When he landed on Iwo Jima 68 years ago this week, Joseph Dryer Jr. was a skinny, 23-year-old Marine lieutenant armed with a curious mind, a taste for adventure and a preternaturally sunny outlook. For 26 days, he fought and ferreted out a desperately recalcitrant enemy, dodging death repeatedly while, as he put it, American “troops were killed like flies.”

Then, on St. Patrick’s Day, fate squared off with Dryer. From 40 yards to his right, a Japanese sniper made the perfect shot.

“The bullet, a hollow point dum-dum … should have gone through my heart, mushroomed and taken out my whole left side,” Dryer wrote to his parents weeks later. “Instead, it hit my dog tags, cut off the bottom of my locker box keys, driving everything inside, went straight to the center of my chest, did a right angle turn just as it reached the heart, and blew a huge hole in the center of my chest — big enough to put your fist inside and see the heart beating.”

His men called for a stretcher and a corpsman, who ripped apart what remained of Dryer’s shirt, sprinkled sulfa powder on what had been his chest and injected him with morphine. The bumpy Jeep ride to the field hospital took 25 minutes. Novocain dulled the pain of a four-hour operation, but Dryer remained conscious while surgeons dug out a Milky Way of shrapnel.

Five more surgeries followed. Nine months of hospitalization. Last rites. “Several times they were going to give him up for dead,” says Nancy, his wife of 57 years. “He had been told that if he ever could walk he would be paralyzed on one side, but of course none of that happened. It was very miraculous that he was able to recover. But he’s got a lot of willpower, and I guess he decided it wasn’t his time yet.”

Far from it. Dryer, now 91, has lived a life worthy of an Ernest Hemingway novel — it even features Hemingway, who attended Dryer’s wedding.

“When you’re young, the world is your oyster, and you can go any place,” says Dryer, who farmed (and fled revolutions) in foreign countries, hosted heads of state and future princesses in his historic Palm Beach home, and developed hotels for KLM and Howard Johnson in Amsterdam and Jakarta.

“And he raised three children in the same home since 1961, which is almost unheard of in this day and age,” says Lt. Col. Todd Peery, inspector-instructor of West Palm Beach’s 4th Anglico Marine Reserve Unit and a friend of Dryer. “I don’t have many people I consider heroes…but he’s right there in that category, not only because he is extremely humble but also because what he endured on behalf of his country is absolutely remarkable.”

A life of action, adventure

In his cozy den, whose walls are decorated with antique rifles and a jaguar skin he purchased in Ecuador, Dryer pages through a crumbling scrapbook of photos he and his battalion photographer shot during World War II. Amphibious training in California, liberty in Hawaii. So many snapshots of men in their prime, some of them with nicknames like Tex, Frenchie and Peepsight.

Dryer, who served with the Fifth Marine Division, pauses on one page. “These are my company officers. Most of them were killed. This was my colonel whose chest was completely blown out.

“And this is on the way to Iwo Jima. Here’s a model of the island and what our objectives were. Now these are actually going ashore for Iwo. This is on the way, and you can see the mountain in the background. It was very exciting. It was a thrill. An absolutely beautiful day.”

Dryer turns another page, and suddenly the photos are splattered with inky black spots as images of smoke and shellfire and flak burst across the pages. But Dryer downplays the danger he faced on the island of black sand. “The Marine Corps had very, very good training, and we felt very competent about ourselves, and I don’t think many people had delusions about what storming a beach would be about.”

In his bedroom hangs a small collection of Iwo Jima posters and photos, one of a corpse-strewn battlefield. “That’s me and another lieutenant with our two heads together in the center. That’s our command post,” he says. “When you’re with people being shot left and right, and artillery and mortars are coming down on top of you, it was just exciting. We were trying to stay alive.”

Dryer’s post-war life would continue to be defined by episodes of action, adventure and occasional danger.

Born in Rochester, N.Y., he graduated from The Choate School and Dartmouth University, and earned an MBA from Columbia Business School. In 1947, two years after Iwo Jima, he was one of 12 combat officers selected by the Marine Corps to create a plan to destroy the center of Russia’s steel industry.

“I wondered how the devil I got on such a list,” he says. That study “was the beginning of the Cold War. The Marine Corps was thinking that far ahead.”

In 1950, a civilian Dryer moved to Cuba and founded the North Atlantic Kenaf Corporation with assistance from the United States Agency for International Development and the Department of Foreign Agriculture. Kenaf is a fiber similar to jute that can be used to make sugar, coffee and sand bags, twine, carpet-backing and upholstery. The U.S. government was eager to support the venture because they feared an Asiatic war (India and Pakistan were the chief suppliers of jute), as well as the spread of Communism in the Caribbean.

“At the end of World War II, for my age group, it was either ‘Go north, young man’ to Alaska or go south to Latin America,” says Dryer. “So it was go south, no question about it, and Cuba was an absolutely wonderful place to live. It was a bachelor’s paradise.”

One day in Havana, Dryer recognized Ernest Hemingway sitting in the corner of a bar. “I went up and introduced myself, telling him that I had several of his rifles and shotguns given to me in 1943 by his eldest son, Jack, who was my best friend at Dartmouth.”

Hemingway took Dryer under his wing and treated him like a member of the family. “He was wonderful,” Dryer says. “All the time we spent with him – days and nights and an awful lot of martinis – I never heard him use a foul word or be as nasty as I’ve read about him in books.

“He was very comfortable to be with, a good conversationalist, easy. Anything you were interested in, he would get interested in. If you were interested in roses, he’d talk to you all about roses until he knew what you knew.”

When Dryer married the Cuba-born Nancy Herrera in Havana in 1956, Ernest Hemingway and his wife Mary served as testigos (witnesses). “Mary said, ‘Joe, Papa got all dressed up for you, and it’s the first time he’s worn a suit in years,’” Dryer said.

The Dryers’ three sons were born in Cuba, and the family remained there 18 months after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. “Then one morning in 1961, the secret police came and took our house apart,” Dryer says. “We decided it was time to leave.”

Friends in high, powerful places

The Dryers moved to Palm Beach because of its proximity to the Caribbean, its quality of life and its good schools, and they purchased a 1925 Marion Syms Wyeth house whose painted ceilings, tile floors and iron gates reminded them of the Cuba they loved. Very few architectural changes have been made to the place, and its Spanish doors, five working stone fireplaces and Venetian chandeliers give the place an Old World charm. (“Town & Country” magazine will feature the home in a future issue.)

Over the years, guests at the house have included George Hamilton and George Plimpton, King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia of Spain, when they were still the Prince and Princess of Asturias, and a dozen men who were taken prisoner in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion.

The Dryers’ guest book includes a Charles Addams’ drawing of Uncle Fester, and when President John Kennedy and his family visited Palm Beach, Jackie Kennedy’s secretary would stay with them.

Prior to meeting and marrying Prince Andrew, Sarah Ferguson spent a month at the Dryers’. “She was great fun,” Dryer says of “Fergie.” “She was a little bit overweight — this is a delicate matter — and I had a lot of trouble finding her dates. But she was very good at making salads.”

Dryer, for his part, is very good at making people feel welcome.

“He’s probably one of the most gracious people I’ve ever been around,” Peery says. “And he’s extremely humble considering the life he and Nancy have led.”

After fleeing Cuba, Dryer moved his kenaf operations to Haiti, “a fascinating country with an amazing cast of characters that looked like it might become one of the ‘in’ countries of the Caribbean,” he says.

But the instability of the Haitian government didn’t make the island a fertile environment for foreigners. In 1963, when three of Dryer’s best employees were kidnapped, never to be seen again, he thought it best to start over again in Guatemala, but “at the end of the first year there, there was another revolution in which we lost everything,” he says.

Dryer became a kenaf consultant to large companies and landowners in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, and in the mid-1960s, the U.S. government asked him to prepare a feasibility study for launching a kenaf industry in Nigeria. “Early one evening at sunset, I was walking on the dirt road just outside my hotel when a full British double-decker bus came along,” Dryer says. “Not more than a hundred feet behind, a Nigerian in white robes came running after the double-decker, being chased by another man.

“Just as the man in white was about to swing onto the double-decker, the other fellow caught up and with a flash of his machete cut off his head. That was actually the first day of the terrible, long, bloody tribal war called the Biafra War.”

In short order, Dryer received a telegram instructing him not to leave his hotel; the people he was working for were going to help him flee the country. “Later, a car arrived after dusk with a man carrying a tommy gun and riding shotgun in the front seat. They picked me up with instructions to stop for no one, or for any reason,” says Dryer, who decided that four revolutions were enough. “Time to change careers.”

“He likes the intrigue”

And what a career change: From harvesting kenaf to opening hotels.

In the late 1960s, Dryer and his friend Peter Pulitzer co-founded an international hotel group with KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. “They said they might consider participating in a new hotel (in Amsterdam) if a business study proved positive and if a well-known American hotel chain would manage it,” says Dryer.

Pulitzer had built a Howard Johnson’s in Miami, and both men knew “the elder Mr. Johnson, who thought it was a wonderful idea and could be their first venture abroad,” Dryer says.

The new firm purchased 24 old canal houses near Amsterdam’s Royal Palace and converted them into a 240-room hotel, which opened in 1970. The property was such a success that Dryer and Pulitzer opened a hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, and were developing another in Barbados.

“Unfortunately, we sold the hotels in 1990, thinking that World War III with Russia was about to commence,” says Dryer, who then worked as a stockbroker for many years.

After 9/11, Dryer hosted a conference for the American Foreign Policy Council in his home, and he continues to serve on the board of directors of the Washington, D.C., nonprofit, which occasionally acts as a backchannel means of communication between the U.S. government and other governments. Says Nancy, “Joe loves all that because he likes the intrigue.”

Guests of honor at council dinners at the Dryers’ have included Karl Rove and former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge.

Dryer, too, is receiving some late-in-life recognition for his wartime service. Last November, Peery invited the Dryers to attend the annual Marine Corps Ball in Boca Raton. When Peery introduced the veteran as the oldest Marine in attendance and a survivor of Iwo Jima, 600 guests stood and applauded and “oorah”-ed.

“It was such an emotional moment, Nancy and I had tears running down our faces,” Dryer says. “But what we (Marines) did was what we trained for. It didn’t seem to be anything special. It was just a much tougher battle than most.”