Iwo Blasted Again
By Ray Elliott
Iwo Jima Marine veteran Jack Britton has carried the horror of combat and the loss of his young wife and his buddies with him for the past 60 years. Now, in the last 36 hours of his life in a hospital intensive care unit, he revisits those aspects of his life and grapples with his long-suffering questions about fate and self-doubt through a psychological phenomenon known as sundown syndrome.
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"Marine veteran Ray Elliott understands American war and warfare as few people do. His work is honest and raw and filled with truth, in the tradition of the great American war novelists who precede him."
— Kaylie Jones, novelist and writing teacher, James Jones' daughter and a director of the James Jones Literary Society
About the Author
Ray Elliott
Marine veteran Ray Elliott is an editor, publisher and author of numerous works of nonfiction. As a retired, longtime English and journalism educator in public high schools and universities, he has encouraged and inspired many young people to pursue their dreams. In 1999, he left the classroom to write full time. Elliott is on the board of The James Jones Literary Society and the Illinois Center for the Book, and is an officer of the Richard L. Pittman Marine Corps League in Urbana-Champaign, Ill.
Read an Excerpt
For just a fleeting second, the line on the heart monitor went flat. Then Jack Britton gasped for air, took a harsh, rasping breath and kept on sucking in the hot, dry air with a labored, hurried irregular rhythm to take in enough oxygen to help his old heart pump another supply of fresh red blood out into his bone-tired, aching body again and make his leathery lungs crackle just a bit from the fluid that was staying in him.
He felt tired, more tired than he had for years. And he had felt that way since he first woke a little before midnight and knew something was wrong. He had had difficulty breathing and drifted in and out of sleep the rest of the night.
His eyes opened now, narrow slits against the light of the early-morning March sun that filtered into his little house through an east-side window, and locked in on an old photo at the foot of his bed. He couldn't quite make out what was there through his blurry eyes. He could see only a hazy image of the three young Marines indelibly burned in his mind, all squinting out happily and confidently from a fading, long-ago photo of them in dungaree jackets and trousers, hands on each other's shoulders, brash smiles on their faces. That would be Bake and Roc and him, he knew. Good buddies. They didn’t come any better. Anywhere. Ever.