[worth]

Wow, fantastic link Fugly.

I haven't seen last night's episode yet, so I don't know how closely they followed this bit here:

My personal experience there happened on the morning of February 19, 1945. We landed in the first wave, and immediately we started climbing these sand terraces you might have seen in the pictures. And when I looked back at the beach, I could see one solitary Marine standing up. This was Marine Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone, the Medal of Honor recipient at Guadalcanal. He could see that the invasion had sort of ground to a halt, so he was motivating everybody by cuss words and kicks to the seats of the pants to get them underway. Well, my position was about three or four terraces up. I was a machine gunner, and when Basilone came to my position, he pointed out a target, and by looking down his arm I could see a giant Japanese pillbox, and he indicated I should start firing on it.

When I pulled the trigger, the gun wouldn’t fire; it had been fouled by the black sands of Iwo Jima. So at that point my assistant gunner had to take a toothbrush out of my pack to clean the breach and blow the sand out of it. He stuck the belt back in, and I could see the tracers hitting close to the pillbox. And Basilone didn’t like that, so he indicated I should move obliquely to my right to fire at it, which we did. But then they closed the steel doors, which left the bullets merely bouncing off of it. Basilone then found a demolition man, who handled the explosives. As I was firing at the pillbox, he walked up the line of fire, and about ten feet from it, he tossed the composition of C2—about ten pounds of it—and it blew the doors off. Basilone indicated that I should commence firing into the aperture.

At this time, he found a flamethrower man, and the flamethrower man walked up the line of fire and when he was almost there, Basilone whacked me on the helmet to tell me to quit firing. He inched the last few feet, and shot three bursts of napalm into the Japanese pillbox. You know, that turned it into a giant inferno right there—it looked like the beginning of hell. Basilone then reached down and unhooked the machine gun from the pin hook, and he grabbed it and put his arm through the belt, and he screamed at me to get the belt. So I got the belt, and he ran up the front of this pillbox, looking over the back where they had entered, and out the back of it came seven or eight Japanese defenders on fire—napalm all over them. And Basilone mowed them down, shooting his machine gun from the hip, and they all fell dead. Later on, I figured that it was probably a mercy killing, because those men were already dead.
At that point, he handed me back my machine gun, and gave us the signal to follow him. And 18 or 19 of us followed Basilone from the beach across the lowlands through an area of scrub brush until we hit the Number One airstrip. We had hoped to catch the airstrip that day, but we were out there by 10:00 that morning. And now we were receiving fire from Mt. Suribachi, from the mortars on the other side of the airstrip, and worst of all we were receiving fire from the United States Navy. We were too far advanced, and they were putting the rolling barrage over us. I thought we should have gotten out of there, really. But Basilone stopped that, and said, “You’re staying here come hell or high water! I’m going back to get more Marines, and we’re going to fight our way across this island!”

And he left us there, and he went back to the beach. Now, I couldn’t tell you in real time how long he was gone. Because when you’re in combat, there’s no recognition of time. And pretty soon, we looked over where we had come from, and Basilone was leading a group of Marines across the same way we had come from toward the airstrip. And all of a sudden, you could hear the shrill sound of incoming mortar rounds. And you could see the mortar hit right amidst Basilone and the C Company Marines. Nobody moved. America, at that moment, lost its number one hero, Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone on the shores of Iwo Jima.