Standing atop Mt. Suribachi on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima, my son Joshua Phillips surprised me by pulling out an American flag adorned with the signatures of surviving Iwo Jima veterans. He tied the flag to a stick and waved it just yards away from the spot where the now iconic flag raisings of 1945 occurred. The wind was blowing furiously and the ledge on which he stood overlooked a pretty drastic precipice which added drama to his private ceremony of thanksgiving.
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I snapped this image from the ledge of Suribachi. You can clearly see the beach where so many thousands of Marines were killed during the invasion. The army divided the beach into color coded regions. The hottest spot during the battle was Green Beach which is the furthest to the bottom of the picture. Colonel Bill Henderson with whom I was traveling hit Green Beach on D-Day. He emphasized over and over that no one was not there can ever really describe or imagine what the fight was like. In addition to Colonel Henderson, several veterans returning to the island for the first time in sixty years with whom I spoke indicated that they never fully appreciated the strategic advantage of Suribachi for Japanese snipers. Standing on the mountain it became pretty clear that those on the beach below were essentially sitting ducks.

Suribachi (like the rest of the island) is full of caves and secret tunnels. More than 1600 rooms were built by the Japanese defenders of the island. Though many of the caves were torched and bulldozed shut by the Americans during the battle, many more remain accessible to this day. Some caves can take you deep below the earth if you are daring enough to negotiate the unlit pathways. (Some from the broader delegation of which we were a part did just this.) Some cave rooms were still full of bullets, bayonets, boots, and other artifacts of the battle. There have been no efforts at preservation or formal recovery. Americans are rarely allowed on the island and what few dozens of Japanese remain to guard the island (which we gave back to the Japanese two decades ago) have not launched any serious recovery efforts.

Justice Phillips stands with his brother Joshua.