Iwo Jima at 70: To Love a Lost Hero - USNI News
During the first few days after U. S. Marines landed on Iwo Jima in February 1945, First Lieutenant Jack Lummus was literally running messages between the Fifth Division’s 27th Regiment commander and Second Battalion Headquarters. While Jack Lummus’s face grayed from Iwo’s volcanic ash, mine reddened in the Southern California sun. Then on 8 March 1945, while I was safely in my bed in Glendale, dreaming of “happily ever after” Jack lay on a hospital tent cot, think-ing his final thoughts, breathing his last prayers, unaware he would be called a hero. A couple weeks later, Jack’s friend, Jim Tuttle, showed up on my doorstep with two other Marine officers. Was he trying to move in on Jack’s girl. Jack’s V-mail, dated 25 February, had arrived that day. “I’m okay,” Jack assured me. I was so young, only 20. And I was so ecstatic to see a familiar face I could associate with Jack that Tutt did not have the heart to explain why he came. Then, on the day President Franklin D. Roosevelt died, I dug a pile of letters out of my mailbox—letters I had written Jack that never reached him. I had known Jack as a Marine who wore swimming trunks on the beach at San Clemente, as a suitor who looked so hand-some, stood so tall in his green wool uniform when he met my mother. Source: news.usni.org
