The pistol was what he most wanted back.

But Sgt. J.L. "Rusty" Mulcahy, after he survived being shot in the back of the head on the island of Saipan in June 1944, figured he'd never again hold the .45-caliber pistol the Marines had issued him -- the side arm he had personalized by placing his young wife's photos under Plexiglas on both sides of the grip.

He didn't know that Col. Vincent Wilson, who led Mulcahy and two others in a combat intelligence group, made sure that pistol wasn't turned in to a quartermaster. Wilson appreciated the strapping young sergeant's bravery in battle, so he took it upon himself to make sure Mulcahy's treasured pistol, as well as his helmet with the gash where a bullet pierced it, was eventually returned to him.

"He was a great guy, and you don't see very many full colonels that are sending letters to sergeants," Mulcahy said with a chuckle during an interview at his Yakima home. Gracious and amiable, he still has the sturdy, broad-shouldered bearing of a Marine at age 86.

Wilson wrote to Mulcahy in August 1944 to tell him his personal belongings had been secured and would be shipped to him. But Mulcahy was stateside by then, and it was months before Railway Express delivered a wooden box containing his pistol, helmet and other items.

On Saipan, the 22-year-old sergeant from Great Falls, Mont., who was a Yakima-based Marine recruiter before his tour of duty in the Pacific theater of the war, evidently had made quite an impression on the senior officer.

The final paragraph in Wilson's letter states, "Your conduct on that eventful day, particularly when wounded you offered to go alone for help, only confirmed my high opinion of you as a man."

Their unit got caught in an unexpected firefight while scouting a pillbox of unusual design in an area that supposedly had been secured by U.S. forces. They were fired on by eight or nine Japanese soldiers who were in the fortification, and the other colonel in their unit was badly wounded. There were no other troops nearby to come to their aid.

"It was probably three-fourths of a mile to where we had to go to get help to get that injured colonel out of there," Mulcahy said. "I volunteered to do that, so the best escape we could figure out was for me to go right up over the top of this embrasure. Unfortunately, there was a window on the other side, and they shot at me, and they caught me right in the back of the head."

The bullet hole is barely an inch above the lower edge of his helmet.

Despite a slug in his head that left him "half-blind," Mulcahy persisted in going for help, and reinforcements rescued Wilson and a sergeant who stayed with him, though the other colonel's injuries proved fatal.

Mulcahy, who received a Silver Star for his courageous action, had received a Purple Heart after he was wounded in previous action in the Marshall Islands.

"I was only in action for a six-month period in the Pacific, and both times I got clobbered," he said.

The first time was earlier in 1944, when he was at an air base on Namur Island when the Japanese launched a nighttime bombing raid targeting munitions stored at the base.

"They laid a string of bombs right down through our piles of ammunition, and that just flew shrapnel everyplace," Mulcahy recalled.

His legs were hit by shrapnel, but it was the next morning before he realized how bad his injuries were. Bad enough that he was evacuated to a naval hospital in Honolulu -- which led to a surprise reunion with a buddy from Mulcahy's school days back in Great Falls.

Patrick Murphy was also with the Marines in the Pacific, though nowhere near Mulcahy, and was wounded and taken to Honolulu. On the day Adm. Chester Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet, was to present the Purple Heart to a group of servicemen at the hospital, the recipients were lined up alphabetically and that brought the old pals together.

The former Marine, nicknamed Rusty as a redheaded youngster, has been a devout Catholic all his life, and Mulcahy tells a story of how he and his comrades were saved -- he believes -- that terrifying night on Namur when bombs were exploding all around.

"I said 'Lord, take us out of here,' and an angel came and led us down to the beach, when we couldn't find any way out," he recalled.

He couldn't find a way out of his recruiting assignment in Yakima for more than a year, even though he wanted to. It wasn't that he didn't like Yakima; he met and married Madeline Armstrong while he was a recruiter here. But two days after he had arrived in Yakima, the world changed on Dec. 7, 1941.

Like countless other men after Pearl Harbor, Mulcahy wanted to be on the front lines defending his country.

"I think that was the basis of being a good Marine, you wanted to be where the action was," he said.

He got there eventually, of course, then came home to the bride whose picture was on his pistol. He still has the .45, though he lost his wife in 1965.

He married again, to a woman who had known his first wife and who also had lost her spouse. When Rusty and Marcella -- who have a grandson in the Marines and another in the Coast Guard who both served in Iraq -- got married nearly four decades ago, they had a blended family of 10 daughters and a son, the youngest of the bunch.

Sounds like a survival story of a different nature.