If he’d stayed on board, he was sure to die in the plane crash. Though he might survive the parachute jump, he would be stranded in the jungle alone. Either way, it was almost certain that he’d never make it home alive.

Against all odds, he survived – but that near-fatal accident transformed Hargesheimer’s life in a way that he never could have imagined.

“I’m so grateful for getting shot out of the sky,” he told The Associated Press, 64 years later.

When the pilot jumped from his falling plane, he landed in the depths of a Pacific island rainforest. He had no possessions except a small survival kit that included a compass, a machete, extra ammo, and 2 chocolate bars. He had no idea where he was, and was sure that if he was discovered, he would be killed.

For 31 days, he pushed his way through the thick jungle trees, drinking rainwater and subsisting on snails after his chocolate supply ran out. He had just about given up on ever making his way out of the rainforest when suddenly, he heard the voices of native islanders coming from the nearby river.

Hargesheimer stayed hidden, assuming that they’d attack him if they found him. But when they discovered him, they handed him a note written in English by an Australian officer, saying that they had aided other soldiers and could be trusted.

The villagers took the starving soldier to their village, Ea Ea, and gave him his own hut. They fed him boiled pig, took him fishing, taught him their language, and nursed him back to health when he became sick with malaria. Most importantly, they kept him hidden when Japanese soldiers passed through the area –a decision that could have cost them their own lives.

“If they’d seen my boot prints, I think they would have tortured everyone in the village until they produced me,” he told The AP.

Eight months after the plane crash, Hargesheimer finally returned to the United States, courtesy of a submarine pick-up arranged by Australian soldiers. He married, became a father, and got a sales job in Minnesota. But he never stopped thinking about the people of Ea Ea, and the kindness they had showed him. He vowed to return to Papua New Guinea one day to repay them for saving his life.

In 1963, he finally made it back, taking a ship to the island where he’d spent so much time. The villagers lined up on the beach to greet him, singing a rendition of “God Save the Queen” in his honor.

It didn’t seem like enough to simply thank them for helping him during his time of need. So when he learned that the village needed a school, he decided to do everything he could to build it: Over the next three years, he reached out to everyone he knew for donations, and returned with $15,000 to build the village’s first elementary school. When it opened its doors, it had 74 students. Today, there are more than 400.

That wasn’t Hargesheimer’s last connection with the people of Ea Ea –in 1970, after their own children had left the home, he and his wife decided to move to the island and join the community there. They spent four years in the village, where they taught students and helped to build a second school. Though they had to cope without the comforts they’d been used to in America, those four years were the best of their lives, according to Hargesheimer’s wife, who died in 1985.

Hargesheimer, now 91, recently returned to Ea Ea for what will be his last visit. His fighter plane had just been discovered in the depths of the jungle, and he had been invited to view the wreckage of that fateful crash –in his mind, the best thing that ever happened to him.

Hargesheimer has a hero’s reputation in Ea Ea, where he is known by the formal title, “Masta Preddi.” But he believes that no matter how hard he has worked to repay the hospitality the villagers showed him all those years ago, it will never be enough.

“These people were responsible for saving my life,” he told the AP. “How could I ever repay it?”

Troops were moving out to Hawaii, but because of his experience in military school, Lucas was ordered to stay behind and drill new recruits. He knew his buddies were ultimately headed for combat, so he hopped onto the train with them—in effect going AWOL to get into the war. Once in Hawaii, he managed to convince officers that he was there because of a clerical error.

He was almost drummed out of the Corps when a censor read a letter to his girlfriend that mentioned his real age, fifteen by then. He managed to talk his way out of trouble again and was assigned a job driving a truck on the base.

A year later, when a large number of troops were being ferried out to ships in Pearl Harbor heading into action, Lucas stowed away on the USS Deuel, in effect going AWOL a second time. He slept on deck and scrounged meals from other men. When the ship was
well out to sea, he turned himself in for fear of being classified as a deserter, and a sympathetic colonel decided that instead of punishing him, he would finally grant Lucas his wish of being assigned to a combat unit.

Not long after, the Deuel approached Iwo Jima. On February 19, 1945, five days after he turned seventeen, Lucas hit the beach with forty thousand other Marines, five thousand of whom would become casualties that first day of combat. The next morning, his unit destroyed a Japanese pillbox, then took cover in a Japanese escape trench, where eleven Japanese soldiers surprised them. The Marines and Japanese started firing at each other at point-blank range. Lucas shot one soldier in the forehead before his rifle jammed.

As he was trying to get it to work, he saw two Japanese grenades land near the Marine next to him. He dove down into the soft volcanic ash, covering the grenades with his body. One failed to go off, but the explosion of the second one flipped him over on his back and inflicted large wounds on his arm, chest, and thigh.

His chin was sliced open and one eye was forced out of its socket. He had internal injuries and was bleeding heavily from his nose and mouth. A Marine from a following unit, reaching down to take off Lucas’s dog tags, saw Lucas’s hand wiggle.

He was given a shot of morphine, carried back to the beach on a stretcher, and transferred to a hospital ship. At one point he was almost given up for dead, but the doctors kept working on him.

Neither spoke the other’s language, but both spoke a bit of French, and, during the three days that Lopardo was waiting for American intelligence agents to take Sakai into custody to find out what he knew about the Japanese military’s plans, the two young, frightened men created a bond.

Sakai believed that the American intelligence officers would kill him after they extracted the information they needed. If he did manage to survive, he thought that the shame upon him for surrendering would be so great that he would never be allowed to return home. So he had a special request for Lopardo.

While the two soldiers waited in the foxhole, Sakai passed Lopardo two photos: a black-and-white image of him and his wife, who he had married the year before; and a photo of the couple and their 4-year-old niece. Sakai gave the photographs to Lopardo, asking him to keep them safe—and, if possible, to send them home to his family, who he believed he would never see again.

Lopardo accepted the request, and kept the photos safe in his possession throughout the rest of the war, and after his return home to his family. He never found out what happened to Sakai, and though he searched for the Japanese soldier’s family, he was never able to locate them.

“He told me and my sister, Lisa, about his desire to return the photos, but he never really had a way to do it,” Lopardo’s son Steve told the San Diego Union Tribune. “This was the days before the Internet. Finding people was a lot harder.”

But after Lopardo’s death a few years ago, Steve decided to take on his father’s quest. He tracked down soldiers from his father’s battalion, looked at previously-classified interrogation reports, and even talked to Japanese tourists he encountered about his mission, but found no leads.

However, one of the tourists he’d met had told a newspaper about his story, and it soon got picked up a Japanese television station. A Japanese government official who saw the program decided to put his staff’s efforts into locating the family.

Finally, last September, Steve Lopardo received an email from a Japanese official: “We found the family, it said. “Will you come and deliver the photos?”

Soon, Lopardo hopped on a plane to Yokohama to fulfill his father’s legacy, not knowing what to expect. On his arrival, he discovered that Sakai had not been killed or shunned after all—he had given the American troops a fake name to protect his family. After his release, Sakai (actually Sakamoto) returned home to his family. He and his wife had six children together, and both passed away in the late 1980s.

Sakai’s son and two daughters were there to welcome Lopardo—along with Sakai’s niece, who was in the photograph.

“Sixty-three years ago, my father accepted these photographs from Taizo Sakai and promised to safeguard them,” Lopardo said in Japanese—he didn’t speak the language, but had gotten his speech translated, and practiced it for weeks, so that he would be able to communicate with Sakai’s family. “With respect to both our ancestors, I now return them to your family.”

After passing over the photographs, fulfilling the promise that his father had made to that frightened Japanese soldier so many years ago, Lopardo’s eyes filled with tears.