They Called His Plan “Suicide” — Until He Killed 11 Japanese and Dove on 2 Grenades

The Two-Second Choice: How a 17-Year-Old Marine Became a Human Shield on Iwo Jima

At 2:30 p.m. on February 20th, 1945, a Marine named Jack Lucas stared across a trench on Iwo Jima and saw eleven Japanese soldiers only twenty feet away.

Then he saw the grenades.

Two small cylinders arced through the sulfur-thick air and landed in the soft volcanic ash beside him—close enough that he didn’t need to guess where the blast would go. His rifle had just jammed. Three Marines were packed into the same narrow cut of earth, too cramped to sprint, too late to think. He was seventeen years old, six days past his birthday, and he had been in combat for roughly one day.

You can live a long life and never face a moment that compresses everything you are into a single decision.

Lucas got two seconds.

Four Years Earlier: A Kid Who Refused to Wait

This story doesn’t start on Iwo Jima. It starts in Plymouth, North Carolina, in August 1942—when Jack Lucas was fourteen.

Fourteen-year-olds were collecting scrap metal, watching the newsreels, and pretending they understood what “over there” meant. Lucas didn’t pretend. He walked into a Marine Corps recruiting station with forged documents that said he was seventeen. His mother’s signature was fake. The notary stamp, he later said, cost him five dollars.

He looked old enough to pass: about 5’8″, broad-shouldered, heavy for his age. The recruiter believed him. The country had been at war for only months, and the Marine Corps was expanding fast. Lucas didn’t join to learn discipline or earn a paycheck. He joined because he wanted one thing—combat.

He spent the next two years training in places that smelled like sweat, canvas, and gun oil: Parris Island, Jacksonville, Camp Lejeune. He learned to march, shoot, crawl, and obey. Somewhere along the way, the Corps discovered the truth—he was underage. They sent him to Hawaii as a truck driver, a safe assignment meant to keep him useful and out of headlines.

But Lucas hadn’t lied his way into the Marines to drive trucks.

So he did what only a teenager with a dangerous amount of willpower would do: he went AWOL to chase the war.

The Stowaway

On January 10th, 1945, he packed his gear, walked to Pearl Harbor, and found a ship loading Marines—men bound for an island he’d never heard of: Iwo Jima.

He climbed aboard and hid.

For twenty-nine days, he stayed out of sight, tucked into a landing craft like contraband. His cousin, also aboard, brought him food. It wasn’t a movie stunt; it was a slow gamble. If he was caught, he could be jailed. If he wasn’t caught, he would arrive in one of the deadliest battles of the Pacific with nothing but the uniform on his back and the certainty of his own obsession.

On February 8th—one day before he would have been officially declared a deserter—Lucas turned himself in to an officer. He was taken up the chain to Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Pollock, who stripped him down to private for unauthorized absence.

Then Pollock did something that sounds impossible if you don’t understand wartime manpower: he assigned Lucas as a rifleman anyway.

If Lucas wanted the front, he was about to get it.

On February 14th, still at sea, Jack Lucas turned seventeen.

Five days later, the Fifth Marine Division hit Iwo Jima.

Iwo Jima Was Not an Island. It Was a Trap.

Iwo Jima was less than five miles long—just a volcanic scar in the Pacific. But it had been engineered into a machine designed to kill.

Twenty-one thousand Japanese defenders had spent months carving tunnels, building pillboxes, and tying firing positions into a network that could survive bombing and shelling. They didn’t need to hold beaches; they needed to hold time. Every yard the Marines moved would cost bodies.

The sand wasn’t sand in the normal sense. It was black volcanic ash—soft, loose, and hungry. Men sank to their ankles. Vehicles bogged down. And overhead, Japanese artillery and mortars from Mount Suribachi tore into the landing waves.

In the first twenty-four hours, thousands of Americans died on those beaches.

Lucas came ashore in the afternoon of February 19th with the third wave. The surf carried bodies. Wounded Marines screamed for corpsmen. Shells punched the beach every few seconds, throwing black sand into the air like smoke. He and his small fire team dug into a shell crater roughly five hundred yards from the first airfield and spent the night listening to war: artillery thumps, machine-gun chatter, and tracer lines stitching the dark.

By dawn on February 20th, Lucas had been in combat less than a day—and already the island had taught him its lesson: you could do everything “right” and still die in seconds.

The Ravine, the Pillbox, the Tunnel

That morning, Lucas and three other Marines moved through a twisting ravine toward the airfield. Ravines offered cover, but they also funneled men into lanes pre-sighted by enemy guns. Snipers and machine guns covered every approach.

They spotted a pillbox—concrete partially buried in ash, a machine gun protruding through a firing slit. Lucas and the others opened fire with their M1 Garands, then jumped into a nearby trench for cover.

That’s when Lucas looked left and saw a second trench running parallel—twenty feet away.

Eleven Japanese soldiers stared back.

There was no cinematic pause. Both sides fired immediately. Lucas fired twice and dropped two of them.

Then his rifle jammed.

In war, that can be your epitaph.

He bent down to clear it, hands working by muscle memory and panic. That’s when he saw the grenades rolling toward him and the three Marines beside him.

Japanese Type 97 grenades. Four-second fuse.

But this wasn’t the start of the fuse. This was the end.

Two Seconds

Lucas had exactly two seconds before the first grenade detonated.

The ash might absorb some blast, or it might not. The three Marines near him hadn’t seen the grenades yet. There wasn’t time to shove them away, and there wasn’t space to run.

So Lucas screamed one word—“Grenades!”—and threw himself forward.

He landed on the first grenade, chest and ribs against the ash. With his left hand he grabbed the second grenade, pulled it under his body, and forced it down. He drove the butt of his rifle into the ash as if he could bury the explosive deeper, as if dirt could negotiate with steel and fire.

A second passed.

One remained.

He pressed his face into the black sand. His right hand still gripped the jammed rifle. His left hand held the second grenade against his ribs. He could feel both cylinders beneath him—cold metal, absurdly small for something that could erase four lives in an instant.

Then the grenade under his chest exploded.

The blast lifted him three feet into the air and flipped him onto his back. Shrapnel tore into him—hundreds of fragments. His right lung collapsed. His right arm was shredded from shoulder to wrist. Pieces punched into his leg, thigh, chest, face, and neck.

The trench filled with smoke and grit. The concussion threw the other three Marines backward—but they were untouched by the shrapnel.

Lucas had absorbed the entire blast.

When he landed, he was on his back with the second grenade still in his left hand.

That grenade did not explode.

Eight Minutes Alone With Blood and Sky

Lucas couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. Blood filled his collapsed lung. More poured from his arm and chest. He tried to breathe and his chest wouldn’t rise. But he stayed conscious.

He heard rifle fire. He heard the three Marines scramble out of the trench, turn the corner, and empty their weapons into the parallel trench. Within seconds, the Japanese soldiers were dead. The firefight ended. And the battle moved on without him.

When the three Marines looked back and saw smoke and a motionless body, they assumed Lucas was dead. They advanced toward the airfield because on Iwo Jima you didn’t stop for the fallen—not if you wanted anyone left to stop later.

Lucas lay there for eight minutes.

He stared up at a strip of gray sky cut by the trench walls and drifting smoke. He thought about his mother. He thought about the forged signature. He thought about hiding for twenty-nine days to reach this island—only to die in a hole on a place he hadn’t even heard of six weeks earlier.

Then another Marine passed the trench, glanced down, and saw Lucas blink.

A corpsman was called. Two arrived fast, dropped into the trench, and began working. As they treated him, a Japanese soldier popped up to throw another grenade—one corpsman shot him with a pistol before the arm could complete its arc.

Four Marines arrived with a stretcher. They carried Lucas back toward the beach under fire.

He stayed conscious through the whole trip.

Surgery, Shrapnel, and the War Inside His Body

Evacuation took hours. The beach was still under artillery fire. Wounded men waited in rows until darkness allowed boats to approach. Lucas waited, leaking life into bandages, while the island kept killing.

He reached a hospital ship where operating rooms were overwhelmed. A surgeon assessed him: collapsed lung, massive blood loss, hundreds of wounds. Critical—but alive enough to wait.

He waited three hours. Men around him died.

At 2:15 a.m. on February 21st, they rolled him into an operating room. The surgeon opened his chest to repair the lung, closed tears, removed shrapnel pressing against vessels, and worked against time. They extracted dozens of fragments and left many more embedded too deep to remove safely.

Lucas woke later unable to move his right arm, jaw wired shut, breathing an intentional act. Over the next weeks he bounced through hospitals—Guam, Hawaii, California—undergoing surgery after surgery. By the end, more than a hundred pieces of shrapnel would remain inside him permanently.

He had survived the grenades.

Now he had to survive what surviving meant.

The Medal, the Disgrace, and the Problem of Rules

While Lucas was still unconscious, paperwork caught up to him: unauthorized absence. Stowing away. Inserting himself into a unit without permission. The Marine Corps ran on rules, even when rules collided with heroism.

Months later, an officer visited and told him the recommendation was in: Medal of Honor. The highest decoration in the United States. The youngest Marine to receive it.

The charge was eventually dropped. His rank restored. His record adjusted to reflect what happened in that trench.

On October 5th, 1945, Jack Lucas stood at the White House while President Harry Truman placed the medal around his neck. Lucas looked older than seventeen in the photos—thin face, tired eyes, stiff right arm hanging at his side.

He didn’t feel like a hero.

He felt like a teenager who made one decision because three men beside him hadn’t seen the grenades.

That’s the part people forget when they talk about medals: the medal isn’t the moment. It’s what’s left after the moment is already gone.