The Landing Craft throwing a line and pulling Don's nearly submerged boat out of range.-They were hauled aboard.-They get into an uncomfortable position: "again, we were where we shouldn't be...in the middle of an air raid..."-"We lost a carrier."-"For the next four or five hours we lived in absolute terror. In fact, frozen terror, for we were still soaking wet."-They were transferred aboard a battleship (The Bayfield).-"I awoke five hours later."-A guard (widely grinning) handed him over his Thompson gun, "newly cleaned and oiled, almost unrecognisable from the rusty piece of junk I earlier relinquished.".-Don wants to get back to Iwo. He asks an officer standing at thr rail watching the shore.-Suddenly, two muzzles in his back. They were the bodyguards of General Clifton Cates.-"It was General Cates (commander, of the 4th Marine Division) whom I had just brashly confronted!".-Don got permission to go back to the beach. The men in the boat "stared at me in disbelief, only an idiot would voluntarily go back into that inferno."-"For the first time I felt I was a tremedously important Marine..."-Don making his way over top of the ramp. "then ordered them to get the hell out of there."-"Thus, I made a one-man invasion of Iwo Jima.-"Blue Beach was even more chaotic than before, completely covered with blasted wreckage..."-"As far as the eye could see, each ocean wave delivered a solid sheet of torn bodies..."-
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