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November 11, 2011; Written by Kathleen Lavey and Published by The Lansing State Journal Tweet
Tyrus Stine had just started 10th grade in September 1943 at Mecosta High School when he got a piece of news that would change his life.
A family friend came to school to tell him his brother, Daniel, had been killed in Sicily while fighting in World War II.
Tyrus was a farm kid who already knew how to use a gun. In his mind, there was only one possible response:
"I dropped everything and went to Big Rapids to the military recruiting station," he said.
Stine joined the U.S. Marine Corps, beginning a three-year odyssey that would take him to California, Hawaii, Japan and other Pacific islands.
Stine would train as a paratrooper, learn to use a machine gun and come ashore with the third wave of troops to invade the Japanese stronghold on the island of Iwo Jima.
He still finds it tough to talk about that bloody, monthlong siege that killed 228 of the 240 men in his unit.
Stine listened to one soldier call for his mother as he lay dying.
Winced as a solider carrying a flamethrower was shot, igniting the fuel pack on his back.
Volunteered for a dangerous trek to get more ammunition.
"There are so many things that happen out there. You can't tell it all," said Stine, 86, a retired General Motors Co. worker who lives on a Vermontville-area farm with his wife, Laurene.
But his family, which includes four children and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren, knows his story is unique and important.
They've helped him work on preserving as many of his memories as possible, to give that long-ago war captured mostly in black-and-white photos a living name and face.
Stine's son, Wayne, and daughter-in-law, Pam, recruited her uncle, Arlen Bates, a former Marine himself, to conduct a 90-minute interview recorded on DVD. Bates and his wife also created a photo album and history of Stine's involvement in the war.
A niece initiated the effort to get Stine's service medals, which finally arrived this fall, along with copies of his service records from the U.S. military archive.
"He went through a lot," Wayne Stine said.
About 2 million of the 16 million U.S. men and women who fought in World War II are still alive, but they are dying at a rate of nearly 700 a day. That makes efforts like the Stine family's even more important, said Geneva Wiskemann, secretary of the Michigan Oral History Association.
Personal stories add a dimension that official histories sometimes lack.
"This is where you not only can fill in the gaps of history, but the soul of people comes through," she said. "The inflection, the way they string words together, the words they use and the things they do not say. Silences speak."
The U.S. Library of Congress encourages people across the nation to interview veterans — not just of World War II but all wars — and to record their stories. People who sign up with the Veterans History Project also can get a kit to help them conduct and record their interviews.
The U.S. objective on Iwo Jima was to capture three airfields and drive out the Japanese, whose soldiers were encamped in bunkers, caves and tunnels throughout the rocky island, looking down at the beach from the vantage point of Mount Suribachi.
Stine jumped out of a landing craft and waded ashore on Feb. 19, 1945, his team charged with the responsibility for making its way north, right up the middle of the island.
"You just didn't think about what it was going to be like," he said of that yard-by-yard journey. "You just had to keep going. You had to protect the guys who were coming behind you."
Troops did whatever they could to keep the battle going, lighting the sky at night with tracer bullets so the machine gunners would have enough light to shoot, using tanks to shoot flames into caves to drive out enemy soldiers, pulling each other out of the line of fire.
Stine matter-of-factly described the night he got a chunk of shrapnel in his hip.
"One night we were throwing hand grenades at each other," he said.
Stine made his way back to a medical tent, got patched up and returned to battle.
Stine was a witness to history as he watched fellow Marines raising the flag atop Mount Suribachi, an image that became an icon of U.S. victory in the Pacific.
Stine still thinks about the men he fought with from time to time.
He unfolds a photo of all 240 men in his original unit, a long, wide picture with rows of seemingly identical GIs.
All men wear the same neat khaki uniforms and caps, but every face is different, full of life, full of potential.
Stine is among just 12 of those from his unit who survived Iwo Jima and is the only one of that group still alive now.
"I guess I was one of the luckiest guys in the world to have made it through," he said.