ALTAMONT — It was the fifth day of the Battle of Iwo Jima, the bloodiest Pacific fight of World War II, when Marines raised the flag on Mount Suribachi.

The moment was immortalized in a Feb. 23, 1945 photograph by Joe Rosenthal. Seventy-one years later, to the day, four Marines who were at Iwo Jima remembered the flag-raising as they ate breakfast at the Home Front Café in Altamont. All of them are in their 90s now but each described the battle as vividly as if it had been yesterday.

“I saw it going up,” said Thomas J. Smith. A first flag was raised in the morning, soon after the mountaintop was captured.

“There was noise everywhere, with ships blaring their horns and cannons going off,” said Dick Varone.

“I saw it twice,” said Smith. “The first one was a small flag; they sent to a ship to get a bigger one. It was quite a thrill.”

The second flag-raising was the one Rosenthal photographed, creating an iconic symbol — sculpted for the Marine Corps War Memorial and appearing on postage stamps.

“I was lying in a hole on my back with my rifle over my shoulder,” said Salvatore Famularo. “I started hearing all these horns from ships. I said, ‘What the hell is going on?’”

Another Marine answered, “They just secured Mount Suribachi.”

“I struggled up to take a look. He said, ‘Pal, stay where you are or you’ll get picked off.’” Famularo caught a glimpse of the original flag, which he remembers to this day.

Smith was a runner on Iwo Jima and was 18 at the time. He worked between the lines at night. “The job was to listen,” he said.

Smith was wounded three times and has two Purple Hearts. He came home to study at the University of Miami, earned a doctorate degree, and ended up overseeing 58 schools.

“When the war was over with, it was over with. I never thought about it again till 1999,” he said. He met Sal Famularo at Wal-Mart. Famularo was wearing a Marines cap

“Were you in the Marine Corps?” asked Smith.

“Are you blind?” rejoined Famularo.

They got to talking and discovered they had both been in the 4th Marine Division, 2nd Battalion. Famularo was in George Company and Smith in Fox Company. “They moved together,” said Famularo of the two companies. “We developed a close relationship.”

That encounter opened the floodgates. The two formed a group of Iwo Jima survivors “We had 12 men; four are left,” said Smith.

He wrote his memories, long kept to himself, into a book — 138 spiral-bound pages, printed last year. “My dad wanted to know what took place. I could never tell him,” said Smith.

“There were 22,000 Japanese living underground, in tunnels and caves. By day, you didn’t see anyone. They came out at twilight and you’d fight at night,” said Smith describing the challenge of taking Iwo Jima.

He wrote in his book, “The enemy troops numbered about 23,000 and by the time the flag-raising took place, our total troops had suffered about 13,000 casualties, including over 3,000 dead.”

The battle to win Iwo Jima lasted 36 days. “Before the island was secure,” Smith wrote, “we would suffer another 11,000 casualties and we would take the lives of almost all of the enemy. Over 6,000 of our men lost their lives fighting on Iwo.”

Smith said as he held a fork over his plate of eggs and potatoes, “It was a living hell.”

He wrote in his book, “The enemy troops were not inexperienced. We were fighting some of Japan’s best warriors, battle tested and sworn to defend their homeland and give their lives for the emperor.”

He also wrote, “I believe just about everyone on Iwo Jima and many of the ships at sea could see the flag raising on Suribachi on February 23, 1945. It was a good feeling and a great moment of pride for us to see the Stars and Stripes go up and fly over the island.

“Up to this point, the battle was really tough and the worst fighting we had ever encountered and I still wonder how any of us got off the beach alive. The Lord was good!”

Lucky in Hell

Dick Varone was a forward observer with the Fifth Division of Marines. “They’d send me up to the front. I was a radioman. When a machine-gun nest held us up, I would radio back so the flame-throwers could burn them out.”

Varone said that the anniversary of the flag-raising “just reminds me how lucky I was to get through it and go home.”

He returned home to a father who expected him to run the family’s hotel and restaurant. “I tried it and didn’t like it,” said Varone. Instead, he had a 30-year career working for General Electric Silicone.

“You never forget it,” Varone said of the fierce fighting on Iwo Jima. Referring to his priest, he said, “Father Patterson would talk about purgatory and Hell. I’d tell him  ‘I’ve already been there. I was at Iwo Jima.’”

Tom Lemme spent 13 days in the front lines without knowing most of his company — Company G, 2nd Battalion, 25th Marines — was killed. Pointing from his seat at the back of the café the 30 or so feet to the front windows, he said, “I was that far away and I never realized my company was wiped out. I was always down in the foxhole. You didn’t dare raise your head.” One time, he said, “I raised my head to fire and a bullet came by my head.”

Lemme went on, “One night, three of us dug a foxhole.” The three men took turns, with one on watch for an hour while the other two slept. It was Lemme’s turn to sleep when, he recalled,  “A hand grenade went off. I heard it with my eyes shut,” said Lemme. “The kid on watch got killed.”

It wasn’t just wounds from the grenade that hurt the watchman. Lemme explained that the watchman had yelled, “There’s a Jap.” Lemme said, “Someone in the next foxhole shot him.” That soldier, said Lemme, “When he realized he hit the kid on watch, he cracked; he cracked.”

Lemme returned home to his family and its business of running food markets. He managed a store at Lake and State streets in Albany for 40-odd years. Then he got interested in archery and sold archery equipment.

Famularo was 19, a rifleman, when he got shot on Iwo Jima. “I got shot in the leg and had shrapnel wounds all over,” he said. He lifted up his shirtsleeve to show one of the scars on his upper arm. “My friends said to me, ‘Sal, don’t drink water. It will leak out all over.’”

After the war, Famularo worked as a bartender “in the better places and restaurants,” he said.

He says he feels “very privileged” to be part of the Iwo Jima Survivors group. “We all have something in common,” he said. “We were in the most elite branch of the service there ever was. The Army has its mules, but the Navy’s got its Marines.”

The anniversary of the flag-raising means a lot to him, said Famularo. “When I landed at Iwo, I was a snotty-nosed kid,” he said.

Famularo got wounded four days after the flag-raising, on Feb. 27, 1945. “I was picked up by a tank. It went right over me, dropped an escape hatch, and picked me up. They took me to the beach. I was lying on the beach, waiting for a LCVP to take me out to a hospital ship,” he said of a Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel.

He was taken to a hospital on Guam where he started his five months of recovery and was “tickled to death” when he was flown home.

But it didn’t erase his memory of lying on the beach, wounded — waiting.

“On the beach, as far as your eye could see, there were hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of wounded and dead Marines waiting to be put aboard the Higgins boat.

“Guys were screaming — calling for their mothers, calling for their wives. How I managed to stay not off my rocker, I’ll never know...I just wanted to get home.”