Malcolm “Jimmy” Keep admits that, deep down, he really doesn’t want to go back. Not to that sulfurous little spit of an island — that place where the volcanic-ash surface teemed with lice, and the tunnel-laced underground was crawling with enemy soldiers eager to kill him.
It was 70 years ago today that Keep, a scrawny but tough 18-year-old kid from South Memphis, made his first trip to Iwo Jima, landing with the Fourth Marine Division. He already had endured fierce combat on Guam and Saipan, but so savage was the fighting on Iwo that he usually refers to the island by other, unprintable names.
“It was a slaughter ...,” Keep said of the legendary five-week World War II battle that began Feb. 19, 1945, and claimed the lives of nearly 7,000 Marines. “It was a twenty-four-seven situation of kill or be killed.”
Now 88 and living in Raleigh, Keep is the only known surviving veteran of the battle who lives in Shelby County, said Diane Hight, founder and president of the group Forever Young Senior Veterans.
And he’s getting ready to return to the island.
Hight’s group is raising money — it’ll take $10,000, with $6,000 still to go — to fund the trip by Keep and his son Mickey, 67. They will join 60-70 other Marine veterans for a 70th anniversary gathering on the island next month, flying to Hawaii, then Guam, where the two will stay before making a one-day shuttle trip to Iwo.
“He deserves it so much,” Hight said. “He’s been through so much.”
Keep said he’s going mostly for his son’s sake. Like many World War II vets, he spent much of his postwar life suppressing memories of combat.
“He just started talking about this stuff three or four years ago,” said Mickey Keep.
As horrific as his experiences during the war were, Keep’s childhood often wasn’t much better. Born in Orlando, Florida, he moved with his family to Memphis while he was an infant. His mother died from tuberculosis when he was young, and that, coupled with his poor relationship with his father, resulted in Keep being raised by his grandmother and her live-in boyfriend.
In school, he never made it past sixth grade, a consequence of his breaking a leg while playing football. Instead of returning to school after the injury, Keep took a job paying 25 cents an hour at a lumber company. It was during the Depression, and the $11 a week he earned helped the household greatly.
But the sweatshop conditions of the plant made him seek an escape. At 17, with his father signing his consent, Keep joined the Marines. It was July 1943, and the war was going full-bore.
“My grandmother had a fit,” he said.
Standing only a shade over 5-foot-5, and weighing just 132 pounds, Keep didn’t cut an imposing profile. But his toughness became evident during a series of boxing matches among recruits in which he took on, and eventually beat, bigger men.
During training, Keep was assigned to reconnaissance duty and paired with another little guy, Charlie Cirulla of Massachusetts. The two men fought together through the remainder of the war, experiencing intense combat first on Guam, then Saipan.
It was on Saipan that Keep manned a 50-caliber machine gun during one of the infamous banzai charges in which Japanese soldiers threw themselves at Marine lines in human-wave assaults. “It was the bloodiest thing you ever saw,” he said. “The damn fools wouldn’t quit coming.”
Afterward, a “spit-and-polish” lieutenant walked by and congratulated Keep because his “pile of bodies was bigger” than those of the other Marine defenders. The compliment enraged Keep.
“I was going to kill that son of a bitch. I could still hear them (the Japanese) scream. I could hear myself scream. Something in me snapped.”
As the assault on Iwo Jima began, Keep and Cirulla were ordered to drive an amphibious tank across the narrow neck of the island below Mount Suribachi to scout the beach on the opposite shore. But an enemy shell disabled the vehicle, forcing the two to dash across the island on foot.
“Every Japanese soldier ever born was shooting at us,” Keep said.
Somehow, neither man was hit. From that point on, other Marines called them “rain-walkers” — a name suggesting that if they could run through intense enemy fire without getting hit, surely they could walk through rain without getting wet.
Keep and Cirulla saw other Marines raise both U.S. flags — the initial flag and the second, larger one immortalized in the iconic photo — on Suribachi.
But the battle was far from won. The Marines still had to fight their way down the length of the island, and casualties were mounting
“What was so bad about Iwo is that, early on, Marines would fall dead from gunshot wounds, and no one knew where it was coming from,” Keep said.
“Turns out, there were tunnels under there — huge tunnels, you could drive a car through them.”
As recon men, Keep and Cirulla were among those charged with the task of clearing the tunnels. Every other day for about two weeks, they descended into the darkness to flush out the enemy.
The close-quarter fighting was beyond terrifying. Once, when Keep and Cirulla neared a corner in a tunnel, they knew there were many Japanese troops on the other side — they could smell them. “I imagine they could smell us, too,” Keep said.
The two Marines lobbed grenades, ricocheting them off the tunnel walls. The Japanese — entire squad of 15 or so men — responded by charging at Keep and Cirulla, only to be mowed down.
At some point during the fighting on Iwo, a Navy photographer took an image of Keep helping a wounded Marine back to the beach. Keep remembers it well, saying he was giving the man — an officer — an earful. “Because he was crying like a baby, saying he was scarred for life. I said, ‘You’re getting off this rock. I’ll trade places with you.’”
After the battle, he and Cirulla were sent to Hawaii to prepare for the invasion of Japan — an operation rendered unnecessary by the dropping of the atomic bombs and the subsequent Japanese surrender.
Afterward, as the two sat on a beach in Maui, Cirulla asked Keep a strange question: Was he sorry the war was over? Keep said he was, and Cirulla echoed that sentiment.
“We had gotten used to the killing, and I guess looked forward to it,” Keep said.
After the war, Keep became an electrician and raised a family, including a son and daughter. His first marriage ended in divorce, and he remarried. Both his ex-wife and second wife are now deceased, and he lost his daughter to cancer.
He had put the war behind him. As close as he was to Cirulla, who also is now deceased, Keep never got back in touch, fearing that if he did “the war would come back to me.”
Mickey Keep said his dad probably would be more interested in going to a Memphis Grizzlies game than returning to Iwo. He’s a huge fan, watching every game on TV, and loves the team’s Marine-like toughness.
“They’re men,” the elder Keep said of the team. “They’re not afraid to bust your ass to get to the basket, especially (Zach) Randolph. Randolph’s my man.”
As much as he tried to forget the war, Keep said, “Now that I’m older, it’s all there again.”
The prospect of returning to Iwo raises mixed emotions. “They’re not going to make me go back in those tunnels, are they?” he only half-kiddingly asks his son.
If there’s a place he’d really like to go, it’s Japan. Keep said he’d visit the Shinto shrines of Japan’s indigenous faith.
“I don’t believe in their gods,” he said. “But I’d like to go to their gods and ask for forgiveness, because I killed a lot of people.”
———
©2015 The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tenn.)
Visit The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tenn.) at http://bit.ly/1MAdjzu
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
No comments:
Post a Comment