(CNSNews.com) - Under a bright Memorial Day sun, Gordon Ward was thinking about much darker times. It was pitch dark, in fact, on the night of February 19, 1945 when the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions stormed Iwo Jima and came under attack from the Japanese.

Ward, a corporal in the 4th Marine Division, was struck in his right leg by mortar fire, but unlike his wounded comrade who crawled with him along the beach, he survived.

"I was up on the front when I got hit," Ward, 84, told Cybercast News Service as he stood in the shadow of the Iwo Jima Memorial in Washington, D.C., on Monday, wearing his Iowa Jima Survivor baseball cap. Under his arm, he carried a folder of black and white photos, including one showing him receiving the Purple Heart.

He recalled the medical corpsman who tried to come to his aid. "He came within 10 feet of me and he got hit and died right there," Ward said.

After that, Ward remembers being lifted onto a stretcher, only to see one of men holding it go down. The next Marine who lifted the stretcher tried to adjust Ward's leg to keep the bone from protruding, applied a tourniquet and gave him a morphine injection -- right before he, too, was killed.

"He probably saved my life," Ward said. "They shot him and he died right on top of me."

When Allied Forces combed the beach at dawn, Ward still lay wounded beneath the fallen comrade who had tried to rescue him. He heard one of them speak. "'Hey, this guy looks like he's alive,'" he said. "I said, 'Yeah, I'm alive.'"

Even when Ward was loaded onto a landing craft, he still wasn't safe. "There were bullet holes in it and water was coming in," Ward said. "I thought I was going to drown because I couldn't hold my head up."

A wounded Marine came to his aid. "He had a bandage over one eye, but with the eye he could see with he could see I was going to die. He held my head up."

Ward finally made it to a military hospital in his native upstate New York. Another black and white photo in his folder shows famed actor Boris Karloff signing his body cast at the hospital.

Ward, who joined the Marines in June 1941 at age 17, spent 24 hours in the battle to secure Iwo Jima. He was honorably discharged as a 22-year-old sergeant in March 1946.

In the 36-day assault to win Iwo Jima, the Allied Forces suffered 27,909 causalities, with 6,825 killed in action. Of the 20,000 Japanese defenders, only 1,083 survived.

At 8 a.m. on Feb. 23, 1945, a patrol of 40 men from 3rd Platoon, E Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines, led by 1st Lieutenant Harold G. Schrier, assembled at the base of Mount Suribachi. The platoon's mission was to take the crater of Suribachi's peak and raise the U.S. flag.

At 10:20 a.m., the first of two flags raised on the peak was hoisted on a steel pipe above the island by First Lieutenant Harold Schrier, platoon commander, Sergeant Ernest I. Thomas, platoon sergeant, Corporal Charles W. Lindberg, and Private First Class James R. Nicel.

As for Ward, after he recovered he asked the woman he'd met in Cuba before he was deployed to marry him. Although Carmen, who was born in Spain, spoke little English, Ward said he wasn't bothered by the language barrier.

"I just took one look at her and I fell in love," he said of the woman who has now been his wife for 64 years. "I think she's a beautiful gal."

On this Memorial Day in 2008, Carmen is still by his side, sitting in a wheelchair under the shade of a nearby tree. Ward, who lives in Maryland, said he has visited the memorial more than 600 times to talk with visitors.

On this day, their mentally disabled son, Gordy, is videotaping his father being interviewed, as tourists gather around him to shake his hand and thank him for his service to his country.

"I used to be young, too," he told a young girl who asked if she could be photographed with him. Ward, who still smiles like the young man photographed in military blues, laughed as he posed. "I wasn't born this way," said Ward, who wears an orthopedic shoe on his right foot and walks with the aid of a cane.

On this Memorial Day, hearing the stories of men like Ward reminds us that Monday was not just the last day of a three-day weekend, but a time to honor the men and women who paid the ultimate price for our freedom -- and those who lived to tell about it.

As Admiral Chester W. Nimitz put it in March 1945:

"The battle of Iwo Island has been won. The United States Marines by their individual and collective courage have conquered a base which is as necessary to us in our continuing forward movement toward final victory as it was vital to the enemy in staving off ultimate defeat.

By their victory, the 3rd, 4th and 5th Marine Divisions and other units of the Fifth Amphibious Corps have made an accounting to their country which only history will be able to value fully. Among the Americans who served on Iwo Island, uncommon valor was a common virtue."

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