thedrifter
11-19-06, 05:23 PM
'It Brings It All Back'
At the Marine Corps Museum, a Platoon's Survivors Relive the Horrors of the Battle of Iwo Jima
By Nick Miroff
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 19, 2006; C11
The Marines of the 4th Separate Wire Platoon get together every year, and when they do, they don't say much about Iwo Jima. They talk about softball games and their old friends and the special foulness of "kickapoo juice" -- footlocker-grade booze they brewed from fermented raisins and coconut milk.
And yet, 61 years after leaving that island, there they were, wandering the halls of the National Museum of the Marine Corps last week, through boot camp and Pearl Harbor and Guam, a path that led them back to February 1945, when they prepared to land on Iwo Jima a few days after the invasion began.
"A lot of it is vague," said Joseph B. Tedder, 82, dwarfed by walls of World War II-era weapons, maps and flashing multimedia displays. "But when I see this or watch the History Channel, it brings it all back."
For four decades after the war, Tedder kept a silk handkerchief with the signatures of the men in his platoon. He'd asked them to sign the cloth "just for the heck of it" before they went their separate ways.
Then, in 1986, Tedder began looking up the names. He found 20 of the 44 men, and the next year, he hosted the group's first reunion in his home town of Gastonia, N.C.
The group has met every year since then at locations across the country. The veterans' wives and children come, too. But the survivors have dwindled to nine men. "Seems like every other year we've had a death," Tedder said.
This year, on the occasion of the veterans' 20th annual reunion, the group came to the new $90 million museum outside Quantico -- dedicated Nov. 10 by President Bush -- and its state-of-the-art interactive exhibits that vividly recreate the experience of battle.
During the tour, museum guides led the veterans into a walk-in exhibit modeled on a Higgins boat, the armored landing craft used to ferry U.S. forces to beachheads. The men boarded slowly, some in wheelchairs, others with limps. A fake cargo door clanged shut behind them, and the room went dark.
Huge, surging waves appeared on a wraparound video screen. The distant rumble of artillery echoed through speakers embedded in the walls.
The men watched the video loop stoically as they relived the invasion, their eyes squinting at the pale blue light of the ocean. This time, no one "cracked up," unlike some who, Mack Drake remembered, collapsed in terror before landing on the beach.
"The waves were 10 feet high when you were trying to get out of those Higgins boats," said Drake, 81, as he stepped off the simulator. "You couldn't form close friendships with someone, because you didn't know how long he'd last."
Drake joined the Marines when he was 16 and went on to receive the Silver Star, Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts for wounds he sustained at Guam and Iwo Jima. "The way I look at it, we all did the same stuff over there," Drake said, walking with a slight limp and wearing a red Marine Corps cap and T-shirt.
A Japanese saber on display at the museum reminded him of one he has at home, taken from an officer he killed in close-range combat on Guam. Soon after, Drake was wounded in the neck and face by shrapnel from a grenade explosion, but he recovered and returned to fight, only to be shot through his left lung on Iwo Jima.
"I was lucky," he said, noting that both corpsmen who treated his battlefield wounds were dead the next day.
Drake said the museum has "everything covered. . . . A lot of memories in this place," he said.
But most of the veterans said that after returning home, they learned not to talk or think about the war and what they'd seen in the fight for the Japanese island and its strategic airfields. In 36 days of fighting, there were 25,851 American casualties, and 6,825 U.S. troops lost their lives. Almost all of the island's 22,000 Japanese defenders died.
"Iwo was always a depressing place for me," Tedder said. "When there's so much death around you, when you see bodies stacked like cordwood, you develop an aloofness."
While passing through the museum's life-size dioramas and walk-through bunkers, Tedder thought of John Hubacher. "He was my tentmate, my close friend. We went from island to island together."
The 4th Separate Wire Platoon was responsible for stringing up and repairing communication lines and phone wires, and the unit would often work at night under enemy fire. In the course of the 36-day battle for control of the island, Hubacher was killed one night in a mortar strike.
"Ol' John would have been a minister if he'd lived," Tedder said. "And I came off that island without a scratch."
For veteran Al Gentile, Iwo Jima also reminded him of Hubacher, because Gentile was a few yards away when the mortar hit. "I got shrapnel through my backpack, in my blanket roll, but it didn't touch me," he said. "That was the closest I came to being wounded."
At one point in the tour, Gentile rounded a corner and faced the American flag that appeared in the iconic Joe Rosenthal photograph that became the model for the Marine Corps War Memorial, better known as the Iwo Jima memorial. "That's the flag I saw," he said. He had landed on Iwo Jima on the third or fourth day of fighting, just before a group of Marines climbed Mount Suribachi to plant the flag. "Everyone took heart when we saw it up there," said, Gentile, 82. "That was amazing."
After the World War II exhibit, the group made it through the Korean War section. But by then, the veterans had been walking for nearly two hours and hadn't even reached the Vietnam War.
They went upstairs to the mess hall-style cafeteria for lunch, where the platoon's two designated jokers, Mike Ferenchik, 83, and Mike Saborse, 82, drank Budweisers and lavished marriage proposals on female members of the cafeteria staff.
Ferenchik offered up his friend Saborse to buss cafeteria employee Charlene Jones, who laughed it off.
"That's a nice smile," Ferenchik said. "If you smile a lot, you'll always stay young."
Ellie
At the Marine Corps Museum, a Platoon's Survivors Relive the Horrors of the Battle of Iwo Jima
By Nick Miroff
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 19, 2006; C11
The Marines of the 4th Separate Wire Platoon get together every year, and when they do, they don't say much about Iwo Jima. They talk about softball games and their old friends and the special foulness of "kickapoo juice" -- footlocker-grade booze they brewed from fermented raisins and coconut milk.
And yet, 61 years after leaving that island, there they were, wandering the halls of the National Museum of the Marine Corps last week, through boot camp and Pearl Harbor and Guam, a path that led them back to February 1945, when they prepared to land on Iwo Jima a few days after the invasion began.
"A lot of it is vague," said Joseph B. Tedder, 82, dwarfed by walls of World War II-era weapons, maps and flashing multimedia displays. "But when I see this or watch the History Channel, it brings it all back."
For four decades after the war, Tedder kept a silk handkerchief with the signatures of the men in his platoon. He'd asked them to sign the cloth "just for the heck of it" before they went their separate ways.
Then, in 1986, Tedder began looking up the names. He found 20 of the 44 men, and the next year, he hosted the group's first reunion in his home town of Gastonia, N.C.
The group has met every year since then at locations across the country. The veterans' wives and children come, too. But the survivors have dwindled to nine men. "Seems like every other year we've had a death," Tedder said.
This year, on the occasion of the veterans' 20th annual reunion, the group came to the new $90 million museum outside Quantico -- dedicated Nov. 10 by President Bush -- and its state-of-the-art interactive exhibits that vividly recreate the experience of battle.
During the tour, museum guides led the veterans into a walk-in exhibit modeled on a Higgins boat, the armored landing craft used to ferry U.S. forces to beachheads. The men boarded slowly, some in wheelchairs, others with limps. A fake cargo door clanged shut behind them, and the room went dark.
Huge, surging waves appeared on a wraparound video screen. The distant rumble of artillery echoed through speakers embedded in the walls.
The men watched the video loop stoically as they relived the invasion, their eyes squinting at the pale blue light of the ocean. This time, no one "cracked up," unlike some who, Mack Drake remembered, collapsed in terror before landing on the beach.
"The waves were 10 feet high when you were trying to get out of those Higgins boats," said Drake, 81, as he stepped off the simulator. "You couldn't form close friendships with someone, because you didn't know how long he'd last."
Drake joined the Marines when he was 16 and went on to receive the Silver Star, Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts for wounds he sustained at Guam and Iwo Jima. "The way I look at it, we all did the same stuff over there," Drake said, walking with a slight limp and wearing a red Marine Corps cap and T-shirt.
A Japanese saber on display at the museum reminded him of one he has at home, taken from an officer he killed in close-range combat on Guam. Soon after, Drake was wounded in the neck and face by shrapnel from a grenade explosion, but he recovered and returned to fight, only to be shot through his left lung on Iwo Jima.
"I was lucky," he said, noting that both corpsmen who treated his battlefield wounds were dead the next day.
Drake said the museum has "everything covered. . . . A lot of memories in this place," he said.
But most of the veterans said that after returning home, they learned not to talk or think about the war and what they'd seen in the fight for the Japanese island and its strategic airfields. In 36 days of fighting, there were 25,851 American casualties, and 6,825 U.S. troops lost their lives. Almost all of the island's 22,000 Japanese defenders died.
"Iwo was always a depressing place for me," Tedder said. "When there's so much death around you, when you see bodies stacked like cordwood, you develop an aloofness."
While passing through the museum's life-size dioramas and walk-through bunkers, Tedder thought of John Hubacher. "He was my tentmate, my close friend. We went from island to island together."
The 4th Separate Wire Platoon was responsible for stringing up and repairing communication lines and phone wires, and the unit would often work at night under enemy fire. In the course of the 36-day battle for control of the island, Hubacher was killed one night in a mortar strike.
"Ol' John would have been a minister if he'd lived," Tedder said. "And I came off that island without a scratch."
For veteran Al Gentile, Iwo Jima also reminded him of Hubacher, because Gentile was a few yards away when the mortar hit. "I got shrapnel through my backpack, in my blanket roll, but it didn't touch me," he said. "That was the closest I came to being wounded."
At one point in the tour, Gentile rounded a corner and faced the American flag that appeared in the iconic Joe Rosenthal photograph that became the model for the Marine Corps War Memorial, better known as the Iwo Jima memorial. "That's the flag I saw," he said. He had landed on Iwo Jima on the third or fourth day of fighting, just before a group of Marines climbed Mount Suribachi to plant the flag. "Everyone took heart when we saw it up there," said, Gentile, 82. "That was amazing."
After the World War II exhibit, the group made it through the Korean War section. But by then, the veterans had been walking for nearly two hours and hadn't even reached the Vietnam War.
They went upstairs to the mess hall-style cafeteria for lunch, where the platoon's two designated jokers, Mike Ferenchik, 83, and Mike Saborse, 82, drank Budweisers and lavished marriage proposals on female members of the cafeteria staff.
Ferenchik offered up his friend Saborse to buss cafeteria employee Charlene Jones, who laughed it off.
"That's a nice smile," Ferenchik said. "If you smile a lot, you'll always stay young."
Ellie