Courtesy of Fluid Design Group

Iwo Jima

Then he was assigned to go overseas. “My first invasion was Iwo Jima,” he said. “We went in with the first wave.” In another incredible brush with death, he had switched places with someone who seconds later was killed when a piece of shrapnel “cut him in half.” Many Marines became sick at the sight, he said, "because a lot of them had never seen combat or blood.”

But this was only the beginning. He was part of a contingent of 36 corpsmen and 2,500 combat Marines. Of that group, only six corpsmen and 88 Marines were still alive when they left Iwo Jima 10 days later.

“The Japanese were very intelligent,” he said. “At the north end of the island was a rock quarry on high ground. They had all their artillery at the rock quarry on the north and at Mount Suribachi on the south. They had pinpointed their mortars about every 5 to 10 feet to where a shell would drop. It was just terrible. Almost every one of those bullets that shot our Marines went through the head. They were just as good at shooting as our Marines, and maybe some of them were better.”

Curnow took a bullet above the knee, a flesh wound that “stung like a bee sting,” he said. “As I whipped down to see what had hit me, right behind my head as I’m going down came a mortar shell.” It flew past where his head had been seconds before and hit a group of Marines. Another brush with death.

Losing his best friend in Iwo Jima still gets to him. Byron Alfred Dary had survived the Omaha Beach invasion in 1944 but predicted he would not live through Iwo Jima. On the boat together leaving San Pedro, California, en route to what would be one of the bloodiest battles of the war, Dary told him, “I’ll never see the lights of those fair shores again.” And he never did. “I have one deep regret in my life,” Curnow said. Even though he was able to mail his friend’s belongings to his parents, “I never had an opportunity to go back to Darien, Wisconsin, and talk to his folks.” From his voice, you can tell it still weighs on him.

After the tide turned in the fighting on the island, Curnow witnessed the famous raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima. “Everybody could see it being raised,” he said. “There were 1,300 ships, and every one of them rang their bell and blew their horns.” Marines on the ground shot off bullets. “The sound roared through our bodies, shaking our insides . . . for maybe 5 to 10 minutes. It made me cry. We knew we were winning.”

Amid all the memories of death, there are other stories he prefers to talk about. “After coming off Iwo Jima, we went back on our ships. At that point, we had a lot of casualties that came aboard our ship,” he said. Makeshift hospital rooms had been set up throughout the ship. “I was sitting at the desk in the sick bay doing some book work, and a wounded Marine in his bunk behind me was as cheerful as could be and said, ‘I can’t see what it is, and am I ever hungry.’” Curnow turned to look at him and saw that he had lost both eyes from a bullet wound. He couldn’t see what he was trying to eat. “I dang near cried. How could a guy be that cheerful after he’s had his eyes blown out and knew he’d be blind for the rest of his life? So I fed him first.”