Rapid Travel Chai

The vets were respondent. Woody Williams, last surviving Medal of Honor recipient from the battle, was beaming to the gather crowds. A Navajo code talker was signing a commemorative map. Other vets entered, all nine decades young.

Also in this series:

• Packed for the Iwo Jima 70th Anniversary Charter
• Cabotage and Getting to Guam on a Delta Award
• Best Amenity Kit Ever – The United Iwo Jima 70th Anniversary
• Iwo Jima 70th Anniversary Banquet in Guam
• On Iwo Jima My Camera Froze and My iPhone Reset
• Iwo Jima 70th Anniversary United Charter Flight
• Iwo Jima 70th Anniversary: The Island

A day ahead of the Iwo Jima 70th Anniversary Commemoration on the island itself, a symposium was held at host hotel Outrigger Guam, under the auspices of the Iwo Jima Association of America.

Lieutenant General Lawrence F. Snowden, USMC (ret.) is the leading light that did the painstaking diplomatic work in the 1980s for the first Reunion of Honor on the island, held for the 40th, and continues to this day. He was wounded on Iwo Jima, evacuated to Guam, and convinced the doctor to allow him to return to his men on the island. Military Historic Tours, lead by founder Colonel Warren H. Wiedhahn, USMC (Ret) does the complicated logistics work for the events.

Gen. Snowden emphasized in his greeting the positive state of current US-Japanese relations, calling it the strongest bilateral relationship the US has today. He told the audience the time for hate is past and talked through his own journey to reach that perspective. Later in the day, P51 pilot Jerry Yellen made his case for repurposing V-J Day into an international day of peace.

The symposium launched into a comprehensive overview of the Iwo Jima’s history, and the battle, from scholar and National Parks ranger James Oelke Farley. It was a great help in placing the context of the upcoming visit.

Next was a representative of the American Battle Monuments Commission that discussed their work, the cemeteries they main, and the winding bureaucratic road the cemeteries and fallen have travailed. As cemeteries shifted and were consolidated to Hawaii and Philippines, some remains were interred and exhumed as many as five times. The cemeteries on Iwo Jima are remembered now by memorial markers. I have visited a number of the AMBC’s sites and plan (this week!) to visit more. Anyone visiting Hawaii should, after a Pearl Harbor visit, head up the hills to the VA cemetery at Punchbowl and the ABMC’s memorial.

The afternoon panel featured several veterans sharing their experiences at the battle, the years since, and the experience of returning to the black sands. In a first, heavily covered by Japanese media, a surviving Japanese defender appeared along with author Don King, who features him on the cover of A Tomb Called Iwo Jima. . He had been badly wounded and his life was spared by an American solider whose military dog had located the wounded. This gentleman (I did not catch his name) awoke in a military hospital in Guam.

The symposium at a close, it was time to collect our charter boarding passes from the United staff at the hotel and to prepare for the evening’s banquet. The vets led the way, as they have for 70 years.