Luck Reunites Wartime Pals After 47 Years : Friends: Marine buddies fought on Iwo Jima and later lost touch. Come to find out, they’ve lived only a mile apart for 20 years.
Clay LeRoy never thought he’d see his old Marine buddy Elmer Reinmiller again.
The two men had been close once, as close as two friends could be. They’d served in the Marine Corps during some of the bloodiest fighting in the Pacific Theater in World War II. LeRoy had even saved Reinmiller’s life one terrible day on a killing field called Iwo Jima.
But after the war they lost touch, and later LeRoy heard that Reinmiller had been killed in the Korean War.
It took a car accident on a Los Angeles freeway, 47 years after they had last seen each other, to reunite the two friends. It was only then that Clay LeRoy and the still very much alive Elmer Reinmiller realized that they’d been living within a mile of each other for the past two decades.
“It’s almost like a miracle,” said LeRoy, 67, as he and Reinmiller sat in the living room of LeRoy’s Hermosa Beach home.
“I couldn’t believe it,” added Reinmiller, 72. “Still can’t.”
The story begins in 1942, when LeRoy, a 17-year-old, fresh-out-of-boot-camp Marine from Wisconsin met Reinmiller, a 22-year-old Marine from Reno, Nev., at a military camp near San Diego. Both were assigned to a motor pool for the 9th Marine Regiment. The two young men became friends; LeRoy admired and respected the older Marine, who because of his advanced age was called Pops.
“Can you imagine being called Pops at age 22?” Reinmiller says now, chuckling.
In January, 1943, LeRoy and Reinmiller found themselves on a troop ship heading for New Zealand. From there they started island-hopping toward Japan with Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 9th Regiment of the 3rd Marine Division--Guadalcanal, Bougainville, Guam. Then in February, 1945, the two Marine buddies landed with thousands of other Marines on Iwo Jima, a tiny piece of volcanic rock midway between Saipan and Tokyo, defended by 21,000 dug-in Japanese soldiers.
“It was terrible,” LeRoy recalled. “You had Japanese in front of you, Japanese in back of you, Japanese under you in those tunnels that they had. It was a just terrible place to be.”
The Marines paid a heavy price on Iwo Jima. Almost 6,000 of them never made it off the island alive; another 17,000 would carry the scars of Iwo Jima for the rest of their lives. Only about 200 Japanese soldiers were captured or surrendered; all the rest were killed.
It was on March 11, 1945, midway through the battle for Iwo Jima, that Elmer Reinmiller was hit.
“We were walking through a minefield, about 50 yards from this tank that was sitting there, when a mortar round exploded off to the right,” LeRoy recalled. “I crawled over to a foxhole, and then I looked back and I saw Elmer raise his head, he had blood coming from his head. That shrapnel must have passed right over my head and hit him. So I went over and scooped him up and put him on a Jeep and took him back to an aid station.”
“If it hadn’t been for Clay I wouldn’t be sitting here now,” said Reinmiller. “I know that for certain.”
Reinmiller was air-evacuated back to Guam, where he underwent two operations to remove the shrapnel from his head. LeRoy survived Iwo Jima unscathed and later met up with Reinmiller back on Guam. In April, 1945, LeRoy and Reinmiller, now recuperated, had both accumulated enough time to be shipped back to the states. Both became drill instructors at the recruit depot in San Diego.
Reinmiller got his discharge in December, 1945, and headed home for Reno, but he had immediate trouble adjusting to civilian life. Thirteen days after he got out of the Marines, he re-enlisted. LeRoy mustered out in January, 1946, and moved to Minnesota.
The two buddies lost touch after that, although they say they often thought of each other and the experiences they’d had together in the war. LeRoy lived in Minnesota for 14 years before moving to the Los Angeles area. He and his wife, Lynn, lived in Lynwood and later bought a home in Hermosa Beach.
In 1963 LeRoy was passing through Reinmiller’s hometown, Reno, and started asking around to see if anyone knew his old pal’s whereabouts. Someone at the post office told LeRoy that Elmer Reinmiller had been killed in Korea.
Reinmiller and his wife, Ruth, meanwhile, bought a home in Manhattan Beach in 1960, and he later retired from the Marines as a sergeant major after 22 years of service.
The story might have ended there. But one Sunday afternoon last month, as Ruth Reinmiller was driving to a garden show in Costa Mesa with her granddaughter Kelli Ann, she pulled off the freeway exit ramp and was stopped at a stop sign when a small truck hit her 1984 Honda from behind.
No one was hurt, but the car needed body work. The next day the Reinmillers’ insurance agent, Carroll Harrison, recommended that she take the car to Edgar’s Peninsula Auto Body in Lomita. Although the body shop was a good distance away, the Reinmillers decided they wanted a good repair job. They dropped the car off the next day.
A few days later, Clay LeRoy, who for the past five years has been productions manager at Edgar’s Auto Body, happened to notice the name Reinmiller on a work order.
“I hadn’t heard that name since I was in the Marine Corps,” LeRoy said. He checked the car registration and saw the name Elmer Reinmiller and his heart started beating a little faster.
“Were you in the Marine Corps?” Clay asked the man who answered the phone at the Reinmillers’ home. “Ninth Regiment? Third Division?”
Reinmiller, not sure who was calling, answered yes to each question.
“Did you know a person named LeRoy?” he asked.
“I sure did!” Reinmiller said.
The next day the two Marine buddies met each other for the first time in almost half a century.
“Tears came to my eyes,” LeRoy said. “It’s one of the greatest things that ever happened to me.”
“I still can hardly believe it,” said Reinmiller.
Although the men had lived within a mile of each other for 20 years, and even shopped at the same supermarket, both doubt they would have recognized each other by sight.
It took coincidence to reunite the two old Marines. Now they have been spending many hours remembering the old times, the good and the bad, and their wives have become friends as well.
And this time, they say they won’t lose touch.