Iwo Jima: In Memory Of A Friend

By Mark Hendricks (Hillviews, 2011)
Glen Cleckler ’50 and his wife JoAnn ’52 sit at the base of the Iwo Jima statue in Harlingen. One of the Marines depicted in the statue is Harlon Block, Glen’s friend who died on the island in 1945.

    From time to time, Glen Cleckler, 87,  still visits his dear friend Harlon  Block. He stands respectfully beside  his gravesite. He may speak to  him quietly, with a trace of a smile  on his face, about the perils of growing old.  But, for the most part, Cleckler uses these  visits to remember.
    And on this sweltering  summer afternoon on the campus of the Marine  Military Academy in Harlingen, it is no  different. Cleckler looks down upon his old  friend’s resting place and remembers. The  memories come easily, perhaps because they  comprise a story that is so impossible to forget.  The two were best friends in high school in  the Rio Grande Valley town of Weslaco. They  were young, handsome, athletic, and popular –  teammates on a conference champion Weslaco  High football team. Both seemed destined to  play college ball. Cleckler, in fact, had a scholarship  offer to Howard Payne. 
    But one afternoon in the fall of their senior  year of high school (1942-43), Block had a mischievous  idea. It was an idea that would tip the  first domino and start a sequence of events with  consequences both tragic and heroic.

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