JACK LUCAS AND D. K. DRUM - Indestructible

I t is often said that the true heroes of war are the ones who dont come back. In the terrible Battle of Iwo Jima, America lost 6,821 such heroes. But for the hand of God, Jack Lucas would have been one of them. During some of the most intense fighting on that sulfur island, on D day plus one, two grenades rolled into Lucass trench. Without hesitation, the seventeen-year-old threw himself on one and pulled the second underneath his body, absorbing a deadly blast with his own flesh and bone. Though he saved the three Marines who were with him, he did much more than that. By that act Jack Lucas exemplified with his own blood and grit the spirit of sacrifice that won the war in the Pacific. All Americans should know his story; our foes should contemplate it.

Jacks life was not unlike my own. We both grew up during the Depression as middle-class kids in a small town, though my experience was spent in Kansas and his in North Carolina. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor we both knew it was our destiny to answer our nations call. I was a college freshman whose biggest concerns were planning the next fraternity party and finding a date for Saturday night. Jack, on the other hand, was still being told what time to go to bed, and his biggest plan was graduating eighth grade.

Though I knew it was inevitable I would serve, I pondered the time of my enlistment. Jack was ready to join the Marines while the bombs were still falling on Pearl Harbor. It took him almost nine months to wrangle his way past the bureaucracy that should have kept him home, entering service four months before I signed up.

While I was fighting Nazis in Italy, Jack was fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. Both of us witnessed a staggering loss of young American lives. Our own lives were forever changed by grievous personal injuries suffered in combat.

Jack and I know the horror of feeling life draining from our bodies as we lay on the field of battle, trapped in a dull haze and comforted only by morphine. We are given only one body, and when it is broken in service to others, we have given a most precious gift. Jack and I would learn to write left-handed, athletics would forever be out of the question, and our internal injuries would require a lifetime of attention. We were fortunate; at least we would have a lifetime.

Jack and I have looked over the edge into the darkness that is death and survived to tell of the ghastliness that is war. War is not glamorous. It is ugly business and no one escapes its effects. It cant be explained adequately to someone who has never been there.

Men are never closer than when they are under fire together. In World War II, we were all brothers on the battlefield. As survivors, we are left to remember those who paid the ultimate price. They too are our brothers, a relationship born in battle, baptized in blood, and immortal in spirit. We honor their memory.

From all walks of life they came, from the mountains, prairies, cities, and farms, they joined to serve. Death gave no heed to the privilege of their birth. They laid down their lives for the cause of freedom and for their buddies in the foxhole with them.

I have always felt that what gets people through a physical or emotional crisis is having a foundation of faith in God, believing that life matters and that theres a bigger plan in play than what we can see with our human eyes. In my own memoirs I wrote

[We] need one another to defend one another, to depend on one another. They say every soldier on the front saves every other soldiers life and has his life saved by another soldier nearby.

Thats the fighting mans job. Jack did his job well and, like so many that have served their country, I am proud to call him my brother.