"John Bartlett, my brother, was in the 3rd Marines. He didn't talk very often about what he went through or what he saw.
He said when they landed on Iwo Jima, that where they went ashore they couldn't dig fox holes as the volcanic ash was so deep it would just fill up again. They had to stack dead Marines up for protection from machine gun bullets. As he was crawling from one stack of bodies to the next and his buddy behind him, a bullet went through his helmet strap, cutting it in two, and hit his buddy in the face.
[He had to put his buddy in front of him, while he could try to do something with his helmet.*]
It was years before he told us this. He had nightmares about killing Japanese. Only way to wake him up was to strike a match in his face."
*Ms. Bartlett Tackitt originally scratched through this line in the note, feeling that she could not swear to this part of the story.
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