At the age of 14 Jacklyn “Jack” Lucas forged his mother’s signature on an enlistment waiver and joined the Marines to fight in World War II. When he arrived in Hawaii his true age was discovered and his action was limited to driving a truck with the constant threat of being sent back home. “He said if they sent him home, he would just join the Army,” said D.K. Drum, who helped Lucas write his life story in the book Indestructible. Lucas then stowed away on a ship headed out for combat, and at 17 found himself at the critical battle of Iwo Jima and faced with making a quick decision that ended up saving the lives of three fellow Marines.

“A couple of grenades rolled into the trench,” Lucas said in an Associated Press interview in 1945. “I hollered to my pals to get out and did a Superman dive at the grenades. I wasn’t a Superman after I got hit. I let out one helluva scream when that thing went off.”

He somehow survived two grenades exploding beneath him, shooting 250 pieces of shrapnel into his body and into every major organ, which required 26 surgeries over the next few months. Later that year, President Truman presented Lucas with the Medal of Honor, making him the youngest serviceman to win our country’s highest military honor in any conflict other than the Civil War.

The citation read:

“By his inspiring action and valiant spirit of self-sacrifice, he not only protected his comrades from certain injury or possible death but also enabled them to rout the Japanese patrol and continue the advance.”

Lucas survived Iwo Jima in 1945 but lost his battle with cancer today. He died early this morning in a Hattiesburg, Miss., hospital at age 80, with family, friends, and his wife, Ruby, by his side.

In his book Don’t Waste Your Life, John Piper referenced Lucas’ story as an example for the youth of today:

“When I stand, as it were, on the shores of Iwo Jima and let myself reenact those hours of courage and sacrifice, and remember that they were young, I cannot make peace with the petty preoccupations of most American life. One of them was really young. I read his story and wanted to speak to every youth group in American and say, Do you want to see what cool is? Do you want to see something a thousand times more impressive than a triple double? Well, listen up about Jacklyn Lucas.”

It seems that most every magazine out there has a special “Green” issue these days, and Time is no exception with its April 21 edition. For only the second time in its history, the magazine has forsaken its familiar red border, this time, of course, replacing it with green. To illustrate its cover headline, “How to Win the War on Global Warming,” Time chose to use Joe Rosenthal’s famous WWII photo of Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima. But instead of a flag, those brave men are hoisting a tree, which didn’t set well with some Iwo Jima veterans.

“Global warming may or may not be a significant threat to the United States,” said Tim Holbert, a spokesman for the American Veterans Center. “The Japanese Empire in February of 1945, however, certainly was, and this photo trivializes the most recognizable moment of one of the bloodiest battles in U.S. history. War analogies should be used sparingly by political advocates of all bents.”

Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel defended his magazine’s cover choice yesterday on MSNBC: “[O]ne of the things we do in the story is we say there needs to be an effort along the lines of preparing for World War II to combat global warming and climate change. It seems to me that this is an issue that is very popular with the voters, makes a lot of sense to them, and a candidate who can actually bundle it up in some grand way and say, ‘Look, we need a national and international Manhattan Project to solve this problem and my candidacy involves that.’ I don’t understand why they don’t do that.”

This particular photo manipulation is hard for Time to defend. I mean, you don’t mess with Marines. Maybe they should’ve used another famous WWII photo, the Life magazine one of the sailor celebrating V-J Day in Times Square with a kiss, but instead of a nurse, he could be laying one on a tree.

Today’s L.A. Times has an interesting article on the dwindling number of Pearl Harbor survivors. The article quotes Jack Ray Hammett, who was a medical corpsman for the Navy stationed in Hawaii at the time of the attack:

“When we’re gone, we’re gone. We’re already just a paragraph in the history books. Will even that disappear when the last one of us dies?”

Hammett, through his work with the Freedom Committee of Orange County speakers bureau, wants to do everything he can to make sure we don’t forget.