Bill Simpson is a veteran of the Pacific Theater of World War II, where he served as a member of the 4th Division of the United States Marines in the battles of Saipan, Tinian and others before being wounded on Iwo Jima. The following is an edited interview.

I left high school over Christmas vacation, 1942, and joined the Marine Corps. I was 17. My father signed his consent for me to enlist but my mother didn't want me to go. It almost caused them to divorce because of it. I didn't have to go, she said, but I thought I did. I felt like I was doing something important.

We went to the Mariana Islands. Saipan and Tinian, that's where we really got after the Japanese. Then we heard we were going to Iwo.

It all happened within an hour. It was cold, it was dismal, and we landed at the crack of dawn. The island was only eight miles long and five miles wide, but boy the Japanese were dug in. They really had it sewed up tight.

There was absolutely nothing on that beach to prevent the Japanese from counting every one of us. They had the big artillery on the north end of the island and their observers up on Suribachi. Every time we got a group of men landed they'd lambaste us with rocket fire and shells.

We were supposed to land on the right-hand side of the assault wave and advance inland quite a little ways but we never got off the beach. It was coral rock, granulated like chicken grit, this dark grey stuff, you could wiggle a little bit and sink right down into it.

I jumped out with some of my friends and advanced less than a hundred yards when they peppered us with shells. We went up in a V- formation and everybody on my side got hit: in the head, in the stomach, in the leg. I was twenty years old. That was no place for a person to be.

After I was hit, I crawled back down to the water, took my legging off, my sock and my shoe, and dressed my wound. A big LCM (landing craft mechanized) came in there with some tanks on it and dropped the front ramp down. They unloaded their cargo and the lieutenant in charge of the ship ordered me to come aboard.

As I crawled up the ramp, the sailors were all swearing at me to hurry up because they all wanted to get back to deep water. They put me in a metal stretcher, strapped me in good and took me out. I spent the rest of ’45 in the hospital. That was my part in Iwo Jima and my end of the war.

I consider myself one of the lucky ones; so many people left and never came back. I was incapacitated, but not to the point where I couldn’t work. I got discharged December 19, 1945, and came home to snow up to my knees. I got married, had children. We bought this place in 1950.

We put the flags up shortly after we moved in, and they’ve been flying ever since. You’re supposed to take them down at sundown and put them back up at sunrise. That’s protocol, I guess, but I don’t follow it. I fly them 24 hours a day out of respect for all the guys, wounded, still alive, or passed-on. There’s Marines all over the world, so they stay up. They only come down to run up new ones when the sun and the wind wears them out.

Picture yourself down in the ocean and the waves are breaking over your head. That’s what it’s like to remember. It comes over me in waves. I’m all right for a while, then it hits me like yesterday, so hard I can’t talk, even after all these years.

So many of my friends are dead, and a lot of them that died I wonder what the hell they died for. People don’t take pride in their country like they used to. I don’t know. Pride, pride’s worth a lot. It’s hard to explain, but as you get older and lose your friends you’ll know how I feel.

My brother-in-law, he said to me once, “Marines are a different breed,” and he didn’t pass out too many compliments.They say once a Marine, always a Marine, and that’s true, but I have these feelings that are difficult to sort out.

I threw away my 4th Marine Division jacket the other day. I couldn’t get into it and the moths were starting to work on it. It wasn’t anything the kids wanted to keep, so I put it in the dump.