Joe Boy, top row, second from left, at Camp Tarawa, on the Big Island of Hawaii. On November 19, 1944, he wrote:
“Here’s a picture of the boys in our squad. The guy in the blur and holding the black cat is our squad leader. They are a pretty good bunch of guys. A couple of them are missing though I don’t know where they were when the picture was taken.”
A few months later, the Marine Corps landed on Iwo Jima, where most of the men in this squad were wounded or killed in action.