Bob...we of the 'Striking Sixth' salute you for your wonderful comments regarding our Marines! Would like to mention that Bill Manchester never recieved a Navy Cross...he did receive a Purple Heart, and one looks at the lapel pin of these medals, they are somewhat similar.

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Two years ago, I was invited to a literary awards' banquet in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to the Tulsa City-County Library, where I would enjoy the truly momentous privilege of sitting alongside prize-winning author William Manchester. Most of you know that Manchester is considered, in the highest literary circles,' as one of the world's pre-eminent biographers. I had originally planned to question Manchester that evening on the topic of Sir Winston Churchill, the great English leader whom Manchester has spent many years studying. Instead, as I spoke with Manchester, I noticed a tiny metal bar affixed to his left lapel. Without my reading glasses, I couldn't make out the bar, so I leaned close to the man and gasped, "My God, that's the Navy Cross!" On that night, a sizeable number of Manchester's old wartime buddies had shown up, many of them wearing their tattered grey-green Marine Corps dungaree 'covers.' Something else that Manchester told me that night still inspires me yet today. Regarding his Navy Cross, the man said: "I'm proud of this award. But it's not about me. It's about all these guys here tonight. It's about our division. And it's about my old regiment." Author James Bradley, with understandable pride in his father, and his father's own tremendous division, wrote that Iwo Jima was "America's most heroic battle." And most Americans perhaps agree. Yet, taking nothing away from the brave men who took that murderous little island, I'd like to leave you with words from my deceased father, who was a veteran of the First Marine Division, and of Operation "Iceberg," the deadliest campaign of the great Pacific War: "Iwo, he told me forty-three years ago, "is thought by many to have been our hottest fight. But I'll go to my grave believing that "Sugar Loaf" was the worst of them all. Whenever you meet any of those guys who were in the Sixth, make sure you thank 'em, and shake their hand--for, God knows, they deserve it!" Indeed, in tribute to those men, William Manchester wrote in the preface to his 1978 best-seller "American Caesar:" 'To the 29th Marines: 3,512 landed on Okinawa, April 1, 1945--2,821 fell in 82 days, the highest price ever paid by a U.S. Marine Corps Regiment in a single battle...."



Thus, to the men of the Sixth, I say on behalf of my dead father, "Thank you. Thank you, very much!" To live in freedom is a true privilege.



Robert Leibold, HM2

lstMarDiv., 1974-76

Just a warm hello to a fellow Marine with a very familiar name.

Robert Leibold
Vietnam Veteran
FLSG 3rd Mar. Div.
USMC 1963-1967