The Last Dawn (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | Carl Williams | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

The island was declared secure. The last darkness did not agree. They met it standing.

March 26, 1945. The day Iwo Jima is officially declared secured. At four that morning, hundreds of Japanese survivors rise from the gorge country and drive into the tents of pilots, clerks, and service troops just told the fighting was over. Iwo Jima's last battle falls on the men the war had dismissed, and the men the country dismissed longest meet it standing.

First Lieutenant Harry Martin of the 5th Pioneer Battalion, the one officer on the island walking his own line at three in the morning, holds his sector through the worst of it, goes back twice into overrun ground for his wounded, and leads the counterattack that breaks the enemy's final charge, dying in the leading of it. The 36th Marine Depot Company, which knew him as the one officer who signed their work without re-measuring it, is asked for by name to bury him. They do, and call his roll the way they have called every roll on this island. Correct.

Then the guns stop, and the harder war begins, the one for a country's word. On July 26, 1948, three years and four months to the day after that dark morning, President Truman signs Executive Order 9981 and orders the armed forces desegregated. A young Marine who once knelt on a troopship deck holding strangers' keepsakes is a preacher by then, and preaches that coincidence of dates for the rest of his life. That same year, the promise made at every graveside, received in trust, to be called for, comes due, and the dead of Iwo start coming home.

This is how thirty-six days ended, and how a reckoning began.

The island was called secure. They were the ones still standing guard when it was not.