FEBRUARY 23, 1945
Mac Owens notes this date in history: This is the 60th anniversary of the raising of Old Glory on the summit of Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima. It marked the beginning of the end of World War II's Pacific theatre.
The invasion of the tiny, nearly useless island by the US Marines had begun four days earlier. The miniature war to take that island would drag on for weeks. Most of the Marines who raised that flag never left the island alive.
In 1996 and 1997 I went to Iwo Jima, on assignment with the US Air Force. The photos here are video captures from footage I shot on Hi-8 during the second trip. Click on the thumbnails to see larger versions.
Iwo Jima is about two miles across and about 7 miles long at its longest. It's out in the middle of nowhere and stinks. The name Iwo Jima means "sulphur island" in Japanese. It gets that name from the little sulphurous jets that blast yellow, foul gases from the island's volcanic heart. 
During the battle, most of Iwo Jima's vegetation was burned off by bombs, flamethrowers and other associated violence. While the trees and grasses have grown back, the island still bears the evidence of battle. There are still cannon, pill boxes, downed airframes and shipwrecks strewn about. Bullet casings can still be found on the beaches and in the jungles. One downed Zero fuselage, about a hundred yards from the famous black sand beach stained red with American blood, served as the Marine Corps' HQ for the first few days of the battle. In the center of the island is a gigantic sinkhole. It is full of American and Japanese military hardware left over from the battle. After the war it was no longer needed, and it was too expensive to move it somewhere else, so the military just pushed it all into that hole.
The Imperial Japanese troops didn't build much in the way of infrastructure on the island prior to the battle. They had a couple of airstrips, which were the main reason we needed to take the island. Nearly everything else, the Japanese built below ground in the natural caves. Their hospital, their command headquarters and their sentry posts were mostly in these caves. Temperatures down in those caves can reach more than 120 degrees, but that is where many of the Japanese troops met their end, either by cave-in, grenade or flamethrower attack. When I was last on Iwo, in February 1997, I explored several of those caves. In one, we found a boot and a gas mask left behind in a cave that still bears the marks of flames on the walls. As of that trip, about once a year some explorer, usually either an American sailor or a Japanese military member, finds a skeleton.
Today, Iwo Jima is a Japanese air base and a training site for US Navy pilots. Iwo Jima is sufficiently remote that at night it can be darkened enough to resemble an aircraft carrier, so our pilots can practice night landings as though they are on a cruise. There may be no wilder feeling on earth than standing next to a runway in the pitch of night with an F-14 bearing down on you to simulate landing on a ship. But that is a common feeling on Iwo Jima. We fought a war there against Japan 60 years ago, but we go there to train with them now.
Iwo Jima is a useless little speck of land. Someday its sleeping volcano will roar back to life and wipe out most of what is currently there, including the scars of the battle fought there. But we should never forget the uncommon valor that was a common virtue among the Marines during that fight. They raised the flag. They won. The world became a more free place.