‘I wanted to have a choice’

You had to be 18 and a half before you could sign up without your parents’ approval.

I signed up 6 August of 1943. All my buddies were joining. Everybody was joining. I didn’t want to wait for the draft. I wanted to have a choice.

We left for Iwo Jima 16 February 1945. We were put ashore the night before they put the flag up. I remember looking back and seeing the flag on top of Mount Suribachi. It was the big one. ...

The sad part was while we were there, the graves registration people were bringing bodies back on three-quarter ton trucks. Canvas was over it but boots were sticking out of the back. There must have been 12 bodies in there. It wasn’t just one (truck); it was several. They just kept coming, kept coming.

The morning we got a mission to go support the 21st Marines, we went across the air strip. Pretty soon the word came back … it was Oscar Saigo, the 3rd Recon Company Commander when I joined them.

A round came in, and he left us right there. Platoon Sergeant Bill McCarthy hollered and said, ‘get a couple of guys, go across the strip. We need rations and water.’

We weren’t gone an hour. We came back, I kept looking up ahead. Where the Hell is everybody? They were down in their holes. One kid was crying. He said, “They got McCarthy. A sniper got him in the back of the head.”

Submitted by Raymond Scoufos, 82, a Marine now living in Oklahoma City Years after Iwo Jima, Scoufos wrote: There was Old Glory – waving in the breeze. I was so happy and excited that I started yelling and pointing and soon all my fellow 3rd Recon Marine buddies joined in because we knew what it had cost since D-Day, 19 Feb., 1945, to secure Suribachi, much less raise our American Flag on top.