The year is 1944, and the U.S. armed forces are fighting to gain control of western Pacific islands one-by-one during the last great offensive of World War II.

Second Lieutenant Dick Cromartie of the Marine Corps is on the second D-Day invasion of four that he will experience in 14 months of combat. On Saipan in the Marianas, Cromartie finds himself positioned directly beneath a Japanese machine gun bunker. He's deafened by the staccato bursts of the weapon and horrified by the sight of fellow soldiers being felled by its ceaseless stream of lead projectiles.

"I didn't know what to do other than to grab the barrel of the machine gun and turn it up so the shots would go over everyone's head," Cromartie says more than 50 years later. "Afterward, I was surprised to see my hand blistered from the heat of the barrel. I shouldn't have been surprised because I must have known it would be blazing hot. But in a situation like that, when you see Marines being gunned down in front of your eyes, you don't think. You just react."

Dick Cromartie's reactions have served him well, not only in combat--where his heroics earned him a Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart--but also in civilian life where he was instrumental in helping two communities to incorporate, founded a newspaper, raised two daughters with his wife of 52 years, Em, and along the way made enough money to live comfortably and eventually retire on the island paradise of Key Biscayne.

Dick is a soft-spoken man who seems to have gone with the flow through 76 years of living, riding life's currents rather than trying to cut across them. Typical of his reactive nature is the way he wound up in the Marine Corps in the first place.

"I really wanted to join the Navy, but when I went to enlist, the line was too long," he explains. "So I went down the hallway and saw a Marine corporal sitting with his feet up on the table reading a newspaper. I asked him how long it would take and he said about 20 minutes.

"I started signing the papers. One said something about who my pay should go to if I got killed or captured, and when I asked him about that, he said, 'If you read all of the papers, we'll be here all day.' So I stopped reading them and just kept signing my name on the dotted lines."

His parents were less than thrilled.

"My mother nearly fainted from shock," he says with a laugh. "And my father said, 'Don't worry, I'll call the Congressman and get him out of it.'"

Of course, that never happened, and Cromartie served his country in perhaps its greatest time of need.

He was there on Iwo Jima, a battle made famous by a photo, then monument, of four soldiers raising the stars and stripes. Dick was at the other end of the island during that monumental moment, where he'd been for about a month. At one point, he got hit in the ankle when the road he was trying to cross was raked with machine gun fire.

"They wanted to evacuate me to the first aid base on the beach," he says. "But I knew that the Japanese were always shelling the beach, so I just put a tourniquet on it and stayed up front. One of the safest places to be is closest to the enemy because it reduces the risk of getting shelled.

"Iwo Jima was tough because the Japanese had their best fighters there. These weren't farmers, but trained soldiers who seemed to have no regard for their own lives. We didn't take any prisoners, because we couldn't."

In a way, Dick hails from a long line of fighters. His family is Scottish and originally came to the States in the 1700s.

"The Scots were always fighting the British and always losing," he says. "At one point, the British gave them the choice of either going to prison or the colonies. So they came here, landing at Cape Fear and heading upriver to find land for farming. Soon, they would get another chance to fight the British during the Revolutionary War, and this time, they'd win." Dick was born and raised in the small town of Garland, North Carolina. His father was a farmer who grew tobacco, cotton and vegetables.

"I had a marvelous opportunity to be with nature and learned to hunt and fish at an early age," he says. "I first fired a shotgun at the age of eight. I was so excited that I forgot what my father had told me about keeping the stock tight against my shoulder, and the kick of it knocked me over."

He grew up during the Depression, but the Cromarties weren't as affected as many because they grew their own food and had a radio for entertainment. However, he was affected by his family's strong conviction to education and religion and remembers Bible reading sessions with his Uncle Angus. But it was an aunt of his, a southern Baptist, who made the strongest impression.

"She needed a cane to get around and asked me to walk her to church on Sundays," he says. "When I was 12, they had some revival services and I became taken with the idea that if you give your heart to Jesus, nothing else mattered.

"That served me well during combat because I had such a strong feeling of spirituality that I never worried about dying. That faded, replaced by a fatalistic feeling of what will be, will be. When you see how some people die and others don't, there's no accounting for it. I thought that there must have been some reason why I survived, and maybe it will manifest itself someday."

When he returned to the States, Dick, who'd graduated Duke University before enlisting, started law school at the University of North Carolina. But his studies soon took a back seat to love.

"I asked Em to marry me on our first date," he says of his wife. "She thought I was crazy and it took me three months to convince her to become engaged."

Thoughts of those days bring a dreamy smile to his face. "We spent long weekends on Myrtle Beach," he says. "Finally, my advisor told me to choose either law school or love. It was an easy decision."

Dick and Em were married by her father, a minister, in 1946 and promptly headed out to California because a tank commander had once told him that San Francisco was the greatest city in the world. But the war had cast a long shadow, and Dick was still struggling to escape it.

"I knew I'd done a lot of terrible things and killed a lot of people I didn't know," he says. "At one point, I thought maybe I should go into the ministry. But a minister convinced me that the guilt I was feeling was just a reaction to combat and that I should just get over it and get on with my life."

And so he did. Dick won a Coro Foundation scholarship to study government, then went on the complete his law degree at the University of San Francisco.

"My father always wanted me to be a professional," he says. "I told him I didn't understand why he'd say that. He had the best life possible because he got to hunt and fish all of the time."

After graduating, Dick went to work in the legal department of a large paper manufacturer, which was about as exciting a job as it sounds. Eventually, he became an accounting department supervisor, even though he "couldn't add two and two."

"It was funny," he says. "Each time I took an aptitude test, it pointed me to a career in sales. Eventually, I tried it and, being a people person, I managed to do pretty well."

Bouncing from law to accounting to sales might seem as though he was going nowhere fast. But Dick didn't mind casting his fortunes to the wind.

"One day in San Francisco, I went into a dentist's office and saw a law degree on the wall," he remembers. "When I asked him about it, the dentist said that he never thought it was smart to be in one profession too long, nor live in one place all of your life.

"I decided that he was right. The old school of thinking that the more you do something, the better you get at it is really a bunch of hogwash because you get burnt out."

The paper manufacturer transferred Cromartie to Chicago, but he soon quit the job to sell municipal bonds. There was just one catch. At the last minute, the investment company bigwigs that had promised to hire him reneged on the deal because they discovered that they could get some bright young MBAs out of college to do the same job for a lot less money.

"I was on my way out of the office when they asked me if I'd like to try selling a new product they were having trouble with," Dick recalls. "That was a bond fund. They had $10 million available and had only sold about $2 million. Since I'd already quit my other job, I said sure. As it turned out, bond funds soon became a hot item. Eventually they made billions for the company."

So Dick made out all right, businesswise. Meanwhile, he, Em and their two girls, Star and Dawn, were living in a suburb called Lincolnshire.

"The county up there was ripping us off, so we decided to fight it by incorporating," he says. "The first thing I said we had to do was to start up a community newspaper so we could let everybody know what was going on."

Dick disappears into a back room of his apartment in the Commodore Club West condominium, and emerges with bound copies of the Lincolnshire Times. The papers aren't much more than pamphlets with headlines that look to be hand-written. And in the margins, the prices of ads are written in pencil.

"We always made money," he says. "Not much, but enough to keep the paper going and unite the community. Incorporation was a big success."

After 17 years in Chicago, Em was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. It most affected one of her legs, and doctors told her that the best therapy was to swim everyday. Suddenly, Florida seemed like a more logical place to live than the Windy City. Dick became the southeast regional manager for the investment company and moved to Key Biscayne. Eventually, he retired when he reached the age of 65. But his retirement from the work force merely gave him more time to devote to civic causes, and he was one of the first ones to recommend incorporation for Key Biscayne. He remembers meeting with other pro-incorporation forces in the old English Pub in 1984, where he was elected treasurer and membership director. Eventually, he chaired the fire department committee.

Last year, when the Key Biscayne American Legion Post was founded, Dick was elected commander. While it might be tempting for a veteran to glorify the war experience, Dick stresses the tragedy and senselessness of combat.

"War doesn't really resolve anything," he says. "A lot of people get killed, and usually you wind up with the same problems that you started out with.

"I don't know how I survived it, how anyone survives it. On Iwo Jima, we were without hot food and a change of clothes. It was hot and humid and the clothes rotted right off your back. It was an impossible situation that got so bad we'd take the clothes off of dead Marines because we didn't have any."

He goes to the back room and re-emerges holding an album filled with letters preserved in plastic sleeves. They're from relatives of Marines who died in combat, responses to letters Dick had written to them on his way back from the front lines. Some of the letters are as faded as old soldiers are supposed to get. Dick shakes his head as he flips through the pages, his hands probably trembling more now than they did as he grabbed the burning hot barrel of a machine gun over 52 years ago.

"I lost many friends," he says. "It was a horrible thing that I hope no one ever has to go through again."