You've seen the picture.

Everybody has.

Six men. A flagpole. A volcano top on a Pacific island most Americans couldn't have found on a map. Joe Rosenthal's photograph, snapped on February 23, 1945, won the Pulitzer Prize and became the most reproduced image in the history of photography. It got turned into a war bond campaign, a postage stamp, a 100-ton bronze statue in Arlington. Marines use it as their emblem to this day.

You've seen it so many times it has almost stopped being real. It's become a symbol. An abstraction. A logo.

But those were actual human beings.

One of them was Franklin Runyon Sousley. Born September 19, 1925, in Hilltop, Kentucky. A place so small it barely shows up on a modern map. Fleming County. Eastern Kentucky hill country. The kind of place where you know everybody and everybody knows your business and the nearest big town is still pretty small.

His father died when Franklin was eight years old. Oldest son. Man of the house, more or less, before he had any business being either. His mother Goldie raised the boys in that hollow, and Franklin did what Kentucky boys did. Went to school. Helped out. Grew up.

After he graduated high school in 1943, he moved to Dayton, Ohio, got a job with the Frigidaire division of General Motors. Nineteen years old. First time off the home ground, probably. Working a factory line in the industrial Midwest, sending money back to mama.

Then the Marines came calling.

The 5th Marine Division — some 21,000 strong — would become the most highly trained division in the history of the Marine Corps. It would fight in only one battle.

Iwo Jima.

The 5th set sail for Hawaii on September 19, 1944. It was Franklin's 19th birthday, and it would be his last.

The fighting on Iwo Jima was unlike anything the Pacific war had produced. The Japanese had burrowed into the island like termites into a house, sixteen miles of tunnels connecting bunkers and caves and artillery positions. They had no intention of surrendering. Out of the 2nd Battalion, which numbered 1,688 men at its peak, only 177 walked off the island.

Franklin Sousley walked up Mount Suribachi on February 23rd and grabbed a flagpole.

That's it. That's the moment. A farm kid from Fleming County, standing on top of a volcano in the Pacific Ocean, helping plant a flag that the whole world would see. He survived the battle for Suribachi itself. Kept fighting. Kept moving north across that terrible island.

On March 21, 1945, Franklin Sousley was shot in the back by a Japanese sniper. He was nineteen years old.

On April 9, a telegram bearing the awful news arrived in Hilltop, Kentucky. Word of Franklin's death raced like wildfire through the countryside. His neighbors reported hearing Goldie's screams all through the night and into the next morning. Their home was a quarter-mile away.

Let that sit for a second.

A quarter mile.

Franklin's remains were brought home and reinterred in Elizaville Cemetery in Fleming County, Kentucky, on May 8, 1947. He's still there. Quiet little cemetery in a quiet little county, the kind of place you'd drive right past without slowing down.

Flag Day lands every June 14th, and millions of Americans will see stars and stripes hanging from porches, snapping in the breeze outside post offices, printed on napkins at barbecues. Most won't think much about it. The flag has become wallpaper. Background noise. A decoration.

But that photograph — the one that still gives people a catch in the throat eighty years later — has a Kentucky boy in it. A holler kid who grew up without his daddy, who worked a factory line to help his mother, who grabbed a flagpole on a Pacific volcano and never made it home.

The flag belongs to all of us.

But a piece of it came from the hills of Appalachia.

And a boy named Franklin Sousley never got to know it.