I know I’m here
to talk about Arnold Shapiro and his 1985 Return
to Iwo Jima documentary to be shown at the Fifth Marine Division
Association reunion in Champaign on Oct. 20, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t say
a couple of words about the 17th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. (Rotarian) Tom
Conroy just did that, and it’s all over the news this morning, but I want to
talk about heroes. People have different ideas about what constitutes a hero.
To me, it goes along with the Rotary motto of “service above self,” and is not
just an idle, catch-all motto.
The passengers aboard United Flight 93 who
took charge of the situation after they knew what was happening in New York and
Washington—that the planes had crashed into the World Trade Center Towers and
the Pentagon and believed their plane was headed for the Capitol Building or
the White House and caused the plane to crash into a field near Shanksville,
Penn., giving their own lives to save the Capitol or the White House—were
heroes much like the Iwo Jima veterans who put their lives on the line to win
the battle for island and help win the freedom we now enjoy.
By bringing the reunion here to
Urbana-Champaign for what very well may be the last for these men, now in their
90s, I’d hoped we would give them a reception as they received at last year’s
reunion on the Big Island of Hawai’i where they had trained for Iwo Jima. Everywhere
we went on the island, the group was greeted with appreciation. But the one occasion
that sticks in my mind is the day we went to Parker School in Waimea, where the
Marines used to go for concerts and social events when they had liberty.
As we turned down the street toward
the school, you could see the elementary school children lined along each side
of the street, waving American flags. More than one of these old Marine veterans
had tears rolling down his cheeks at the sight. And when we got off the bus to
go inside for the program, most of the veterans spent several minutes talking
to the kids about how much they appreciated what they were doing and asking the
kids about their lives.
We have a great program planned here
for the 69th annual reunion of the Fifth Marine Division Association (see
schedule in Spring/Summer 2018 Spearhead), and Oscar-winning documentary
filmmaker Arnold Shapiro has helped make it better by giving us, gratis, the
right to show at the Virginia Theatre his 1985 Return to Iwo Jima film, hosted by Marine veteran Ed McMahon, that helped
set up the annual “Reunion of Honor” trip to Iwo Jima where the Americans and
the Japanese, once mortal enemies, came together in peace.
For the record, 6,821 American died
in the 36-day battle, more than 17,000 were wounded, about 21,000 Japanese
died, and a total of 2,251 damaged planes landed on Iwo Jima—the first one while
the battle was still raging on March 4 on the way back to the Marianas from
bombing raids on Japan, saving the lives of 24,761 crew members who would have
otherwise gone down in the ocean and undoubtedly died.
A sign on a sea ration carton at the
entrance to the Fifth Marine Division Cemetery (where the division buried those
killed in action) put the sacrifices of the Iwo Jima veterans in perspective
for those airmen and for the people at home whose freedom was maintained: “When
you go home, tell them, say, we gave all for their tomorrows for all of our
todays.”
Like the passengers on United Flight
93, these men were heroes.
Arnold Shapiro is not a veteran, but
he went to Camp Pendleton, Calif., for an Iwo Jima memorial service in the
early ’80s and met a number of Iwo Jima veterans. He raised the question to
four of them about going back to Iwo Jima. There had been a veteran-organized
trip to Iwo Jima for the 25th anniversary of the battle in 1970 just after the
island had been returned to Japan to strengthen ties between the two countries,
but nothing after that. A few weeks after meeting at Pendleton, a group of the
veterans formed a committee to make the going back a reality and asked Arnold
to write the initial letters to the State Department and others to get the ball
rolling.
For his part in that first official
“Reunion of Honor,” Arnold produced the film that will be shown at the Virginia
Theatre at 1 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 20, during this year’s reunion—no charge
for admission, although we will accept donations to pay the theater rental and
insurance costs. He is coming from his home in California to introduce the film
and participate in a panel discussion with the Iwo Jima veterans afterward.
When Arnold said we could show the
documentary at no cost, I asked him if he would come back to introduce it. He’d
just retired and moved away from L.A. and a 52-year television career in which
he had produced 29 series and nearly 100 documentaries for every broadcast
network and 14 cable channels and said no. Then he called and asked how far
Urbana-Champaign was from Springfield, where he’d like to visit the Abraham
Lincoln sites. The proximity to Springfield made up his mind to attend the
union.
In addition to producing the 1985 documentary,
he raised $30,000 from the John Wayne Foundation via his friend, Michael Wayne
(John’s son), for the monument that sits on the invasion beach, and wrote the
words that are in English facing the ocean where the annual “Reunion of Honor”
is now held annually and written in Japanese facing the interior of the island.
The words Arnold wrote and gave me the OK to use in my novella, Iwo Blasted Again, follow:
“Reunion
of Honor on the Fortieth Anniversary of the Battle of Iwo Jima, American and
Japanese veterans meet again on these same sands, this time in peace and
friendship. We commemorate our comrades living and dead, who fought here with
bravery and honor, and we pray that our sacrifices on Iwo Jima will always be
remembered and never repeated. February 19, 1985, Third, Fourth, Fifth Division
Associations: USMC and the Association of Iwo Jima.”
He told me he’d written that in about 15
minutes and it was the best writing he’d ever done. Of all his work during his
career, he says Iwo Jima is his favorite subject. He has traveled back to Iwo Jima several times for the “Reunion of
Honor” and has often contributed funds for Iwo Jima veterans to make the trip
back to the island. And in addition
to the film we’ll be seeing at the Virginia, Arnold also wrote and produced the
2001 Heroes of Iwo Jima (a 96-minute
documentary hosted by Danville native and Marine veteran Gene Hackman) and wrote
and produced as his final project the 2015 Iwo
Jima From Combat to Comrades (a 55–minute documentary hosted by Ryan
Phillippe) shown on PBS on the Marine Corps birthday Nov. 10, 2015.
For the last one, Arnold asked me to
check the script for military accuracy, and because of his work in prisons with
Scared Straight and other work about
prison life, I asked him to read my prison novel, With the Silent Knowledge, and review it. The review is posted on
Amazon where the book is available.
Before I show the short trailer of Return to Iwo Jima, I want to read a
piece I used in my novella from a Marine you will see in the documentary—you’ll
also see the monument on Iwo Jima. But I got William Norman’s words from the letters
of Dr. Luther Lowrance from Robinson, Ill., a graduate of the University of
Illinois who was treating wounded Iwo Jima veterans in a hospital in Hawaii. I
secured the letters from the doctor’s family for the University of Illinois
Library’s Rare Book Room:
“The sight that met my eyes as I set
foot on the beach is one that I shall never forget,” Norman wrote in the
hospital after he was wounded. “Dead Marines were so thick that we had to
sidestep them in order to move forward. I have withstood heavy enemy bombardment
that lasted all night on Saipan, but never have I seen men who died so
violently. Men were blown to pieces, one leg here, an arm there, and strings of
guts that were several feet long. These men had scarcely set foot on the beach.
But to us, this was a reminder that we would have to fight, and pay in human lives
and blood, for each foot of this barren island.”
Men like William Norman and the Iwo
veterans, like those on Flight 93 who gave their lives to save the seat of our
government, are the real heroes in this world.
While the veterans, families and
friends are in Urbana-Champaign Oct. 16-21, they will also learn about the
Center for Wounded Veterans in Higher Education at the University of Illinois,
the history of the university’s ROTC program and the current Naval ROTC
program; visit the Vermilion County War Museum and the Fischer Theatre in
Danville and the Ernie Pyle Museum in Dana, Ind.; and the Abraham Lincoln Home,
the Tomb and the Presidential Museum in Springfield.
Hope to see you at the Virginia next
month. We also have tickets for the banquet that Rotary member Betsy Hendrick’s
Hendrick House will be catering at the Hyatt Place Hotel—see registration for
banquet in the Spearhead issue. Paul
Lewis, Marine Embassy guard who spent 444 days in captivity during the 1979-81student
revolution in Tehran, will be the keynote speaker, and Art Leenerman, one of 14
remaining survivors of the USS Indianapolis, will be a special guest at both
the film and banquet.
No comments:
Post a Comment