硫黄島 (Iwo Jima)

This past weekend, I was lucky enough to go to a place that has great historical significance for Americans... and I guess Japanese. This picture may give you a clue as to where I'm talking about (or you could look at the title of my blog, but that's too easy!).

Or what about...

Yup, Iwo Jima (officially known as "Iwo-to" these days). It's open only to a select few military members, and seeing as I'm part of CVW-5 these days, we use it for "Field Carrier Landing Practice" (FCLP for short) for the non-helicopter squadrons. If you're a n00b like me and have no idea what that means, check out this article for your continual lifelong learning. Since I'm a doctor and not a pilot, I was there to provide medical support. Our clinic was straight out of Catch-22, I swear... like, it was bare bones. Totes.

Those three guys were my lucky (and awesome) corpsman.

I must provide a preface to this blog post. I don't have the maps that explain the different caves so please accept this sword of defeat at your feet for the lack of educational info I'm known for... my internet searching was not helpful since most of it was centered around the battle and not necessarily the modern day island.

My camera almost died from the humidity, so the first picture is very foggy... but I will include it for my dad.

Originally, we wanted to go to Mount Suribachi (the flag raising location) first, but we ended up getting lost. If you realize that Iwo Jima is only about 8 square miles, you'll understand the impressiveness of that last statement. Instead, we found ourselves on Shipwreck Beach, which is a place where reinforced cement ships were placed to create a reef or something like that. Since the tide has gotten so low, it now looks like you're the only survivor in a post-apocalyptic world war.

Next to that beach was a volcanic sulfur pit, so called "Warbler Hell" due to its color (I guess it has the same color as a the Warbler, a Japanese bird). I later heard that someone almost fell into it after the ground gave away, and I felt a little scared that I had gone so close.

Next up was the memorial for the flag raising on the top of Mount Suribachi. It was incredible to see and be present at such an iconic location. There were multiple monuments, one was to the Americans and the rest were to the Japanese.

 I took that one for the corpsman.

From the top you could see Invasion Beach, where the Marines and Seabees first landed. The front wave didn't meet much opposition because General Kuriyabashi wanted to wait until they were all on the beach and then attack. However, the first wave experienced devastating losses from the hidden Japanese.

If you can't tell from the photo, it was freaking hot there. On Invasion Beach, we found one of the old machine guns.

With all that excitement behind us, we then went cave diving. There are hundreds of tunnels around the island that were used by the Japanese, and it was fun to see the more well-known ones. I would try to scare the corpsman by playing creepy classical music while we were crawling around in the dark, dirty caves (alliteration for you right there). We found one that was a medical cave and had tons of old medicine bottles, helmets and rusted weapons. It was very weird to think that someone actually used that before us, and there it was, untouched (sorta). There was also a "Sauna Cave", which is now used as a sauna (clever) by the Japanese because it is so hot.

On the northwest part of the island, we found another monument. Unfortunately, it was all in Japanese so I wasn't able to translate any of it. Also, my trusty internet skillz have failed me in finding out exactly what it was for, so if anyone knows, please feel free to comment on it.

With that, I will leave you with two other photos... one is a picture of a jet at dusk, and the other is a picture of the trusty golf cart that carried us around the island without incident.