I was a corporal with the Fifth Amphibian Tractor Battalion, assigned to the Fourth Marine Division. At Saipan, I landed on Red Beach 2 in my amtrac, and I was told to stay there and follow the orders of some infantry lieutenant. Once we unloaded and were there for a few minutes, he says let’s go, and we drove right down the beach, down by the sugar mill. We were the first and only ones to travel for at least a mile-and-a-half along that beach, and we were under fire the whole way. So, anyway, we went down there and there’s that sugar mill in ruins, and we were helping out any way we could since we had nothing else to do. We were under heavy shelling, and we had an artillery attack, and we were helping with the wounded.
But of course mortars and stuff were landing all around, and there was one mortar that landed very close, killing the lieutenant as I was standing there talking to him. He saved me because he took everything from that mortar explosion, and I was saved because I was standing on the other side of him. The first three times I got wounded on Saipan were rather trivial, but the fourth one stopped me. A piece of shrapnel went in the back of my leg high, and didn’t come out. It protruded through the skin in front of my leg. It traveled a good distance because it went in high and ended up low.
Three or four days later, aboard the transport, the doctor took it out. They measured it, and it was a half inch by three-quarters of an inch. It was a piece of shrapnel that went clear through my leg. It just tore up the muscle, but luckily it didn’t hit bone. I could still walk, but I knew I shouldn’t be walking. I found that when a guy gets wounded and no bones are broken, you don’t hardly even feel it for about three or four hours. I was evacuated out to the ship before I even began to feel the pain. I went back to Pearl Harbor to the hospital, and then I went back to Saipan. We got new equipment and new replacements, and then we were ready to go to Iwo Jima.
On Iwo we hauled the Twenty-fourth Regiment in to the beach. I came ashore in the fourth wave. I think it was around 9:30 or so. We unloaded the troops and went back out and brought ammunition in on the second trip. I landed way on the far right of the invasion beaches. We came up and swung around and went up by a big rock formation called Turkey Knob. There was a big concrete blockhouse up there about two or three stories high. It must have been about sixty feet square. I can’t swear to that, but as I remember back it was about that. I saw a 16-inch naval shell hit that damned blockhouse, and it didn’t do a thing. It exploded, but it didn’t hurt that blockhouse a bit.
We had 129 LVTS in our battalion, and after the first five days we only had 9. We’d land okay and unload, and then we’d go back out to the LST, and from there we were told, okay, go to someplace else, get this ammunition or that ammunition or something, and take it back in to the beach. So we did that a few times, and by then most of the day was over. So, on our last trip out to the ship we didn’t go back in because the beach was getting so cluttered that they didn’t want us to add to the clutter. Then they told us to stand by because we may have to go in tomorrow to get the guys out. They were seriously thinking of withdrawing, pulling them off. But they didn’t.
So the next day we got more ammunition and hauled that in, and brought wounded out, and we could do that as long as our tractor was still in one piece. Our tractor kept going for about three days, and then we got two 37 mm hits. One went through the oil reservoir, and that obviously put us out of business. Amazingly it ran for quite a while after we were hit, but the smoke was pouring out. If it could have been fixed we would have fixed it, but it just finally stopped, and we got out with our machine guns.
After we got out of the tractor we became infantry. We had three machine guns, and from that point on that’s what we did. Some people ask, “You were trained to handle an amphibious tractor. How could you suddenly be in charge of a machine gun squad?” Well, all Marines are trained on everything. In theory, every Marine could do just about every other Marine’s job. I handled flamethrowers, bazookas, everything.
We had a hell of a time on that island. After you don’t sleep for three or four days at a time, you’re too numb to get scared; you’re just numb. You then respond from training, your mind is gone, everything is gone, but you are still doing your job as a result of your training. No way could you sleep because they’d jump in the foxholes with you. They were good infiltrators at night and, I mean, you sleep, you die! That’s all there was to it. I went four days without sleep. We were physically fit, but we were numb and groggy. On other islands you could pair off and one guy could sleep while the other kept a lookout, but not on Iwo Jima. I must say that I had a lot of respect for the Japanese troops before, but right there those guys were good, dedicated—they were real warriors.
So the fighting was almost the same every day. We’d start moving forward, and then someone would get shot. So where did the shot come from? Then you just cover each other, you just know you have to get up to that certain point where you get fired on. Then the word is passed, “Give this guy some cover, he’s going to go up.” So everybody around there that had something to shoot was shooting, not indiscriminately, because we only carried eighty rounds of ammunition; we had to measure it off. Say you come up to one cliff with a hundred or so caves. Where’s the shooting going to come from? So, you concentrated on the one cave you were interested in. The others, if somebody gets shot they just get shot. You’d try to get in any way you could, side, front, just any way to get there.
When the flags went up on Suribachi, I saw them both from where I was, even the small one they raised first. Of course, in those days I had 20-15 vision. The guys I was with didn’t say a word; well, in the first place, we were up where we would have been shot if we’d have made a loud noise, but we all felt, well, I don’t know, a thrill, a sense of pride, patriotism, but it wasn’t an exuberant jump up in joy and holler kind of deal.
One day I was creeping forward and I saw a Japanese soldier run into a wooden doorway to a cave, and he closed it behind him. I took a big lump of C4 explosive, and I have to admit I hadn’t worked with it much, and I didn’t know how much to put on this door. So I took a hunk of it and plastered it on the door, wired it up, got back, and blew it up. And I’ll tell you that was quite an explosion! It was pretty obvious that I didn’t really need that much C4 to do the job. It was a much bigger explosion than I’d expected.
So the dust and smoke is clearing, and Japanese money started to flutter down from the sky. I guess that there was a safe or a strongbox behind that door to that cave, and when I blasted the cave it blew open that safe, and it must have had the payroll for the whole island inside. Those Japanese bills were blown all over the island. I picked up a few of the bills and I still have them, and that’s about the only souvenirs I kept from Iwo.
So, I made it all the way through to the end, and my only wound on Iwo was that I got knifed lightly. I went into a cave, stepped over some bodies, and one I stepped over was still alive. He got up behind me, and I was just able to see him move out of the corner of my eye, my peripheral vision, you know, just in time for me to swing around. He hit my hand with his knife, but I had a .45 in my other hand, so I won and he lost.
What can you say? It’s got to be luck or something. But I don’t attribute mine to luck. Because after all, you really don’t have any luck. I remember it to this day that about the fourth or fifth day on Iwo I’m laying on the beach. It took us three days to get from the beach to that airfield. And I’m on this beach and artillery shells are crossing right overhead, and way into the middle of the night it got to worrying me that they were going to collide right over my head. You know, what a stupid thing to worry about. But it got to bothering me, and I really got scared. All of a sudden—I didn’t ask, it just came—a big booming voice from up there someplace said, “You are chosen, do not fear,” and I relaxed, and I haven’t been afraid since. I’m not a nonreligious person, I’m just kind of in the middle. But after that, every time we were asked to do something, which was constantly, nobody would want to do it unless I was with them. They thought I was going to come through. I still have this feeling. For some reason, I can’t explain it, but whenever we were asked to do something they would say, well, Hastings has to go with us. And when I got all the way to the end, and I was one of the few guys who hadn’t been carried off that island dead or wounded, I left there and never wanted to see that place again.
Well, I said I never wanted to go back, but—and it wasn’t my idea—I ended up going back to Iwo for the fiftieth anniversary trip, and I’ll tell you, I didn’t like being there. A couple of my buddies called and asked me to go with them, guys who I had been with there, and I says, bullshit, why do you want to go back there for? Well, okay, they wanted to go back, so I said, okay, I’ll go with you. And I must say I only went because the guys wanted me to be there with them. I would never have gone back on my own. And immediately, as soon as my friend made the call and I said yes and hung up the phone, I started having flashbacks. Every day, once or twice a day, something would just happen or I’d see something bad, something I’d seen on Iwo. It could be at home or anyplace else, and, boom, I’d get a flashback. It would be a flash of something dangerous or somebody getting killed, or something like that. And this was fifty years later. In fact I hadn’t had problems for years until the subject came up to go back to Iwo.
I did have problems for about a year when I first got back from the Pacific. It was like bad dreams, or loud noises or something like that and I’d duck into the gutter or into a doorway, you know, just crazy things. I went immediately into college, and they kept having beer parties and stuff, and, boy, I would go. While I’d be there, I would have a sudden feeling that I’ve got to get out of there, these people are jammed up too much, they’re too close together, and it kind of ruined it. You know, you’d get ten or fifteen guys bunched up together on Iwo and you’d get a mortar on top of you. So I got to Iwo for the fiftieth and I had a few flashbacks that day. None of the other guys I went with on that trip had this happen to them. The flashbacks slowly faded after I returned from the Iwo trip, and about a year later they were gone.
People ask me if it wasn’t depressing being in such a bad place with so many bad things happening. But it didn’t depress us. We had a job and knew what to do, and we were trained to do it, and we were in a war.
But then some of the guys who were there did stupid things, and it would have been just as well if they had stayed home. I remember one guy, he had two kids and a wife, and he was a replacement in our unit. He stayed on the LST while the rest of us went ashore with the gear. After three or four days he says, “I want to go in to the beach.” “What the hell for?” was the reply. “I want to get some souvenirs,” he says. “You just stay right where you’re at and we’ll bring you all the souvenirs you want.” So he says, “No, it won’t be like getting them myself. I want to get some for my kids.” Well, there was no talking him out of it, so he rode in with one of the guys to the beach. Lo and behold, he wasn’t there ten minutes before one of those big 16-inch rockets hit that tractor, and nobody ever found a piece of that tractor or anyone that was on it. They were just vaporized. So he got killed and he wasn’t even supposed to be there! Now that’s the kind of thing that depressed me, not the actual combat but the stupid and senseless things that happened. I’m glad I’ll never see that island again.