Dave Wrote:Amazing stuff Ken. The shear bravery in facing his injuries, and how he got them, is astounding.

Quote:Thanks for posting them.

Kenji Wrote:Ken, thanks for a lot of letters.

jimbow8 Wrote:Thanks for posting those letters, Ken. Do you have any of the letters that his mother sent to him, or were those lost?

Quote:Out of curiosity, was his eye repaired?

Quote:Were his eyes damaged by shrapnel along with the legs?

Quote:If I remember correctly, you've said that he was 300% disabled; how do they determine that?

Kenji Wrote:Even for an Academy Award-winning director like Clint Eastwood, making two movies taken from the opposing sides of a battle seemed a daunting and impossible challenge. But Eastwood proved the skeptics wrong in completing what he calls his "Iwo Jima project," filming the movies "Flags of Our Fathers," and "Letters from Iwo Jima" from the standpoint of the U.S. and Japanese soldiers and their leaders.

Ken Valentine Wrote:They were all lost Jim. I only have those because my grandmother was the most wonderful packrat . . . bless her heart.



That was dealt with in the final letter which was on the second post.

Quote:Yes. Even his broken wrist. In one of the letters I didn't post, he wondered what happened to his wrist watch -- whether or not somebody took it. X-rays later showed that parts of his watch were imbedded in his wrist.

I can semi-jokingly say that I owe my very existence to an M-1 Carbine.

When he was caught out in the open by a mortar barrage, he ran for a shell crater. Before he got to it, a mortar shell landed right in front of him. While crossing the open area -- Motoyama Airfield Number 2 -- he was carrying his carbine slung over his shoulder. When he started to run, the carbine slipped off his shoulder and the sling was caught in the crook of his elbow. This placed the carbine across his groin. As a result, he lost only one testicle. He caught a lot of shrapnel in his legs. In 1969, one piece of shrapnel in his upper thigh had corroded to the point where it cut off blood circulation to his entire leg -- it was embedded beneith the femoral artery -- and he almost had to have his leg amputated. This was more than 24 years after the initial injury. He still had a lot of gravel and shrapnel inside him when he died in 1995.

What actually saved his life was that he had a field telephone and "Walkey-Talkey" radio set covering his chest and abdomen.

His eyes were damaged so badly that skin grafts were made to create new eyelids for him. The cosmetic surgeon even went to the extent of taking a strip of hair from his eyebrows to give him eyelashes. Being as he didn't have that little bit of cartilage in his eyelids as we do, the skin eventually stretched and he couldn't open his eyes. He had to lift his eyelid with his hand in order to rotate his glass eyes back into place. (They would tend to rotate with the blinking reflex.)



I don't know how they determine it Jim. Blindness was/is considered to be 100%. Loss of certain muscle groups were given a lesser percentage, and they were listed by number. For example, muscle group 12 was listed as 30%. Another muscle group was also 30%, another was 40% and still another was 50%. The "broken wrist" injury cut a number of tendons to the fingers of his left hand, and other shrapnel injuries cut muscles and tendons to his legs as well. He also had a partially crushed skull, and some brain damage (another 50%) -- so they said -- I could never figure out what the "brain damage" amounted to. He had the most astonishing memory, and could do arithmatic, plane geometry, and trig in his head . . . as long as someone could read him the trig tables. However, he did have trouble pronouncing some words.

He was one of those people you rarely hear about. In Iraq for example, you hear about the number of Americans killed, but how many more casualties like my dad do you not hear about.

Any wonder why I oppose war?

Ken V.