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A West Virginia Town Applied For Soviet Foreign Aid, and Other Lesser Known American History Facts

Khalid Elhassan February 21, 2020 33 min

Vulcan - McDowell County — Vulcan miners in 1919. The Sangha Kommune

25. A Teenage Marine’s Sublime Courage

Marines during the Battle of Iwo Jima. Imgur

In February of 1945, seventeen-year-old Jack Lucas was in a trench in Iwo Jima with three other Marines, when a firefight erupted against 11 Japanese in a nearby trench. When two enemy grenades landed in Lucas’ trench, the teenager saved his comrades by shielding them with his own body. As he described it: “I hollered to my pals to get out and did a Superman dive at the grenades“.

Lucas landed atop one grenade, and grabbed the other to place it beneath his body as well. One grenade was a dud and failed to explode, but the other went off beneath Lucas and severely injured him. “I wasn’t a Superman after I got hit“, he added, recalling how he screamed after the explosion.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.