John Wayne Met A Real IWO JIMA Marine At His Movie Premiere—The Salute Changed His Life

Washington D.C. September 1949. There are cities that understand ceremony the way other cities understand commerce or weather. Washington is one of them. It is a city built for the long view, for the marble and the distance and the deliberate framing of what a nation wants to say about itself when it is speaking to itself formally.

The avenues are wide on purpose. The buildings are large on purpose. Everything is arranged to produce the feeling that what is happening here is larger than any one person, which is either reassuring or oppressive depending on the day and what you’re carrying when you arrive. On a Thursday evening in September of 1949, the Lowe’s Capital Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue was hosting the Washington premiere of Sands of Eoima.

Republic Pictures director Alan Dwan. John Wayne is Sergeant John Striker, a hard-edged Marine drill instructor who is difficult to like and impossible not to follow and who dies in the last minutes of the picture in the way that the men you depend on always seem to die. At the moment when you have finally understood what they were.

It was Wayne’s best performance to that point. Most of the people who saw it knew that while they were watching it, the premiere had the full weight of the occasion behind it. The Marine Corps was there officially. officers in dress blues, a color guard. The kind of institutional presence that the core brings to things when it has decided the thing reflects well on what it is and what it asks of its people.

And in the crowd, not in the official delegation, not in dress blues, in a dark civilian suit that fit the way civilian suits fit men who have spent years in uniform and have not entirely stopped being in uniform even after the uniform is gone. A man named Edgar Huff. He was 32 years old.

He had been at Eojima, not in the picture, on the island. February to March of 1945, 36 days of the worst fighting in the Pacific theater of the war on a volcanic island 8 square miles in size where the Japanese had constructed a defensive network so thorough and so deep that the Marines who took it paid for every yard of it separately. Edgar Huff had paid.

He had the paper to show for it. The citations and the commendations and the documentation of what he had done on that island and what it had cost him and what he had given. But paper is not what the night was about. The night was about walking into a theater in Washington and watching a movie about the thing he had done and seeing whether it was true.

This is what happened. First, Edgar Huff. He grew up in Gadston, Alabama, which in the 1920s and 30s was a steel town on the Kusa River with the particular economy and social structure of a steel town in Alabama in that era, which meant it had a specific geography of what was available to whom and where, a geography Edgar Huff had learned before he was old enough to read.

His father worked in the mills. His grandfather had worked in the mills. The mills were the floor, the thing that was available, the thing that the men in his family had done, because it was what was offered, and because a man works with what is offered, and finds his dignity in the doing of it rather than in the offering.

Edgar was not going to the mills, not from rebellion, from calculation. He was a precise and serious young man who had looked at what the floor produced and decided there was a ceiling available to him if he could find the right door. The Marine Corps was the door. He enlisted in 1942, which was the year the Corps was taking men it had not previously taken, which is to say black men, because the war had made certain necessities clear that peace had allowed to remain obscure.

He went to Montford Point, the segregated training camp in North Carolina, where the first black Marines were trained. Montford Point was its own kind of thing, a place where men who had been told their whole lives what they could not do were trained to do things that most men could not.

Edgar Huff was one of the best of them, not as a thing he performed, as a thing that emerged from the training because the training had found something that was already there and given it a form. He was a natural leader in the way that is difficult to define and impossible to fake. Men followed him not because of rank, though rank came, but because of the quality of his attention to the people under him.

He noticed things. He remembered things. He understood that the man next to you is not interchangeable with the next man and that treating him as though he has cost you things you cannot afford to lose when it matters most. It mattered most at Eojima. He did not talk about Eojima easily or often. Men who were actually there generally did not.

The ones who talked easily about it were usually describing something adjacent to it, something related, but not the thing itself. The thing itself was not easy to talk about, not because it was shameful, but because language was not built to carry it without losing something essential in the translation.

Edgar Huff carried it. He carried it in the way that men carry things that are too large to put down and too important to drop, by building a life around the carrying, by becoming someone whose size was adequate to the weight. After the war, he had stayed in the core, not because the war was where he belonged, but because the core was, and the core was not done needing what he had to offer.

He was a master sergeant in 1949. He was one of the most decorated black marines in the core’s history at that point. He was in a dark civilian suit at the LSE Capital Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue watching a movie about Eoima to see if it was true. The picture was true in the ways that pictures can be true.

It was true in the physical texture of it, the weight of the equipment and the mud and the noise which the production had worked at and gotten closer than most. It was true in the relationships between the men, the specific dynamic of a unit under sustained pressure, which is not camaraderie in the easy sense, but something more complicated.

The mutual dependency of people who cannot afford to fail each other and know it. It was true in the way Sergeant Striker was true, which is to say it was true about a kind of man rather than a specific man. The kind who is not likable and is necessary. The kind who takes the weight of other people’s survival onto himself and carries it without asking for acknowledgement and dies with it still on his shoulders.

Edgar Huff had known men like Striker. He had been in certain respects aversion of that man himself, not the drinking or the bitterness, the taking on of weight, the refusal to let the men below him fail if there was anything left in him to prevent it. He watched the picture and he watched Wayne and he ran the internal accounting that men who have done the real thing always run when watching the performed version.

Not looking for failure, looking for truth, he found more of it than he expected. Not all of it. There are things a picture cannot be true about because the things themselves cannot be reproduced outside the conditions that produce them. The smell, the sound at 3:00 a.m. on a volcanic island when the silence means something is about to happen.

The specific weight of carrying a man who cannot carry himself across ground that does not want to be crossed. But what a picture could be true about this one was. When the lights came up, Edgar Huff sat in his seat for a moment. Then he went to find the man who had played Striker. The postcreening reception was in the theat’s mezzanine. It had the quality of all such events, the pressed suits and the careful conversations and the sense of occasion being properly observed.

the Marine Corps officers from the official delegation, the Republic pictures people, the Washington press, the civic and political figures for whom this kind of premiere was part of the social calendar of the city. Wayne was at the center of it in the way that he was always at the center of such rooms, not by positioning himself there, but by being who he was and having the room arrange itself accordingly.

Edgar Huff worked his way through the room. He did not rush it. He was not the kind of man who rushed things. He had a master sergeant’s patience, which is the patience of a man who has learned that the right moment produces better results than the forced one. He found the right moment at the edge of the main group. When Wayne had turned from one conversation and not yet been absorbed into the next, he stepped forward.

Wayne turned. He looked at Edgar Huff. and Edgar Huff, Master Sergeant, United States Marine Corps, veteran of Ewima, one of the most decorated black Marines in the history of the corps, came to attention and saluted not as a performance for the room, as a private thing done in public, the salute of a man who has decided that the person in front of him has earned the acknowledgement and is going to give it regardless of where they are.

Wayne looked at the salute. He looked at the man giving it. Something moved across his face. He had received applause. He had received awards. He had received the specific approval of audiences and studios and critics and all the apparatus of public recognition that his career had generated. He had not received this a salute from a man who had been on the island.

He came to attention himself. He returned it. The room around them had gone quiet in the particular way that rooms go quiet when something is happening that is not part of the program. They talked for an hour, not in the middle of the reception. Wayne moved them to the edge of it, a quieter corner, and they stood there while the event went on around them.

And neither of them gave it much attention, Wayne asked. That was the first thing he asked. Not the polite questions of a famous man acknowledging a fan or even the respectful questions of a man acknowledging a veteran. The real questions. What was it like? What did the picture get right? What did it miss? What was the thing that could not be put in a picture? Edgar Huff answered.

He answered with the precision of a man who has been carrying something for four years and has been waiting without knowing he was waiting for someone to ask the right questions. He told Wayne about the volcanic ash, about how it was not like any ground he had trained on, not sand and not soil, but something that swallowed your boots and offered nothing back that you could not get purchase in no matter how strong your legs were.

He told Wayne about the noise or tried to and said what he always said when he tried to tell it, which was that it was not possible to explain the noise to someone who had not been in it and that he would not insult Wayne by pretending otherwise. He told Wayne about the men, not as a group, as individuals. He told him about two men specifically, men from his unit, men who had not come back.

And he told it the way he always told those stories when he told them, which was factually with their names and what they had done, because the facts were what mattered and the facts were what he owed them. Wayne listened. He listened for an hour. He asked questions that showed he had been listening. Specific questions about specific things Edgar had said, follow-up questions.

the questions of a man who is not waiting for his turn to talk, but is actually inside what is being said. At some point in the hour, Wayne said something that Edgar would later describe as the thing that stayed with him longest from the night. He said, “I have been playing soldiers and marines and soldiers again for 15 years.

And tonight is the first time I have sat with a man who did the real thing and asked him what it was. He said it without self-pity and without performing the guilt of it. As a fact, he was noting about himself that he found significant.” Edgar looked at him. He said, “You asked the right questions. That counts for something.

” Wayne said, “It’s not enough.” Edgar said, “No, but it’s a start.” They exchanged information before the evening was over. Not formally. Wayne wrote his contact at the studio on a card. Edgar gave him the base contact in North Carolina. Wayne called the following week. He called specifically to ask about Montford Point.

He had not known about Montford Point. He had not known about the history of black marines, the resistance within the core to their inclusion, the specific fight that had been fought before the first black marine ever reached a training ground, the men who had trained at Montford Point and gone to the Pacific and done what Edgar Huff had done.

He had not known because he had not asked. He asked now. Edgar told him the call lasted 2 hours, not the length of the conversation they had had at the reception. longer because the questions were more and the material was larger and Edgar Huff was a man who could account for it and Wayne was a man who was genuinely trying to understand it.

At the end of the call, Wayne said he wanted to help. Edgar asked what that meant in practical terms. Wayne said he was not sure yet, but that he intended to find out what it meant in practical terms took several forms over the following years. It meant that Wayne used whatever platform he had, which was a significant one, to speak to the contributions of black Marines in the Pacific theater in contexts where he had not previously spoken of them.

Not as a campaign, not as a public position he announced and asked to be credited for. in conversations, in interviews when the subject of Eoima came up. In the specific moments when he was the person with the microphone and the thing could be said, it meant that he pushed within the limited sphere of what a movie star could push in the film industry of the early 1950s for the depiction of black servicemen in war pictures to move closer to accuracy.

He did not win that argument often. The industry was what it was, but he made the argument. It meant that he stayed in contact with Edgar Huff. Not constantly, not the contact of close friends who see each other regularly. The contact of men who have had a conversation that mattered and who check in because the checking in is a way of honoring that the conversation mattered.

Wayne called when he had a question. when he was preparing for a role that involved military material and wanted to know if he was getting it right. Edgar answered, “He told Wayne when he was right and he told him when he was wrong because that was the point of being the man you called to get it right and you did not honor that by softening the correction.

” Edgar Huff retired from the Marine Corps in 1972. He was a sergeant major by then, the highest enlisted rank in the core, which is not a rank you arrive at through anything other than 30 years of doing what the core requires and being trusted to lead men through it. His career had been its own argument.

He had made the argument not by making it, but by the fact of the career, which was the same argument a saddle sitting on a shelf makes, which is that the work is the argument, and the work speaks for itself if the work is right. The Montford Point Marines were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2012. It was 67 years after the battle they had fought, which is the kind of interval that is not unusual for official recognition of the contributions of black servicemen in American history.

And the length of the interval is its own kind of statement. Edgar Huff was alive for the ceremony. He was 95 years old. He had been his whole life a precise and serious man who looked at what was available and built what he could from it and did not wait for the world to be different before he started building.

He received the medal with the same quality he had brought to everything else. Present, attentive, unwilling to let the moment be less than it was. He died in 2013 at 96. His obituary ran in papers across the country. It named the Congressional Gold Medal. It named Ewima. It named the 30 years of service. It did not mention a Thursday evening in September of 1949, a corner of a reception in Washington, a salute given and returned.

Some things are not for obituaries, some things live in what came after them. Wayne was nominated for the Academy Award for best actor for Sands of Eoima in 1950. He did not win. He won 20 years later for True Grit in 1970. The Rooster Cogburn performance. The one shaped by an afternoon with an 81-year-old man in a camp chair outside a trailer in the canyon country outside Oay.

The chain of influence is not always straight, but it is always there. The salute at the Lowe’s Capital Theater in 1949 produced a phone call the following week, and the phone call produced 2 hours of conversation about Montford Point, and the conversation produced 20 years of contact. and the contact produced in ways that cannot be traced in straight lines but can be felt in the aggregate.

A different kind of attention. Wayne paid more attention after that night. Not to everything. He was not transformed. He was the same man with the same considerable limitations and the same considerable qualities. But he paid more attention to what the men who had done the real thing had actually done. He asked more. He listened more.

He let what they told him land instead of processing it into what he already understood. That is not nothing for a man whose work was about those men, about the American character and extremists, about what people do when the moment demands everything, paying attention to what the real version of those people had actually done and been and given. That is not nothing.

It is close to everything. A salute in a theater given by a man who had earned the right to give it by doing the thing the picture was about. returned by a man who understood in the moment it was returned that he was receiving something he had not been given before and might not deserve but was going to try to be worthy of.

20 years of intermittent contact of questions and answers of a man with a platform being told when he was right and when he was wrong and being willing to hear both. A congressional gold medal in 2012 67 years late. A career that made the argument by being the argument. 30 years of it no gap in the record. The chain does not run straight, but it runs from a volcanic island in the Pacific to a mezzanine in Washington to a phone call in October to 20 years of getting it more right than it would have been otherwise. That is what a salute can do.

If the right person returns it, if the returning of it is the beginning of something and not just the gesture Wayne made at the beginning, Edgar Huff let him, that is the whole of it, that is exactly enough. picking up from the end of the Edgar Wayne contact section, adding 400 words before the closing movement.

There is something specific that Wayne said in a 1962 interview with a journalist from the Los Angeles Examiner that the journalist almost did not include because it did not seem to fit the profile he was writing, which was a profile about Wayne’s upcoming production schedule and his thoughts on the western as a genre. The journalist had asked as a kind of closing question what Wayne thought the difference was between playing a soldier and understanding one.

Wayne was quiet for a moment. He said, “I used to think they were closer than they are. I played enough soldiers that I started to believe the playing was a form of knowing. It isn’t. The playing is a form of pointing. You point at the thing, and if you point well enough, people look in the right direction. But you are not the thing.” The journalist wrote it down.

He almost cut it. He left it in because it was the most interesting thing Wayne had said in two hours and he was a journalist and his job was to put the most interesting things in. It ran in the examiner in November of 1962. Edgar Huff read it in Jacksonville, North Carolina, where he was stationed at the time. He cut it out.

He put it in the small notebook he carried, the one where he kept things worth keeping, addresses and phone numbers, and the names of men he wanted to remember, and occasionally a thing someone had said that was true enough to record. The clipping was in the notebook when Edgar retired in 1972. It was in the notebook when his daughter found the notebook in his house in Gadston after he died in 2013.

She read it. She read the whole notebook carefully, the addresses of men, most of whom were gone, and the names and the occasional true thing. She said later that the Wayne clipping was not the most important thing in the notebook. She said there were names in there that mattered more. The names of men from Ewoima and from 30 years of service.

The names her father had been keeping because keeping them was the form is honoring took. But she said the clipping was in there which meant her father had decided it was worth keeping which meant the man had gotten something right which is in the end what we are all trying to do. If this one found you, pass it on.

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