II and who died on the island - Monday at approximately 11:30 a.m. at a ceremony at the St. Ignatius Catholic Cemetery.
In Ronan, Laverne Parrish, who was also killed in World War II, will be honored during events that include a parade at noon, a dedication immediately following at the Ronan park that bears Parrish's name, followed by a dinner at the Ronan VFW at 2 p.m. to be attended by Parrish's brother.
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