This article was printed a few years ago in the New Haven Register. Full credit given to author Jim Shelton.

That day, the day he came ashore on Iwo Jima in February 1945, the seas unleashed a stomach-churning fury, accentuated by bursts of enemy fire and the beating of his own heart.

“The place stunk with a rotten egg smell,” recalls Callahan, 82, who served as a Marine in the 5th Engineer Battalion, Company B, attached to the 27th Combat Regiment. “We were told to get off the beach as fast as we could, and that’s what I did.”

Iwo Jima was Callahan’s first and only battle of World War II. He was there less than a week before a shell blast hurled him into the air, injuring his back. He spent nine months in the hospital and earned a Purple Heart before finishing his military hitch in New London.

“I have a scar on my back you can just about put your finger in,” he says. “But they never found any shrapnel in me. My back still hurts now and then. I really don’t think there’s anything exceptional about my war experiences.”

Many Americans might disagree.

As the country prepares for Veterans Day on Saturday, Iwo Jima’s importance shines particularly bright thanks to the new movie “Flags of Our Fathers,” directed by Clint Eastwood. Based on a best-selling book, it tells the story of the soldiers who raised the American flag at Iwo Jima. It also tells of the famous news photo of the flag raising that bolstered the nation’s resolve for winning the war.

Callahan saw the flag flying over Mount Suribachi in person.

“That was the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen,” he says. “Once you saw it on the top of that mountain, you felt, ‘This island is ours.’ It was a relief, too.”

The battle of Iwo Jima, considered by many historians to be a key engagement in the war’s Pacific theater, cost nearly 7,000 American lives. The military awarded 27 Medals of Honor as a result of Iwo Jima, the most of any single battle in U.S. history.

Callahan was part of the third wave of Marines to storm the island, which was defended by 22,000 Japanese troops hunkered down in camouflaged positions and underground bunkers. Callahan, a private, was a demolition man. He came ashore wearing a demolition pack on his chest with squares of TNT, primer cord and blasting caps.

“Our job was to blow up stuff,” he says. “I never got to that stage.”

Callahan had joined the Marines in 1944 after his graduation from Hamden High School. His father was a veteran of World War I, and Callahan was proud to serve during wartime.

“The day of the invasion, I stood with my buddies on the deck of our ship and watched the bombardment,” he recalls. “That whole island was a mass of explosions, smoke and dust. We were told the whole thing would last three days. We thought it would be a cake walk.”

He was there an eventful four days.

Almost as soon as he’d left the beach and started running up a hill, Callahan nearly ran into the aperture of a Japanese pill box. Luckily, the compartment had been abandoned.

He and his buddies soon settled into a constant pattern of digging into a position, then moving forward 50-60 yards, then digging in again. It was both monotonous and terrifying.

Once, he dove into a position where there was another soldier. He spoke to the man, and when he didn’t get an answer, he noticed the soldier in a pool of blood. Another time, Callahan took cover in a hole left by a mortar shell and found a dead Japanese soldier.

“When you come under machine gun fire, you’d be surprised how quick you can dive into a position of shelter,” he says.

Then one day, while on the march, he was hit. There was an explosion behind him which tossed him into the air and over the head of the soldier in front of him. He landed on his backside, with no feeling in his legs.

Even after his comrades removed him from danger, leaving Iwo Jima proved difficult. The small transport he was in nearly capsized several miles off shore, leaving him guessing if he could swim all the way back to the island without using his legs. But it didn’t come to that and Callahan eventually made his way home to finish his service commitment in Connecticut.

He recovered from his injuries, as well. In fact, he remembers saying a quick “Hallelujah” when the feeling in his toes returned.

“I walked with a limp for a long time,” he says.

Then in short order, he got on with his life. Callahan met Eileen Coyle on a blind date in 1946 and married her a year later. They raised four children, living first in Wallingford and then Hamden.

He worked several jobs, including manufacturing equipment sales and teaching at Eli Whitney Vocational Technical School, before retiring at age 65. Eileen died in 1996 and Callahan now lives near the water, where one of his hobbies is carving birds from wood.

Callahan says he doesn’t go out of his way to talk about the war, but he answers questions if people ask him about it. He says his contribution was minor, compared with that of other combat veterans.

“But it was an experience you’d never want to go through again,” he says.