Fightin' Marines #65

A young Marine named Ben Kartek finds himself nearly alone on Iwo Jima's volcanic Hill 119—grimly nicknamed Headstone Hill by his platoon leader Lt. Elliott Wayne—when Japanese soldiers begin emerging from hidden caves and tunnels to pick off the stragglers. Crawling through the warren of passages to escape, Kartek discovers the enemy's strategy: they've dug in below the ridge, waiting for the Marines to pass before striking from behind. Racing back to report his findings, Kartek helps Colonel Simms devise a counterattack that turns the tables, sending the battalion into the caves to fight the Japanese where they've made their stand.

During his fourth combat mission, Marine pilot 1st Lt. Chet Boland is forced to bail out over an unfamiliar Pacific island after Japanese Zeros damage his plane—and there he encounters Edwin Frees, a New Zealand coast watcher monitoring enemy movements. When Boland learns of a nearby Japanese fueling station stocked with ammunition and supplies meant for the enemy fleet, the two men decide to strike together, turning a chance meeting into a dangerous two-man assault on a heavily guarded installation.

When P.F.C. Carmody joins the First Platoon in Korea during the brutal winter of 1951, the seasoned Marines view him as a liability—an untested kid who doesn't know how to survive. As the platoon fights its way through waves of Chinese attackers around the Chosin Reservoir, Carmody struggles to prove himself, making mistakes that put his squad in danger while the men around him grow increasingly tense about his safety. When catastrophe seems certain, Carmody must find the grit to become the Marine he insisted he could be.

S/Sgt. Sam Lloyd, a military advisor stationed in Saigon, rescues a Vietnamese farmer named Kafoum from the Viet-Cong and sees potential in the terrified man—so Lloyd takes it upon himself to train Kafoum and other villagers in weapons and combat tactics on his own time. What begins as one soldier's grassroots effort to arm the helpless transforms Kafoum into a fierce fighter and inspirational leader, turning an entire village into a force against Communist terror.