When the fliers tilted their wings in salute to the men below and circled around for their home carriers, the ships let go with a fresh bombardment. And JJ felt the mood on the LVT change. The coxswain at the helm got a scowl on his face, and pointed the craft toward the island. On all sides of them, the LVTs were forming lines. Waves. “Showtime,” JJ told his men, quietly, as the craft picked up speed, heading in.

Red Beach 1 was their designated landing location: an incline steep enough it would have made a great sledding hill back behind somebody’s barn in Wisconsin. But when he stepped out of the crashing surf and onto the island, the black protean sand here gave way under JJ’s feet and sent him sliding back down. He scrambled up as quick as he could, volcanic dust and the stench of anxious men filling his nostrils. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw countless Marines struggling up the incline behind him, as far down the beach as he could see in either direction, as thick on the sand as fleas on an old hound. And to his left, through the haze of smoke obscuring the blue sky, loomed the giant black hump of Mount Suribachi.

There, lying on his belly in the black sand, peering up over the edge of the incline, he had a feeling of final wholeness, of the purest clarity. He felt then that the end was near. He thanked God that he’d lived to fight this long.

They advanced, dug in, taking some small arms fire. Nothing they couldn’t handle.

Then the Japs ambushed them with everything they had: machine gun bursts, mortar fire, from concealed positions the Marines had already passed. JJ was conscious only of dropping to the ground, but when he looked, his left leg to mid-thigh was gone, the stump of it a gory mess. It was perplexing that he had not been immediately killed, but as it was he did not imagine he had much longer to live.

Bertinelli dumped sulfa powder on what was left of his leg and tied him a tourniquet, and together they stayed in the shell crater they’d fallen into, fighting off the enemy with the rest of their battalion, who were crouched nearby in similar craters. JJ took stock of his men when he could. His vision was clear except when the sweat off his brow leaked into his eyes. His shooting was accurate. He wanted to make something stick, in his last moments. The Marines held their ground.