This is a story that would be told best by a classic fiction writer.

There’s just one problem.

It’s not fiction.

Jimmy Bunting now lives a quiet life on the Mountain (since 2005) with his wife Becky. It’s a life well earned.

He was adopted out of an orphanage at age 4 by an Illinois farm family. As he progressed through grade school, he was introduced to the burden that was required of Midwestern farm families.

“I got up before 5, and the chores began,” Bunting told The Mountain Times.

“Livestock had to be fed, hay had to be baled – hay bales as big as me. Then,
off to grade school, then back home, and the chores started all over again.”

He’d finish up around 9:30 in the evening, which left no time for homework.

“I was a terrible student,” he said. “And about the time I turned 15, I had it
up to here.”

Bunting contrived a perilous escape plan.

There was no way he could join the military at 15.

So he went down the road to a neighbor farmer who happened to have a son
in the Marines. He bribed the farmer with two quarts of Old Yellowstone – a
lot of money in those days, and it took him a long time to save up – and the
farmer gave Bunting his son’s birth certificate and accompanied him to the
Marine recruiter’s office.

At the tender age of 15, Jimmy Bunting became a Marine.

The Marine Corps didn’t know he was 15. They didn’t even know his real
name.

Boot camp wasn’t easy, but after the farm life, it wasn’t all that bad.
“It was tough, but I could handle it,” he said.

Following boot camp and combat training he boarded a ship to Korea. The
troops slipped down the big ropes on the side of the ship.

“That was where I saw my first dead Marine. He was crushed between the
ship and the landing craft.”

Oddly, the war was officially over, but there were plenty of enemy troops left
behind who were unaware of the peace treaty.

Bunting was attached to a reconnaissance unit because of his shooting skills –
he had shot 238 out of 250 on the rifle range. He was immediately made the
permanent point man in his platoon.

“It was my job, all the time,” he said. “I was the best shot and the smallest
target.”

He worked point with two interpreters with bull horns as the Marine unit was
trying to notify the enemy the war was over. Both of the interpreters were
killed immediately.

At one point his platoon was pinned down by an enemy machine gun nest.
Bunting grabbed a couple extra grenades, worked his way around the back of
the nest and lobbed two grenades at the enemy.

“They had already killed three or four of us,” Bunting remembered. “The
grenades took out the machine gunner and his feeder, I shot two, and got the
last one as he tried to run away.”

For that effort, he was awarded the Bronze Star.

After six months of combat, he was called before the commanding officer with
six other underage Marines. The CO informed them they had enlisted under
false pretenses, had his Bronze Star taken away, and was drummed out of the
Corps, with the proviso that if he ever told anyone about his service he’d be
sent to prison at Fort Leavenworth.

Bunting took them seriously. He never told anyone, not even his wife Becky,
until 2011 at a nephew’s wedding. That original recruiter was there and
remembered Jimmy.

But the Marine saga continued. When he turned 17 he enlisted again – this
time under his own name.

“Boot camp was a lot easier the second time,” he said. “I knew what was
going to happen.”

He made the base wrestling team and was on his way to the Pan-American
Games when he suffered broken ribs and couldn’t continue.

That was doubly unfortunate, as his next assignment was Desert Rock,
Nevada, where his company was entrenched in a four-foot deep trench, 3,500
yards from three atomic bomb blasts.

“We put on our dark glasses, kneeled down, and wrapped our arms over our
faces,” he said. “When the bombs went off, I can’t tell you how hot it was. It
was the biggest firecracker I ever saw. When the bomb went off I could see
the bones in my arm as if it was an X-ray.”

The Marine Corps was finished with the experiment. War games ensued and
they approached ground zero.

“As we got closer, the blast had been so hot we were crunching in sand that
had turned to glass,” he said. “Finally, the lieutenant had had enough and
ordered us to head back.”

He finished out his tour of duty in relative ease and settled as a civilian in San
Francisco where he met, and married, Becky.

But a normal life was not yet in the offing. Bunting went to diving school, was
certified as a deep sea diver doing salvage work. Later he became a plumber
and worked as a boomer throughout the country on jobs such as, ironically,
nuclear plants.

He later went into business for himself, owning a welding business, before
retiring in 1999.

Becky remembers that moment, when, after 50 years of marriage, she found
out about Jimmy’s underage enlistment.

“All I can remember saying was ‘What? Oh my God,’”

Becky and Jimmy have two children, and enjoying family is now a top priority.
And one of the youngest warriors ever is now one of the oldest veterans in the
Mountain community.

When asked what’s next, Jimmy flashed a jagged smile and said:
“It takes a lot to take out an old Marine, especially if he still feels like fightin’.”