He saw the grenade land between the two men directing the mortar fire, and he did not hesitate. Private First Class John New threw himself onto it, and on this very date, the 25th of September 1944, he died on the coral of Peleliu so that two other Marines would live. New was with the 7th Marines on Peleliu, the savage coral island whose landing I told you about back on the 15th, now ten days into the grinding, waterless nightmare of clearing the ridges cave by cave. On the 25th he was at an observation post on a cliff, where two Marines were directing mortar fire down onto Japanese positions, calling the rounds onto the enemy emplacements below. A Japanese soldier emerged from a cave in the cliff directly beneath them and hurled a grenade up into the post, right among the men. There was no time to do anything but what New did. He instantly understood the danger to the two observers and flung himself onto the grenade, covering it with his own body and taking the entire blast to shield them. He was killed. The two men he threw himself in front of survived, unhurt, and went on directing their fire. It was the same choice Lewis Bausell and Charles Roan had made on the same island days earlier, the choice that recurs again and again in the story of Peleliu and of the whole Pacific war, a young Marine trading his one life in a fraction of a second so that the men beside him would go home. Peleliu produced an extraordinary number of these acts, a measure of how close and how brutal the fighting was, men packed together in tight positions among the rocks where a single grenade could kill several at once, and where the only way to save the others was to smother it with your body. John New's Medal of Honor records that instant on the cliff on the 25th, the grenade in the post, the two observers in mortal danger, and the private who did not think twice. He was one of many on that terrible island, and the island itself would go on grinding for another two months, but his was the purest kind of sacrifice, made in a heartbeat, on this day.