 Well, the Marine Corps changed my life. Pretty smooth as to why we would need so many Marines to take this little piece of rock. After the first day, when they lost so many who didn't kill, they announced that night, you know, we're going to shore. And the island was so different in its appearance that from Guam and other islands that we've been on, there was no jungle, it wasn't anything. Even though we'd been in combat before, you could see right off it wasn't going to be anything like what we had experienced before. Landed, the beach looked, it was chaotic. Jeeps had blown up and tanks stuck, and packs and rifles, the dead naturally along the beach area. They had all the advantage. They had a complete field of fire, so every time we would move, try to move forward, we'd lose Marines. We couldn't penetrate the pillbox area. After the losing so many Marines, our commanding officer, he called for a meeting of all NCOs. So that's where I got involved. He told me to pick four Marines to help. And two of them I picked were in my squad. I knew those two guys. But there were other Marines there, and by that time we were so chaotic, we had lost organizational structure completely. It was just Marines. So I picked two other Marines, and I didn't know who they were. But there were Marines. So I picked them to help me when I was approaching a pillbox. Their job was to actually shoot at that aperture so that the Japanese couldn't shoot at me. Two of them sacrificed their lives at that, so they protected mine. And I said from that point on that it belongs to them. They made the sacrifice. I'm just the caretaker of it.