Reunion of Honor vets make emotional pilgrimage to Iwo Jima

World War II vets make emotional pilgrimage to Iwo Jima
By Emanuella Grinberg, CNN
March 8, 2010 9:23 a.m. EST

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Retired fighter pilot Jerry Yellin returns to Iwo Jima with son, grandson for "Reunion of Honor"
Reunion brings together veterans, officials from Japan, the United States
Return represents closure for Yellin, whose son married the daughter of Japanese pilot

"It's reliving something that happened so long ago," Marine correspondent Cy O'Brien says

(CNN) -- Jerry Yellin has spent most of his life trying to forget about the stench of death on the island of Iwo Jima 65 years ago.

Yellin was a P-51 fighter pilot who had turned 22 a few weeks before he touched down on the island March 7, 1945, amid some of the bloodiest fighting of World War II's Pacific campaign.

"To one side, there were mounds and mounds and mounds of bodies of Japanese soldiers being pushed around by bulldozers into mass graves. And right behind our squadron area was the Marine mortuary, where they'd lay out the bodies, check their dog tags and fingerprint them for identification," recalls Yellin, an 87-year-old retiree who lives in Vero Beach, Florida.

"I've lived with those memories all of my life and it was not something I ever wanted to go back to."

Nevertheless, Yellin was back on the island last week for the first time since 1945 to attend a ceremony commemorating the battle's 65th anniversary. About 22,000 Japanese soldiers died defending the island, along with more than 6,000 Americans, in a battle that was memorialized in the iconic photograph of five U.S. Marines and a Navy corpsman raising the U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi, the island's dormant volcano.
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World War II vets make emotional pilgrimage to Iwo Jima