“Fred Ward was born and raised in Whitesville, Kentucky and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps at age 17. However, you will not find Mr. Ward at VFW Post 696. Instead you will find him proudly wearing his red satin Marine Corps jacket and uniform hat, gracing the hallways of a local full-time care facility. His daughter Carolyn says that the whole experience has been a blessing, as everyone at the facility has gone out of their way to show honor and respect for Mr. Ward’s WWII military service. Alton Neagle, a Vietnam Army veteran and social worker at the facility, struck an immediate bond with Mr. Ward. Carolyn says that “The bond he and Daddy have is very, very special” and it “puts peace in my heart” to know there is someone there that cares for him in that way.

Up until very recently, Mr. Ward was able to clearly share his wartime memories as if they happened yesterday. At the age of seventy-eight, he began requesting legal pads in an effort to free memories that had plagued his mind for nearly sixty years. He finally filled enough legal pads to publish the book Picking Up the Pieces: The Battle of Iwo Jima. In the book, Ward chronicles the horror he experienced as a nineteen-year-old Marine “on a tiny island that lay in the Pacific Ocean only 750 miles from Tokyo, Japan…so small I could ride my bicycle in any direction approximately 30 minutes.”

Ward landed on the island on February 19, 1945 and was part of the original forty-man team that raised the first flag atop Mount Suribachi on February 23. Mr. Ward recalls, “The first flag was too small so we went to a ship (aircraft carrier) to get a bigger one.” This bigger flag is the one we have come to know from the now-famous picture. Five days after raising the flag, Ward was shot in the calf, earning a Purple Heart, and two weeks in the island infirmary. Ward was one of thirty-two men that were wounded or killed out of the original forty-man flag-raising team. When asked now why they raised the flag that day, he said it was to let the enemy know that “they better scoot or give up real quick.”

In October of 2014, the same year of the seventieth anniversary of the Battle of Iwo Jima, Fred Ward was among those selected to fly to Washington through the Honor Flight Bluegrass program.”

- Owensboro Living, 29 May 2015

With great regret, I inform you all that Fred has passed away as of this morning. Having lived in the same town as him almost all my life, I had the honor of meeting him several times. He always loved speaking with other Marines and loved sharing stories about the good times we had with our buddies abroad. He will truly be missed, and will always be remembered.

SEMPER FIDELIS….

You guys remember the ORIGINAL Iwo Jima flag picture? Here he is, in it.