Found, Loss, Found

[TheMercenary]

A moving reminder:

FOR many of his 85 years, Franklin W. Hobbs III has managed to distill good fortune from bad luck. Orphaned at 10, he wound up in the care of loving — and wealthy — grandparents. After World War II snatched him from Harvard, the G. I. Bill sent him back for a master’s in business administration. Rocky moments in his career often led to lucrative, fulfilling opportunities.

And so it was on Iwo Jima in the winter of 1945.

Mr. Hobbs, an untested corporal in the Army Signal Corps, doubted he would survive the barrage of mortar shells and gunfire awaiting him on the Japanese island’s besieged beach. Then he met a streetwise Detroit schoolteacher named Schnarr, who tossed four words his way: “Stick with me, Frank.” The unlikely pair clambered off the boat together and stepped past scores of slain and wounded Marines.

“I had never seen a dead person before,” Mr. Hobbs recalled in a recent interview. “It was awful. They were in the water. They were on the beach.”

His gun had slipped into the sea, so he bent down and scooped a weapon from one of those killed. Then he and Schnarr, on orders to stay alive long enough to set up communications, dug a hole off the beach where they stayed, ducking rounds of fire and eating raw bacon, for two days. When the fighting moved farther inland, they got to work laying wire.

Driving a truck a week later, Mr. Hobbs stumbled on a Japanese soldier, with no visible wounds, lying dead near a cave. The man wore a helmet and a military jacket. A white envelope peeked out of his chest pocket. Mr. Hobbs, then 21, opened the envelope to find a child’s colorful drawing — of youngsters lined up for an air-raid drill with buckets and padded garb — and a photograph of a baby. He asked an intelligence officer nearby if he could keep it.

continues:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/ny...gewanted=1&hpw