My name is Louis Sabine. Once I blew a mean saxophone. When I played the sax, I blew doo-wah, doo-wah, wah, wah and those cats would dig it, you know. Then I joined the Marines and became a cool cat with an M-1. Right now the only thing I’m digging is the volcanic ash of Iwo Jima. 

      But enough of that hep cat talk. No kind of talk will stop those Japanese from digging me up. They’re working just over the rise with their metal detectors, sweeping that black ash, sweating up their polyester shirts. Death was a big surprise to me. That naval shell, a fourteen-incher at least, fell right on my head. I like to think, for some reason, that it came from the Nevada. But it could have been the Tennessee or the Idaho. Why that should make any difference I don’t know. They always told me I’d never hear the one that got me, but that’s not the way it was. I heard it all right, sounding like somebody was driving a locomotive down out of the sky over my head. We were pinned down by machine gun fire, so even if I’d had time to run, I couldn’t. I just lay there, my face in that hot ash. It didn’t hurt at all, and the next thing I know I’m buried in the ash and looking down at what’s left of me. I call it the field. What I’m in. It’s not big but I’m comfortable.

      It’s those Japs I’m worried about, digging away and probably every now and then resting on their shovels and looking off at Mt. Suribachi. For lunch they’ll cook noodles or maybe rice and fish over an alcohol stove and squat there in the ash and work those chopsticks. I bear them no ill will. Looking for their dead, that’s all they’re doing.