Plunging Onward Out Ahead!

"All I could do was to scoop out a hollow in the sand."

"It worked. I'm here," said the 84 year old Marine veteran of amphibious assaults on Iwo Jima, Guam, and Guadalcanal.

Plunging Onward Out Ahead.

"I'm the World War II generation," he continued in the locker room of New Bern's Courts Plus gym.

Born in '22, he now was slow, so slow, as he crouched in the corner laboriously pulling on his trousers.

Slowly...slowly...slowly.....Yet once engaged in conversation, his story flowed out like a mountain stream.

Plunging onward out ahead...

"Were you the famous Marine photographed raising the victory flag over Iwo Jima?" I asked him with a chuckle.

"No, I'm the one who ran for cover," came a swift, twinkling reply.

"There was no cover, " he continued. No trenches could be dug into the beach soil. "All I could do was scoop out a hollow in the sand."

Then came the shrapnel -- in his chin through the lips, and right above the brow. "I pulled the shrapnel out, stuck on the bandaids, plunged onward out ahead."

Later, at Guam, came more serious wounds.

"Burns," he said. All over the face, shoulders and chest. When a Japanese suicide plane crashed a bit too close. For months he recovered in military hospitals -- fortunately, he recalled, penicillin had just become available, so antibiotic coated water wetted bandages made of toilet paper could keep infection at bay.

"You know now I'm loosing weight but my stomach keeps getting bigger especially when I sit...I used to do three sets of racketball every lunch hour....Now I'm down to swimming, but that gets hard with water in the ears...Today I just did a steam bath..."

"You're 64?" he said to me. "A young one.....you're doing the right thing to exercise. That will help keep you alive."

"Chiao," said the man from Iwo Jima, as he trudged just a bit woundedly out through the locker room door.......

Yes, it worked. He is still here.

Plunging onward out ahead.