Saturday I went to the dedication of a new veterans memorial in Springboro Ohio. While there I was honored to meet a WW2 Marine. I almost had to pry out of him that his big fight was at this place called Iwo Jima! He was on a 75 mm pack howitzer crew, and when the ramp went down and they hit the beach, they were STUCK! The gun sank to the axle in that black sand and there they were, stuck on an island with 21,000 Japanese hosts, and a gun stuck in the sand, and it wasn't even pointed inland.
There must have been 10,000 stories begging to be told that day. I'm glad I was able to collect a few, and share a couple.