Bill Montgomery doesn’t hear too well these days. At 95, he’s deaf in his right ear and struggling with his left. But he can still hear the sounds of war that pounded his 20-year-old eardrums on a rocky, pork-chop-shaped island called Iwo Jima. And he still remembers the unbridled joy he felt the day he saw the U.S. flag raised there, an event forever etched in the annals of American military history.

“It was the fifth day after we landed,” he recalls. “I was all alone, lying on a slope on the edge of an airfield, when I heard some ships’ horns sounding. And cheering started from guys in the foxholes.”

He cast his eyes to the summit of 554-foot Mount Surabachi,