Despite 81 years since the island of Iwo Jima was declared secure — and several years since these two Marines last saw one another — the first thing out of their mouths wasn’t sentimental, it was trash talk.
“Hey, get outta that chair,” barked the 101-year-old Don Graves. “Sitting in that chair with your arms folded.”
“I’m freezing!” rejoined William “Billy” Byrd, now 100.
“He looks like he’s been through battle right now,” Graves continued.
The two Marines, part of the 2nd Battalion, 28th Marine Regiment, 5th Marine Division that was famously tasked with capturing Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima, had been flown into Washington, D.C., to serve as Honorary Grand Marshals for the National Memorial Day Parade on Monday.
Time was superfluous to the men who commenced their ribbing mere seconds upon spotting one another.
Graves, a native of Detroit, Michigan, quit high school and joined the Marine Corps in 1942 at the age of 17.
“It was always the Marine Corps,” he told photographer D. Clarke Evans in 2018. “My dad was in the Corps.”
Graves noted that he was the only flame thrower in the 2nd Battalion to survive the battle.
“We had 335 Marines going in; 18 came off,” said Graves, adding the sobering statistic.
He was among the third wave of Marines that came ashore on Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945, equipped with a 72-pound flamethrower strapped to his back and a .45-caliber pistol on his hip.
“On the beach, we knew this wasn’t going to be easy; we couldn’t move, we couldn’t get up. Guys were getting killed. Every time they’d go over the top, they’d drop,” Graves said. “I was on the beach at least two hours. It took us three days to go 540 feet to Suribachi — inch by inch, foot by foot, shell hole by shell hole.”
Graves, who after the war went into the ministry, told Evans that he found God in the volcanic sands out in the Pacific.
“I lay on the beach at Iwo. Nowhere to go, I saw what was happening. I was scared. I put my face in the sand and said, ‘God I don’t know much about you, but if you can do for me what people tell me you can, I will serve you the rest of my life.’”
Byrd, a Mississippi native, enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1943 at the age of 18. One of seven children to parents of sharecroppers, Byrd hoped to expand his horizons by joining the Corps.
Byrd, like Graves, was just 19 years old when he found himself fighting on Iwo Jima.
“I was right on the lines,” Byrd told the Clarion Ledger in 2015. “I was so lucky.”
“The only thing we thought about was going home,” Byrd recalled to a local Mississippi outlet in 2019. “And after I got back home a couple of years, I regretted that I didn’t get their addresses and phone numbers.”
And while it took nearly a century to connect, the Marine was on hand Monday to watch as Graves belted out “God Bless America” at the National Memorial Day Parade.
One can only imagine the ribbing after that.
Claire Barrett is an editor and military history correspondent for Military Times. She is also a World War II researcher with an unparalleled affinity for Sir Winston Churchill and Michigan football.
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