Marine buried buddies at Iwo Jima

Fellow Marines were falling in record numbers all around him. The suicidal Japanese soldiers were literally coming out of the ground from caves and pillboxes “kicking the (expletive) out of us,” he said. But any duty was better than bidding his friends goodbye forever.

“We were told we were only going to be there for 10 days. … Well, they were a little wrong. It was 35 days,” the father of three said of the battle in early 1945 that left 7,000 Marines dead.

“I’ll never forget the wounded. One of my buddies during the shelling campaign said ‘Buster Christ, I’ve been hit.’ I got up and I looked at him and he’s holding his guts,” Richards said. A Navy corpsman came running to help — the “bravest men” on Iwo Jima, he added — but he was probably too late.

“Well, they took him away. I never heard how he made out,” Richards said. “Christ, his whole insides were out. He was holding them in his hand.”

This proud veteran — his bed cover is a U.S. Marines blanket — is one of the Heroes of a Generation, the focus of a continuing series in the Herald chronicling the lives of those who served during World War II.

His wife and two sons are gone. He lives in senior housing in Woburn close to his daughter. He’s a Boston University graduate and still quick-witted and passionate about his friends, his family and the flag he saw flapping atop Mount Suribachi that awful February.

“That became iconic,” he said of the flag-raising photographed by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press during the battle.