Jesse Bradford stars as one of the U.S. servicemen who raised the American flag after the battle of Iwo Jima in the film, "Flags of our Fathers."

The chaos of war doesn't end on the battlefield. It spreads throughout a society as a confusion of purpose when the people are tired of combat, uncertain of the conflict's outcome, divided over whether to continue the struggle or stop the flow of blood and tears.

Clint Eastwood's "Flags of our Fathers" questions the way that the inconceivable savagery of warfare is transformed into mythology and legend for political ends. While it's flawed by a sometimes confusing timeline, it is a great achievement in American filmmaking, a haunting statement about the nature of violence and heroism.

The film is a story about three servicemen, and it flows along three streams. It begins in the recent past with aged veterans' memories of the battle of Iwo Jima. Then it moves back to their youth in early 1945 during the assault on the Japanese stronghold and their chance appearance in the timeless photograph of Marines raising the American flag. Finally it follows the three survivors of subsequent combat — "Doc" Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) — as they are packaged as public relations heroes to literally sell the war at bond rallies. The men, plucked from combat and lavished with adulation they feel they don't deserve, struggle with their guilt as their buddies continue to die in the Pacific.

Bradley does the best job of keeping his moorings, recognizing the necessity of the charade he's been ordered to play. Gagnon, who smiles easily for the cameras, hopes to parlay his fame into a postwar career. The Native American Hayes is the film's tragic figure, crumbling into alcoholism under survivor's guilt and the continuous offhand racism of nearly every white he meets. Beach easily takes the acting honors, giving the intense role its full measure of sorrow.

The chronology is unsettlingly choppy as it loops between veterans' reminiscences, harrowing you-are-there combat footage and stateside hoopla — at one point I was convinced that the projectionist had the reels out of order. It takes a while to realize that as in "Citizen Kane," we're watching a tangle of conflicting accounts, being collected in this case by Bradley's journalist son.Once you accommodate yourself to the film's unconventional structure, however, its themes develop enormous power. The combat scenes are brutally realistic, every bit the equal of the D-Day sequence in "Flags" producer Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan."If the pictures that emerged from that battle focused on that appalling slaughter rather than the flag raising, the effect on the nation's morale would have been devastating. To fight on against the suicidal Japanese, America needed to focus on the Marines' triumph on Mount Suribachi. "This picture says we can win this war, are winning this war," barks the abrasive Treasury Department official who shuttles the trio to staged public appearances around the country.While this epic demonstrates that violence is not glorious or heroic, and sanitizing it for the folks back home is deceitful, it presents warfare as morally complex, not merely "wrong." Inevitably, it prompts thoughts of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman, whose combat experiences were clumsily distorted by the hero-hungry military and the media. Eastwood's skeptical film is respectful of the patriots who gave everything in the service of their country, but it pointedly leaves the flag-waving to others.