Bill Bennett: “on Veterans Day, it is fitting to pause, remember and recognize the contributions of those who have defended America…”

“on Veterans Day, it is fitting to pause, remember and recognize the contributions of those who have defended America throughout our history. Today, I would also like to recognize a man who risked his life to save his fellow marines in the horrific World War II battle for Iwo Jima. Historian David Kennedy, in his book ``Freedom from Fear,'' describes the battle of Iwo Jima: The twenty-one-thousand-man Japanese garrison had honeycombed Iwo's basaltic ridges and Suribachi's ashen flanks with reinforced concrete-and-steel bunkers and stuffed them with artillery, antiaircraft guns, mortars, and machine guns. They were so well and deeply entrenched that seventy-two days of aerial bombing and three days of naval shelling barely scratched them. At first light on February 19 two divisions of marines, each man carrying up to a hundred pounds of gear, stepped from their amphtracs onto Iwo's beaches and sank to their boot-tops in the powdery mixture of sand and volcanic ash. Vehicles, including tanks and half-tracks, soon bogged down in the quicksand-like topping of pumice and cinder that blanketed the island. From the Japanese bunkers and pillboxes a hellish rain of shells and bullets pelted the beaches, where the marines seemed to be moving in slow motion through the sucking sand . . . The battle ground on . . . with unmatched barbarity. Japanese soldiers stubbornly refused to surrender.…”