Don Graves is 101 years old. William "Billy" Byrd is 100. They met as 19-year-old Marines in the 28th Regiment, watched the American flag go up on Mount Suribachi on February 23, 1945, and this Memorial Day weekend they stood together again in Washington, D.C., honorary grand marshals of the National Memorial Day Parade.
Of the 335 men in their unit who fought on Iwo Jima, only 18 walked off the island alive. Today, Graves and Byrd are the only two still living.
That single fact should stop every American in their tracks. In a country that spends most of its public energy arguing about the next election cycle, two centenarians who bled for the republic traveled to the nation's capital to remind us what sacrifice actually looks like, and what it costs.
Byrd's trip to Washington was itself a small act of courage. The only plane he had ever boarded before this reunion was a military aircraft in 1944. He had never taken a commercial flight. He had never visited Washington, D.C.
At 100, he overcame a lifelong fear of flying to get there.
Think about that for a moment. A man who stormed one of the most heavily fortified islands in the Pacific, a battle that killed or wounded roughly 26,000 Americans in five weeks, had to summon fresh nerve just to board a passenger jet. The contrast says something about the quiet, undramatic way that generation carried its burdens. They did not broadcast their anxieties. They managed them and moved forward.
Kenny Cunningham of the American Veterans Center, which helped organize the veterans' appearance, described the reunion as filled with stories that time had not dulled.
"Throughout the weekend, they talked about what they remembered from being young guys on Iwo Jima... fun moments like teasing their friend Ira Hayes about becoming famous for raising the flag in the iconic photo. They remembered it like it was last week."
Ira Hayes, a name most schoolchildren once knew. He was the Pima Indian Marine photographed helping raise the flag on Suribachi, an image that became arguably the most famous war photograph ever taken. Graves and Byrd knew him not as a symbol, but as a buddy they ribbed about his sudden fame.
That detail alone collapses the distance between a bronze monument and the flesh-and-blood boys who lived the moment. Hayes, Graves, Byrd, they were teenagers doing a job that most of us cannot imagine.
Three hundred thirty-five men. Eighteen survivors. Two still breathing.
Those figures deserve to sit in plain view without commentary. The 28th Marine Regiment was tasked with capturing Mount Suribachi, the volcanic peak that dominated Iwo Jima's southern tip and gave Japanese defenders a clear line of fire over the invasion beaches. The regiment paid for that objective in blood.
Graves and Byrd have carried those losses for more than 80 years. They carried them through decades of peacetime, through Korea and Vietnam and the Cold War and every conflict since, through the slow disappearance of every man who shared their foxholes. And they carried them down Constitution Avenue as grand marshals, representing not just themselves but 317 brothers who never came home or who have since passed on.
Memorial Day parades have become, in too many cities, an afterthought, a long weekend of sales and cookouts. The holiday's original purpose can feel abstract when the last World War II veterans are over 100 and vanishing fast.
Graves and Byrd are a living rebuke to that drift. Their presence in Washington is a reminder that the freedoms Americans argue about every day were purchased at a price most of us have never been asked to pay. The men who paid it did not ask for applause. They asked for a country worth the cost.
The American Veterans Center deserves credit for making the reunion happen. Connecting two centenarians across the country, getting one of them onto his first commercial flight, and placing them at the head of a national parade is logistical work that honors the mission the organization claims. When institutions do what they say they exist to do, it is worth noting.
Graves and Byrd have been friends for 81 years. They met as boys, survived what most of their unit did not, and now share a bond that no civilian experience can replicate. Their reunion was not a media event engineered for clicks. It was two old Marines sitting together, talking about Iwo Jima and Ira Hayes and the things only they remember.
In an era that treats military service as a biographical line item or a political prop, their weekend in Washington was something rarer: an unscripted encounter between two men who earned every honor a grateful nation can offer and never demanded any of them.
We are running out of time to hear their voices. When the last Iwo Jima veteran is gone, the battle passes entirely into books and monuments. Right now, it still lives in the memories of Don Graves and Billy Byrd, sharp, they say, as last week.
A country that cannot pause to honor that has forgotten what it owes.
