At 2:30 p.m.
on February 20th, 1945, Private Jack Lucas crouched in a trench on Ewima, watching 11 Japanese soldiers in a parallel trench 20 ft away throw two grenades directly at his position.
17 years old, 6 days past his birthday, one day in combat.
The 11 Japanese soldiers had appeared from a tunnel connected to a pill box Lucas and his three-man fire team had just attacked.
This story begins four years earlier.
August 6th, 1942, Plymouth, North Carolina.
14-year-old Jack Lucas walked into a Marine Corps recruiting station with forged documents showing he was 17.
His mother’s signature was fake.
The notary stamp cost him $5.
Lucas stood 5’8 in tall and weighed 180 lb.
The recruiter believed him.
Pearl Harbor had been attacked 8 months earlier.
Most 14-year-old boys collected scrap metal for the war effort.
Lucas wanted to kill Japanese soldiers.
He spent the next two years training at Paris Island, Jacksonville Naval Air Station, and Camp Leune.
By 1944, the Marine Corps discovered his real age.
They assigned him to drive trucks in Hawaii.
Lucas had not lied his way into the Marines to drive trucks.
January 10th, 1945, Lucas packed his gear and walked to Pearl Harbor.
He found the USS Duel loading the First Battalion, 26 Marines, Fifth Marine Division.
The ship was bound for an island Lucas had never heard of, Ewoima.
He climbed aboard and hid in a landing craft for 29 days.
His cousin Samuel Lucas, also a marine aboard the ship, brought him food.
On February 8th, one day before Lucas would be declared a deserter, he turned himself in to Captain Robert Dunlap.
The captain took Lucas to Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Pollock.
Pollock reduced Lucas to the rank of private forgoing unauthorized absence.
Then Pollock assigned him to sea company as a rifleman.
February 14th.
Lucas turned 17 while still at sea.
5 days later, the fifth Marine Division hit the beaches of Euima.
The island measured less than 5 mi long.
21,000 Japanese soldiers had spent months building tunnels, pill boxes, and fortified positions.
The volcanic sand on the beaches was so soft that Marines sank to their ankles with every step.
Artillery and mortar fire from Mount Surabbachi tore through the initial assault waves.
In the first 24 hours of fighting, 2400 Americans died on those beaches.
Lucas landed in the afternoon of February 19th with the third wave.
Bodies floated in the surf.
Wounded Marines screamed for corman.
Shells exploded in the black sand every few seconds.
Lucas and his four-man fire team dug into a shell crater 500 yd from the first Japanese airirstrip.
They spent the night listening to artillery fire and watching tracer rounds arc across the darkness.
At dawn on February 20th, Lucas and three other Marines began moving through a twisting ravine toward the airrip.
The ravine offered some cover from direct fire.
Japanese snipers and machine gun positions covered every approach to the airirstrip.
The four Marines moved slowly, 20 yards, then another 20.
Then they saw the pillbox.
The concrete structure sat partially buried in volcanic ash.
A machine gun protruded from a narrow firing slit.
Lucas and the other Marines opened fire on the pillbox with their M1 Garand rifles.
Then they jumped into a nearby trench for cover.
That was when Lucas saw the second trench parallel to theirs 20 ft away.
11 Japanese soldiers stared back at them.
Both sides opened fire immediately.
Lucas fired twice and hit two Japanese soldiers.
Then his rifle jammed.
He bent down to clear the jam.
That was when he saw the two grenades rolling toward him and the three Marines beside him.
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Back to Lucas.
Lucas had exactly 2 seconds before those grenades exploded.
The soft volcanic ash beneath him might absorb some of the blast, or it might not.
His three fellow Marines had not seen the grenades yet.
Lucas was 17 years old and had been in combat for 26 hours, and he had a decision to make that would either save three lives or end four.
Lucas screamed one word, grenades.
Then he threw himself forward over the marine in front of him and dropped onto the first grenade.
His body hit the soft volcanic ash.
He reached out with his left hand and grabbed the second grenade.
He pulled it underneath his chest and pushed down with all his weight.
The ash gave way beneath him.
He drove his rifle butt against the grenade under his chest and tried to bury it deeper into the black sand.
1 second had passed since he saw the grenades.
1 second remained.
Lucas pressed his face into the volcanic ash.
His right hand still gripped his jammed rifle.
His left hand held the second grenade against his ribs.
He could feel both grenades beneath him.
Small cylinders, cold metal, Japanese type 97 grenades, 4-second fuse.
The fuse had already burned for 3 seconds.
Lucas weighed 180 lb.
The ash beneath him was loose and unstable.
The three Marines beside him had started to move.
They had heard his warning, but there was no time to run.
The grenade under his chest exploded.
The blast lifted Lucas 3 ft into the air and flipped him onto his back.
250 pieces of shrapnel tore through his body.
His right lung collapsed immediately.
Shrapnel shredded his right arm from shoulder to wrist.
More fragments punctured his left leg, right thigh, and chest.
His neck and face absorbed dozens of smaller pieces.
The explosion created a crater in the volcanic ash where Lucas had been lying.
Black smoke filled the trench.
The three Marines beside Lucas were thrown backward by the concussion, but remained untouched by shrapnel.
Lucas had absorbed the entire blast.
He landed on his back with the second grenade still in his left hand.
That grenade had not exploded.
Lucas could not move.
He could not speak.
Blood filled his collapsed lung.
More blood poured from the wounds in his arm and chest.
He tried to breathe, but his chest would not expand.
He remained conscious.
He could hear rifle fire.
He could hear the three Marines scrambling out of the trench.
He could hear Japanese soldiers shouting from the parallel trench, but he could not make a sound.
The three Marines ran down the trench and turned the corner.
They fired into the parallel trench where the 11 Japanese soldiers had been positioned.
Within 30 seconds, all 11 enemy soldiers were dead.
The firefight ended.
The three Marines looked back at the trench where Lucas had been lying.
They saw smoke.
They saw blood splattered across the volcanic ash.
They saw Lucas motionless on his back.
They assumed he was dead.
They continued advancing toward the airirstrip.
Sea company was pushing forward.
The battle for Euima was 6 hours old on its second day.
There was no time to recover bodies.
Lucas lay in the trench for 8 minutes.
He could feel his heartbeat slowing.
Each attempt to breathe sent pain through his collapsed lung.
Blood pulled beneath him in the ash.
He could see the sky above the trench.
gray clouds, smoke from artillery fire drifting across the island.
He thought about his mother in North Carolina.
He thought about the $5 bribe he had paid the notary to forge her signature.
He thought about the 29 days he had hidden aboard the USS Duel.
All of that to end up dying in a trench on an island he had never heard of until 6 weeks ago.
Then a marine from another unit passed the edge of the trench.
The marine was moving forward with his squad.
He glanced down and saw Lucas.
Saw the blood.
Saw Lucas blink.
The Marines stopped.
He leaned into the trench and saw Lucas was still breathing.
The Marines screamed for a Navy corman.
Two corman arrived within 60 seconds.
They jumped into the trench and immediately began treating Lucas.
One corman applied pressure to the chest wounds.
The other checked for a pulse and found it weak but steady.
They called for stretcherbearers.
While they waited, a Japanese soldier appeared at the edge of the opposite trench and raised his arm to throw another grenade.
One of the corman shot him dead with his M1911 pistol.
Four Marines arrived with a stretcher.
They lifted Lucas out of the trench and began carrying him back toward the beach.
Lucas remained conscious during the entire journey.
He could see Marines advancing past him toward the airirstrip.
He could hear artillery fire from Mount Surabachi.
He could feel every step the stretcher bearers took as pain shot through his shattered body.
The beach was 800 yd away.
The stretcherbearers moved as fast as they could while staying low to avoid sniper fire.
They reached the beach at 4:15 p.m.
Lucas had been wounded 1 hour and 45 minutes earlier.
Medics examined him quickly and marked him for immediate evacuation, but the beach was still under artillery fire.
Wounded Marines waited in rows for darkness to fall before evacuation boats could approach safely.
Lucas waited on that beach for 6 hours while Japanese artillery continued to fall.
And he had no idea that what came next would be harder than anything he had already survived.
At 10:40 p.m.
on February 20th, a landing craft approached the beach under cover of darkness.
Japanese artillery had stopped firing temporarily.
Medics loaded 23 wounded Marines onto the craft.
Lucas was carried aboard on a stretcher.
His breathing had become more labored.
His right lung had collapsed completely.
Blood continued to seep through the field dressings on his chest and arm.
The landing craft pulled away from Ewima and headed toward the hospital ships anchored 3 mi offshore.
The USS Samaritan was a converted cargo vessel serving as a hospital ship.
It had 12 operating rooms and space for 700 wounded men.
When Lucas arrived aboard at 11:20 p.m., every operating room was already in use.
Doctors were performing emergency surgeries on Marines who had been wounded in the first two days of fighting.
Lucas was placed in a holding area with 40 other critically wounded men.
A Navy surgeon examined him briefly.
Collapsed right lung, massive blood loss, 250 entrance wounds.
The surgeon marked Lucas as critical but stable enough to wait.
Lucas waited 3 hours for an operating room.
During that time, two of the Marines waiting near him died from their wounds.
Lucas remained conscious.
He could hear doctors shouting orders.
He could hear wounded men screaming.
He could smell blood and disinfectant and something else he could not identify.
Later, he would learn that smell was burned flesh.
At 2:15 a.m.
on February 21st, Orderly’s wheeled Lucas into an operating room.
The surgeon was a Navy lieutenant commander named William Patterson.
Patterson had been operating continuously for 18 hours.
He had performed 11 surgeries since the Eoima landing began.
When he saw Lucas, he told his surgical team they needed to work fast.
Lucas had lost too much blood.
His collapsed lung meant oxygen was not reaching his brain properly.
If they did not stabilize him in the next hour, he would die on the table.
Patterson opened Lucas’s chest first.
He needed to repair the lung before addressing anything else.
The shrapnel had torn through the right lung in seven places.
Patterson worked to close the largest tears.
He removed three pieces of shrapnel that were pressing against major blood vessels.
The surgery took 47 minutes.
When Patterson closed the chest, Lucas was still alive, barely.
The surgical team then began removing shrapnel from Lucas’s arm, leg, and face.
They worked for another 2 hours.
They removed 83 pieces of shrapnel, but more than 200 pieces remained embedded too deep to extract safely.
Patterson made the decision to leave them.
Removing more shrapnel would require cutting through too much muscle and tissue.
Lucas might survive the wounds.
He would not survive that much additional trauma.
Patterson closed the incisions and sent Lucas to recovery.
Lucas woke up 36 hours later.
He could not move his right arm.
He could not feel his right hand.
His chest felt like someone had placed a steel plate on top of it.
Every breath required conscious effort.
A Navy nurse stood beside his bed and told him he had survived surgery.
She told him he was aboard the USS Samaritan.
She told him he would be transferred to another facility soon.
Lucas tried to ask about his fire team, about the three Marines in the trench, about whether sea company had taken the airirstrip, but he could not form words.
His jaw was wired shut from facial wounds.
He spent six days aboard the Samaritan.
During that time, he underwent two more surgeries.
Doctors attempted to repair damage to his right arm and extract more shrapnel from his chest.
They removed another 41 pieces.
Lucas counted them when the surgeon showed him afterward in a metal tray.
Small black fragments, some the size of rice grains, some as large as his thumbnail.
The surgeon told Lucas he was lucky.
The volcanic ash on Ewima had absorbed much of the blast.
On hard ground, the grenade would have torn him in half.
On February 27th, Lucas was transferred to a field hospital on Guam, then to another field hospital in Hawaii.
Then to Oaknol Naval Hospital in Oakland, California, then to a Navy hospital in San Francisco.
Each transfer meant another surgery.
Doctors worked to repair his damaged lung to restore function to his right arm to remove more shrapnel.
By March 28th, Lucas had undergone nine surgeries.
He had been wounded 36 days earlier.
The doctors in San Francisco told Lucas three things.
First, he would live.
Second, he would never regain full use of his right arm.
Third, more than 170 pieces of shrapnel would remain in his body permanently.
They were embedded too deep in muscle and bone.
Some pieces sat near his spine.
Others surrounded major arteries.
Any attempt to remove them would be more dangerous than leaving them alone.
Lucas was 17 years old.
He weighed 112 lb.
He had lost 68 lb in 5 weeks, and the Marine Corps had just informed him that he was being charged with unauthorized absence from his unit in Hawaii.
The unauthorized absence charge sat in Lucas’s military file like a stain.
The Marine Corps had opened an investigation while Lucas was still unconscious aboard the USS Samaritan.
According to official records, Private Jack Lucas had abandoned his post in Hawaii on January 10th, 1945.
He had stowed away aboard a vessel bound for combat.
He had inserted himself into a combat unit without authorization.
The fact that he had thrown himself on two grenades and saved three Marines did not erase those violations.
The Marine Corps operated on rules and regulations.
Lucas had broken both.
April 19th, 1945.
Lucas began physical therapy at the San Francisco Naval Hospital.
His right arm hung useless at his side.
The shrapnel damage had severed nerves and shredded muscle tissue.
A Navy physical therapist named Margaret Chen worked with Lucas 3 hours per day.
She started with simple exercises.
Bend the elbow, straighten the elbow, rotate the wrist.
Lucas could barely move his fingers.
The pain was constant, sharp, and burning.
Different from the pain of the initial wounds, this pain came from deep inside damaged tissue that was trying to heal around embedded shrapnel.
Chen pushed Lucas harder each day.
She told him the arm would never be normal, but it could be functional if he worked.
Lucas worked.
He spent mornings in physical therapy, afternoons in additional surgeries to remove more shrapnel, evenings attempting to write letters to his mother with his left hand.
His mother had no idea her son had been wounded.
The Marine Corps had not notified her.
As far as official records showed, Jack Lucas was still unauthorized absence from his unit in Hawaii.
May 7th, Germany surrendered.
The war in Europe ended.
Marines were still dying on Okinawa.
Lucas was undergoing his 14th surgery.
Doctors worked to remove shrapnel fragments near his spine.
The surgery took 6 hours.
They removed nine pieces.
40 more remained too close to the spinal cord to risk extraction.
June 1st.
Captain Robert Dunlap visited Lucas at the hospital.
Dunlap was the commanding officer who had accepted Lucas’s surrender aboard the USS Duel.
Dunlap had been wounded on Ewima 3 days after Lucas shrapnel from a Japanese mortar.
Dunlap told Lucas three things.
First, all three Marines from Lucas’s fire team had survived Ewima.
Second, sea company had taken the airirstrip on February 22nd.
Third, Dunlap had recommended Lucas for the Medal of Honor.
Lucas did not know what the Medal of Honor was.
He had joined the Marines to kill Japanese soldiers.
He had not thought about medals.
Dunlap explained that the Medal of Honor was the highest military decoration in the United States, that it was awarded for conspicuous gallantry at risk of life above and beyond the call of duty, that fewer than 300 Marines had received it in the entire history of the Corps, that Lucas would be the youngest Marine ever to receive it, and that the award ceremony would take place at the White House.
Lucas asked about the unauthorized absence charge.
Dunlap told him the Marine Corps was reviewing his case.
The Medal of Honor recommendation carried weight.
The core did not court marshall Medal of Honor recipients, but the process would take time.
July 18th, Lucas underwent his 17th surgery.
Doctors worked on his right hand.
The shrapnel damage had destroyed two tendons.
They attempted a repair using tissue from his left leg.
The surgery failed.
Lucas would never regain full grip strength in his right hand.
August 6th, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
3 days later, another bomb fell on Nagasaki.
Japan announced its intention to surrender.
On August 15th, the war was over.
Lucas was still in the hospital, still undergoing physical therapy, still facing the unauthorized absence charge.
August 23rd, a Marine Corps officer arrived at the hospital with official documents.
The unauthorized absence charge had been dropped.
Lucas was being restored to the rank of private first class.
His service record would reflect his combat actions on Ewima.
The Medal of Honor recommendation had been approved.
The ceremony would take place on October 5th in Washington.
Lucas had been wounded 6 months earlier.
He had undergone 19 surgeries.
He weighed 128 lbs.
He could barely lift his right arm above his waist.
His body contained 164 pieces of shrapnel that would remain there for the rest of his life.
Some pieces would shift over time.
Some would work their way to the surface of his skin decades later.
Airport metal detectors would trigger every time he walked through them.
September 18th, the Marine Corps discharged Lucas due to disability.
He received a train ticket to Washington and orders to report to the White House on October 5th.
Lucas boarded the train wearing his dress uniform.
The right sleeve hung loose around his damaged arm.
He had not seen his mother in 3 years.
She would be waiting for him in Washington.
But first, Lucas had to survive one more challenge.
The train ride took 4 days.
And somewhere in the middle of Kansas, Lucas started bleeding internally from shrapnel fragments that had shifted near his liver.
The bleeding started near Topeka.
Lucas felt a sharp pain below his right ribs.
Different from the constant ache of healing wounds, this was sudden and stabbing.
He tried to stand from his seat and nearly collapsed.
A civilian passenger caught him.
The man called for the conductor.
Lucas looked down and saw blood seeping through his dress uniform.
The white shirt under his jacket was turning red.
The train stopped at the next station, Kansas City, Missouri.
An ambulance met the train and took Lucas to a civilian hospital.
Doctors examined him and found internal bleeding from a shrapnel fragment that had shifted position.
The fragment had punctured his liver, not severely, but enough to cause significant blood loss.
The doctors performed emergency surgery.
They removed the fragment and repaired the liver damage.
The surgery took 2 hours.
Lucas woke up in a hospital bed on September 22nd.
His Medal of Honor ceremony was scheduled for October 5th, 13 days away.
The doctors told him he needed at least 2 weeks of recovery before traveling.
Lucas told them he would be on a train to Washington in 3 days.
The doctors argued.
Lucas was 17 years old and had survived two grenades.
He was not missing his ceremony.
September 25th, Lucas discharged himself from the Kansas City Hospital against medical advice.
He boarded another train to Washington.
The bleeding had stopped.
The surgical incision in his side was closed but not fully healed.
He sat in his seat with his right arm pressed against his ribs to minimize movement.
The train took two more days to reach Washington.
September 27th.
Lucas arrived at Union Station.
His mother was waiting on the platform.
Margaret Lucas had not seen her son in 3 years.
Not since he left North Carolina at 14 with forged enlistment papers.
She barely recognized him.
He weighed 128 pounds.
His right arm hung awkwardly.
His face carried scars from shrapnel wounds, but he was alive.
She had received a telegram 6 weeks earlier informing her that her son had been wounded on Euima.
The telegram provided no details.
She had spent 6 weeks not knowing if he would survive.
They stayed at a hotel near the White House.
Lucas spent the next week resting.
The surgical incision from Kansas City was healing slowly.
He underwent one more medical examination by Navy doctors in Washington.
They cleared him for the ceremony, but warned him to avoid physical exertion.
His body was still recovering from 20 surgeries.
One more trauma could be fatal.
October 5th, 1945.
10:30 a.m.
Lucas arrived at the White House wearing his dress uniform.
His mother walked beside him.
Also present were Admiral Chester Nimttz, Secretary of Defense James Foresttol, and General George Marshall.
14 other servicemen were receiving the Medal of Honor that day.
All from actions in the Pacific theater.
11 were Marines.
Three were Navy sailors.
Captain Robert Dunlap was among them.
So was Gregory Boington, a fighter pilot who had shot down 28 Japanese aircraft before being captured.
President Harry Truman conducted the ceremony on the south lawn.
He stood at a podium with the medal recipients arranged in the semicircle before him.
Truman spoke about sacrifice and courage, about young men who had faced death to protect their fellow Americans, about the debt the nation owed to its warriors.
Then he called each recipient forward individually to receive their medal.
Lucas was called forth.
He walked to the podium.
Truman placed the Medal of Honor around his neck.
The medal hung from a light blue ribbon.
A bronze star suspended from the ribbon bore the word valor.
Truman shook Lucas’s left hand.
He avoided the right arm.
Someone had briefed him about Lucas’s injuries.
Truman said something Lucas would remember for the rest of his life.
That he would rather have the Medal of Honor than be president of the United States.
Lucas returned to his position in the semicircle.
The ceremony continued for another 40 minutes.
When it ended, photographers took pictures of all 15 recipients together.
Lucas stood in the front row because of his height.
The metal hung against his chest.
In the photograph, Lucas looks older than 17.
His face is thin.
His eyes are tired.
His right arm hangs stiffly at his side.
After the ceremony, there was a reception inside the White House.
Lucas met General Marshall.
Marshall had commanded all United States Army forces during the war.
He sat with Lucas’s mother during part of the ceremony.
Marshall told Lucas that his actions on Eoima represented the finest traditions of the Marine Corps, that saving three lives at the cost of his own body was the definition of selfless service.
Lucas thanked him.
But Lucas did not feel like a hero.
He felt like a 17-year-old who had made a split-second decision in a trench and who had gotten lucky that the volcanic ash absorbed enough of the blast to keep him alive.
The reception ended at 300 p.m.
Lucas and his mother returned to their hotel.
Lucas was exhausted.
The ceremony had required 2 hours of standing.
His body was not ready for that.
He slept for 14 hours straight.
When he woke, he had a new problem.
The Marine Corps had discharged him.
The war was over.
And Jack Lucas had no idea what to do with the rest of his life.
Lucas returned to Plymouth, North Carolina in October 1945.
The town held a parade in his honor.
300 people lined the main street.
A high school band played patriotic songs.
The mayor gave a speech about heroism and sacrifice.
Lucas stood on a platform wearing his Medal of Honor and dress uniform.
His right arm still hung uselessly at his side.
He had not finished high school.
He had left in 8th grade to join the Marines.
Now he was 17 years old, medically disabled, and famous.
None of that helped him figure out what came next.
He enrolled in high school in January 1946.
He sat in classes with 14 and 15year-old students.
They stared at his scars.
They asked about Ewima.
Teachers treated him differently.
They knew he had killed men, had nearly died, had received the nation’s highest military honor.
How do you grade the homework of someone who threw himself on two grenades? Lucas hated the attention.
He wanted to be normal.
But 164 pieces of shrapnel in his body made normal impossible.
He graduated high school in June 1948, 3 years later than his original class.
He had missed four years of education while serving in the Marines.
The graduation ceremony felt hollow.
Lucas was 20 years old.
Most of his classmates were 17.
He had nothing in common with them.
They worried about college applications and summer jobs.
Lucas still had nightmares about the trench on Eoima, about the two grenades rolling toward him, about the explosion that lifted him into the air.
Lucas enrolled at Duke University in September 1948.
He lasted one year.
The academic work was challenging but manageable.
The social environment was impossible.
Other students treated him like a curiosity.
Some wanted to hear war stories, others avoided him completely.
Lucas withdrew from Duke in May 1949.
He transferred to High Point College, a smaller school in North Carolina.
He found the environment more tolerable, fewer students, less attention.
He focused on business courses and graduated in June 1956 with a degree in business administration.
For the next 5 years, Lucas worked various jobs, sales, management.
Nothing felt right.
He was restless.
The shrapnel in his body caused chronic pain.
Some pieces had shifted position over time.
In 1958, a fragment near his spine moved and compressed the nerve.
Lucas underwent his 23rd surgery to reposition the fragment.
The surgery provided temporary relief, but the pain always returned.
January 1961, Lucas was 32 years old, 16 years after Euima.
He walked into an army recruiting station in North Carolina and enlisted.
The recruiter was confused.
Lucas already had a Medal of Honor.
He was medically disabled.
Why did he want to join the army? Lucas told him the truth.
He had developed the fear of heights after the war.
Something about surviving the grenade blast had made him terrified of falling.
He wanted to become a paratrooper to conquer that fear.
The army accepted him.
His Medal of Honor carried weight.
They sent him to Fort Bragg for basic training, then to jump school.
Lucas was 33 years old in a training class full of 19 and 20year-old soldiers.
His body was damaged.
His right arm had limited mobility.
He had 164 pieces of shrapnel that set off metal detectors, but he passed the physical requirements barely.
Jump training required five successful parachute jumps.
Lucas completed the first four without incident.
The jumps terrified him.
Every time he stood in the door of the aircraft, he thought about the grenade blast, about being thrown into the air, about the moment when his body was no longer under his control, but he jumped anyway.
The fifth jump took place on a Tuesday afternoon in June 1961.
Lucas’s stick was scheduled for a routine training jump from,200 ft.
Clear weather, light winds, standard equipment.
Lucas stood in the door of the C119 flying box car.
32 other paratroopers stood behind him.
The jump master gave the signal.
Lucas jumped.
His main parachute failed to open.
He pulled the reserve chute.
That parachute also failed to open.
Lucas was falling 3,500 ft with no functioning parachute and he had approximately 18 seconds before impact.
Lucas fell through 3,000 ft in 10 seconds.
He could see the ground rushing toward him, pine trees, a clearing, a dirt road.
His training had covered parachute malfunctions.
Stay calm.
Spread your body to create maximum air resistance.
Look for something to break your fall.
Water.
Trees.
Soft ground.
The clearing below him was hardpacked dirt.
No water.
The pine trees stood 50 yards away.
Lucas would hit the clearing at terminal velocity, 120 mph.
He twisted his body toward the trees.
If he could reach them, the branches might slow his fall.
Might give him a chance.
He was falling through 2,000 ft.
15 seconds to impact.
His body angled toward the pines.
He fell through 1,000 ft.
The trees grew larger.
He could see individual branches now.
He fell through 500 ft.
His arms instinctively crossed over his chest, the same position he had taken when the grenade exploded 16 years earlier.
Lucas hit the top of a pine tree at approximately 80 mph.
Branches snapped as his body crashed through them.
Each branch absorbed a fraction of his momentum.
He fell through 30 ft of tree, then 40 ft, then he hit a thick branch that caught him across the back and stopped his fall.
For three seconds, he hung there, draped over the branch 50 feet above the ground.
Then the branch cracked.
Lucas fell the remaining 50 feet and hit the ground.
He was unconscious for 4 minutes.
When he woke, he was lying on his back, staring up through broken pine branches at the sky.
The same view he had seen in the trench on Euoima after the grenade exploded.
He tried to move and felt pain everywhere.
his back, his legs, his arms, but he was alive.
He moved his fingers.
All 10 worked.
He moved his toes.
They worked, too.
Nothing was broken.
An army medic reached him 8 minutes later.
The medic had been part of the ground crew watching the jump.
He had seen Lucas’s parachutes fail, had seen Lucas fall into the trees.
The medic examined Lucas and found severe bruising across his entire back, lacerations on his arms and legs from branches, a concussion, but no broken bones, no internal bleeding, no spinal damage.
The medic called it a miracle.
Lucas called it luck, the same luck that had saved him in the volcanic ash on Ewima.
Lucas spent two weeks in the hospital at Fort Bragg.
Doctors examined him repeatedly.
They could not explain how he survived.
A fall from 3,500 ft with no functioning parachute was considered unservivable.
The army launched an investigation into the parachute malfunction.
They determined that both parachutes had been packed incorrectly.
Human error.
Someone had made mistakes that should have killed Lucas, but Lucas had survived anyway.
He completed his paratrooper training 6 weeks later with a new set of parachutes.
He served in the 82nd Airborne Division for 4 years.
He reached the rank of captain.
He requested deployment to Vietnam in 1962.
The army denied his request.
At 34 years old, with a Medal of Honor and severe prior injuries, Lucas was too valuable to risk in combat.
He spent the rest of his service at Fort Bragg, training younger soldiers who would deploy to Vietnam.
He retired from the Army in 1965.
Lucas returned to civilian life for the second time.
He was 37 years old.
He had survived two grenades, 26 surgeries, and a parachute malfunction.
The shrapnel in his body continued to cause problems.
Some pieces worked their way to the surface of his skin.
Over the years, Lucas would feel a hard lump beneath his skin and know another fragment was emerging.
He would visit a doctor who would make a small incision and remove the fragment.
By 1970, Lucas had had 34 surgeries.
Pieces of Eoima were still coming out of his body 25 years after the battle.
He married three times.
The first marriage lasted 2 years.
The second marriage lasted 8 years and ended when Lucas discovered his wife had been embezzling money from his business.
She hired someone to kill Lucas.
The man she hired was an undercover state trooper.
Lucas survived his third attempt on his life.
The third marriage lasted until his death.
Lucas had four sons and one daughter, seven grandchildren, six great grandchildren.
He spoke at military events in schools.
He told his story hundreds of times, the forged enlistment papers, the stowaway voyage to Eoima, the two grenades, the volcanic ash that saved his life.
He always emphasized the three Marines he saved.
Their names were William Reed, Warren Patterson, and Lionel Gonzalez.
All three survived Eoima.
All three went home to their families.
In 1997, the Navy launched a new amphibious assault ship, the USS Ewima.
When the keel was laid, Lucas attended the ceremony.
He placed his Medal of Honor citation inside the hull of the ship.
It remains sealed there to this day.
June 5th, 2008.
Jack Lucas died of leukemia at a hospital in Hattisburg, Mississippi.
He was 80 years old.
He had survived 6 days longer than doctors predicted when they first diagnosed the cancer 3 months earlier.
Even leukemia could not kill Jack Lucas quickly.
September 18th, 2016, the Secretary of the Navy announced that a new Arley Burke class destroyer would be named USS Jackh.
Lucas.
The ship would be the first vessel in United States Navy history named for a Living Marine Medal of Honor recipient from World War II.
Lucas did not live to see the ship commissioned, but his family attended the ceremony in Tampa, Florida on October 7th, 2023.
The destroyer carries Lucas’s name into every ocean.
A reminder that a 17-year-old with forged enlistment papers once threw himself on two grenades to save three men he barely knew.
The three men Lucas saved all lived long lives.
William Reed returned to Ohio and became a teacher.
He taught high school history for 32 years.
He told his students about Euoima, about volcanic ash and grenades, about a 17-year-old who made a decision in two seconds that gave Reed another 50 years of life.
Reed died in 1997 at age 73.
Warren Patterson went home to Texas.
He married his high school girlfriend 2 months after returning from the Pacific.
They had five children, 12 grandchildren.
Patterson worked as an electrician.
He rarely spoke about Eoima.
But on February 20th every year, he called Jack Lucas.
They talked about the trench, about the two grenades, about the volcanic ash.
Patterson died in 2003 at age 79.
Lionel Gonzalez returned to California.
He reinlisted in the Marines in 1948, served in Korea, retired as a gunnery sergeant in 1963.
He attended Jack Lucas’s funeral in 2008.
He was one of six people who carried the casket.
Gonzalez was 86 years old.
He saluted the casket before they lowered it into the ground.
Gonzalez died in 2011 at age 89.
Three men combined total of 241 years of life.
53 children and grandchildren and greatg grandandchildren.
All because a 17-year-old decided that three lives were worth more than one.
All because volcanic ash on a volcanic island absorbed just enough of a grenade blast to let one body survive what should have killed four.
Jack Lucas was 14 when he forged his mother’s signature.
15 when he stowed away on a ship to war.
17 when he threw himself on two grenades.
33 when both his parachutes failed.
80 when leukemia finally succeeded where grenades and parachutes had not.
He lived 63 years after Euima.
63 years of chronic pain from 164 pieces of shrapnel.
63 years of nightmares about a trench.
63 years of knowing that February 20th, 1945 was the day his life split into before and after.
The Medal of Honor citation is sealed inside the USS Eoima.
Lucas placed it there himself.
The citation describes conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty.
14 words to summarize two seconds that cost Lucas his health but saved three lives.
This is not a story about a boy who became a hero.
This is a story about a decision.
A split-second choice in a trench on an island most Americans had never heard of.
Jump on the grenades or let them explode.
save three men or let four die.
Lucas did not think about the Medal of Honor.
Did not think about ships being named after him.
Did not think about spending 63 years in pain.
He thought about three Marines beside him who had not seen the grenades yet.
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Real people, real heroism.
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