- Tragedy is an often overused word, but today's guest describes the sequence of events in October 1979 that took the lives of 13 US Marines and injured 60 more in a sequence of events that can only be described as tragic.

He's Chas Henry this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(inspirational music) (inspirational music continues) (inspirational music continues and fades) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is an old friend whose voice you might recognize.

Chas Henry is a retired US Marine and journalist.

He's also the author of a gripping new book, "Fuji Fire: Sifting Ashes of a Forgotten US Marine Corps Tragedy."

He's joining us today from suburban Washington, DC.

Chas, it's great to see you.

- I appreciate the invitation, Jim.

Good to see you, as well.

- You know, and congratulations.

I mentioned to you before we started that I found "Fuji Fire" profoundly affecting emotionally and just a tremendously well told story about a really unknown tragedy to a lot of us.

So let's start, though, maybe at the highest of levels and maybe ask you to provide just a quick overview of the book for those who haven't read it yet.

- Sure.

So in October of 1979, a super typhoon made its way over mainland Japan.

It reached a ramshackle little Marine Corps training camp at the base of Mount Fuji.

The typhoon was horrendous.

It created a situation that caused a fuel spill in a fuel bladder.

5,500 gallons of gasoline flowed downhill amidst the storm into this camp where 1,200 some Marines and sailors were living inside Quonset huts.

The Quonset huts were heated by open flame kerosene heaters.

Vapors rose.

Flames ignited, and in the end, it was a terrible tragedy.

73 people injured, of whom 54 were burned.

13 would eventually die of their injuries.

And yet just 16 days later, American hostages were taken at the US Embassy in Iran, and attention just shifted away and never came back.

And those who were impacted either by being terribly injured or by just being amidst the mayhem were left.

Only they, and those people in their immediate circles knew what had happened.

- Yeah.

So can you give us a sense of what that, for lack of a term, of what that firestorm looked like?

So the base has a fuel bladder that holds the motor fuel for the vehicles that are gonna be operated on the base.

It ruptures.

So 5,000 gallons of motor petroleum flowing through the base.

What happens inside the Quonset huts that are exposed to this?

- So the huts were flooded already.

This typhoon, Super Typhoon Tip, set the still standing world records for the largest, most intense typhoon ever.

In one hour, it dumped three inches of rain.

Over the course of the day, the area got 10 inches, more than 10 inches, and that was more than they would typically get in a month.

So the storm had been hitting.

The water was already flowing downhill into these huts.

When the gasoline in these bladders, these were rubberized fabric bladders that were made by the same company that makes the parade balloons at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

They were great, very convenient in that you could fold them up when they were empty.

You have 'em on ship.

You take 'em where you're going.

You roll them out, and you could put up to, in these particular bladders, you could put up to 20,000 gallons of fuel, diesel or gasoline or aviation fuel.

And so, a series of events happened that principally were caused by the storm, but also involving where these fuel bladders had been placed.

And the gasoline bladder went through a breach and a berm.

A slice was made, and as you know, 5,500 gallons of gasoline flow downhill.

So this is floating on top of the water that's already flooding the huts.

Maybe there's three or four inches of water going in these huts, in one door out the other.

Vapors rise.

And these are two open flame kerosene heaters at each end, one at each end of these huts.

These were World War II era huts.

This camp was really ramshackle.

Vapors rise and then there's a whoof.

You can imagine when you've been barbecuing- - Yeah.

- You know, lighter fluid or something gets on, and there's a whoomf.

Well, this happens inside this corrugated steel and wood frame building.

So immediately, there's this flash.

It sucks up oxygen.

Guys inside are having difficulty breathing, and a large cloud of flame rises above this first hut to ignite.

When that eventually comes back down, there's gasoline on top of the water everywhere in the camp.

So these pieces of fire that have come down from the sky light up and ignite these 10 and 15 foot curtains of flame that are moving through the camp on this downhill slope.

So the guys inside the huts, what do they do?

Well, the inclination of Marines is do something quickly.

Many of them run outside.

Some of them grab their helmets that have a plastic helmet liner.

They run outside.

Well, flames were surrounding the huts.

And then as this played on, this is about 1:40 in the afternoon.

As this played on, the fire moved to other huts.

In some huts, you know, people were able to have sufficient advance notice to turn off their kerosene heaters.

But this is in the midst of a loud typhoon.

People are not thinking about a fire, and there's quite a spread between the huts in this camp.

They're tiered actually because of the downward slope.

So every couple of rows of huts, there's a three or four foot retaining wall, and then another row similarly.

And that happens two or three times as you move down the hill.

So it's very loud.

People are in the huts riding out the storm.

And so no one's thinking about a fire.

And it takes a considerable period of time for word to get downhill, but that's happening as the fire is moving downhill.

- [Jim] Wow.

Incredible.

- That is totally nightmares.

So Chas, the book is meticulously researched.

How did you report it?

Talk a little bit about your methods and the time it took to put this horrifying story together.

- Sure.

Well, I fell into it, and had I known how much work it's going to entail, I don't know if I, from the start would've pursued it, but I fell into this.

I had retired from a second career in journalism at the end of 2019.

Prior to that, I'd done a career in the Marine Corps.

And my plan was for my wife and I to travel.

Well, the pandemic put an end to that.

So I'm looking for something productive to be doing.

This wasn't the productive part, but I'm posting old photos on Facebook, and one of them is a photo of me at Camp Fuji in 1978, about a year, year and a half before the fire occurred.

And I just mentioned in passing, "This happened about a year before the big fire."

And I was shocked by the number of people, fellow Marines particularly who asked, "What fire?"

Even guys I knew who had been through Camp Fuji in the 1980s.

And similarly, I was embarrassed to realize that a friend I'd known since 1981 commented on that Facebook post, "You know, I escaped from one of those burning huts."

And it wasn't until 2020 that I realized he'd been involved in that.

When the fire happened, I was back in Hawaii at the base I was stationed at, and it was a kick in the gut around the Marine Corps.

The casualty figure in peace time.

You know, we weren't that long out of Vietnam.

And the casualty figure in peace time was really shocking.

And so I was taken aback that this wasn't remembered.

And so I said, "Well, let me see.

I need something to do, but let me see what I can find."

So I started doing some online research.

I was able to find a copy of the investigation, interestingly, on the Navy Judge Advocate General website.

And that was interesting because it was on a page that was sort of, I don't wanna say greatest hits, but maybe their 10 or 15 most often requested documents.

And so I was able to download that.

It was very redacted.

Around this same time, another mutual friend of the fellow who had been in the camp during the fire and I, had in 1986, thought he might write something about this.

And he'd done a Freedom of Information Act request.

And that garnered about three quarters of an inch worth of photocopied material that when he found out I was interested in this, he sent to me.

And that became sort of my starter dough.

That was Charles W. Henderson, who had written the book, for instance, "Marine Sniper: 93 Confirmed Kills," very accomplished author and fellow Marine.

That included a copy of the investigation that was less redacted.

So between the two, I was able to reconstruct a copy of the investigation, which was useful in showing me what had happened.

But most importantly, it gave me names of individuals.

And then I spent a lot of money on postage stamps, and online, I went to these people search sites, tried to find people about the right age with this name, and I might find, you know, five or six people that had this name.

I'd send off these letters.

And for about a year, that's about all I did.

And eventually, I was able to find people, and eventually, that would lead to my interviewing 130 people who'd been involved.

- So did the reporting and writing of this affect you personally?

- It did in ways that I wouldn't have anticipated.

So in that first year, as I'm finding people, and the second year, in which I'm recording interviews, this is happening during the pandemic, so it's almost all virtual.

So I'm contacting people that I've never seen.

In some cases, we're just talking on the phone.

I'm having them record their end of the conversation on another phone.

On occasion, we're doing a Zoom chat so we can see each other.

But I call it my two years of crying with other men in their 60s.

(Jim and G. Wayne laugh) In many cases, these guys had not talked about these events partly because no one had heard about them.

So if you talk about them, people won't have a point of reference.

And in some cases, they'd not talked about them with their family members, just given the horror of the circumstance.

And so it was very emotional at that point.

And, but later, I found, even as I was writing in the last couple of years of this four year plus project, I'd be in the front room on my MacBook and my wife would come in and there'd be tears streaming down my face.

And it was, I don't wanna say wearing.

Nothing that I experienced came anywhere close to what the Marines and sailors I was writing about had experienced.

But it bore a weight.

And when the book was finally published, and I was a few weeks out from working on it every day, I felt some of that lift.

- So I think what you're describing is a bit of catharsis.

Is that what happened both to you and to the people you wrote about?

Was there a cathartic element to it?

- I think so, and I worried about that.

As I'm interviewing people and then particularly as I'm gathering their memories together to tell the story of the Fuji fire, I worried, am I gonna be doing more harm than good?

I mean, I'm not a trained counselor.

You know, am I gonna be ripping metaphorical bandages off of wounds that maybe should have been left covered?

Fortunately, most everyone I've talked to has said that it's been useful to finally talk about it, to share the information, and to learn more about what happened to people other than them.

That had been a worry.

And it's been gratifying that everyone I've talked to so far has found it useful.

And people are now even reconnecting with each other.

Some are volunteering with groups for burn survivors, and so that's been gratifying.

- Well, you know, Chas, the book is not just about the immediate crisis of the fire, it's about what follows.

And this was some, I thought, of the most affecting parts of the telling, the people who literally ran to help.

And, you know, I wanna talk about them, but I wanna start with just maybe a moment talking about the nature of thermal injuries.

You know, what happens when people are burned in a fire and what does that do to their bodies?

And what does the treatment and recovery prognosis look like for people who were, you know, had second and third-degree burns over large portions of their body?

- This is something that I had never known about.

You know, you hear the term first, second, third-degree.

I didn't know what that meant.

And so over the course of this, I got quite a tutorial from people who had themselves been burned, from burn surgeons and nurses who cared for people in that circumstance.

A second-degree burn, interestingly, can be horrible for a patient in the first instance, more so than a third-degree burn.

So first of all, our skin is an organ.

It's the largest organ in our body.

We don't typically think of that as an organ.

And just on a very basic level, it keeps you warm.

When your skin is gone, you're incredibly cold.

This incident's happening in the middle of a typhoon.

So there's cyclonic winds, there's rain that's, you know, even if you have your complete skin cover, you're being pelted.

It feels like you're being shot with BBs.

So these people in this circumstance are without their skin.

When you have a third-degree burn, every level of the tissue is burned.

And there's no life left in it.

It's going to, you know, for your recovery, it's gonna have to be completely removed.

If you have second-degree burns, you nerves in that layer are still connected.

You're in terrible, terrible pain.

So there were people who tell the story of when they were first burned, they were in horrible pain, and then suddenly, they don't feel anything.

And so they're able to experience, because the nerve endings are no longer connected, they're walking around in this surreal hellscape, you know.

This is no paved roads in this camp.

It's all volcanic soil.

People are running around.

These huts are on fire.

Walls of flame are rushing by them, you know, burning from moving water.

And so it was just an odd experience, but so those who had second-degree burns required, you know, when corpsmen could get to them with morphine, you know, there was serious pain management to be done.

And then, but second-degree burns can heal.

So when you get into the point of this long-term healing, third-degree burns, that material has to all be removed and skin hopefully can be grafted from other parts of the body and replace it.

I gained a huge appreciation for the gravity of the injury and for the fortitude of the people who survive it.

And for the dedication of the medical professionals who specialize in that.

It's a calling.

- Let's talk about some of those medical professionals, because these Marines that are evacuated from Camp Fuji are eventually air evacuated to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas.

Why Brooke and what's their experience like while they're there?

- So by 1979, the Army Institute of Surgical Research Burn Center within Brooke Army Medical Center was the, and remains today, the premier burn treatment center in the world, not just in the military, not just in the US, in the world.

And there was one particular surgeon who had over a decade of having taken command of that created just this incredible, not just treatment center, but they were producing more research into burns, intentional research that then contributed to improvements in treatment.

And so the medical evacuation that took 38 Marines from Japan to Texas remains the largest ever single medevac flight of burn patients.

One Marine died en route on the plane, so 37 were admitted to Brooke Army Medical Center that day.

And that remains the largest single admission in the Army Institute of Surgical Research's history.

And in fact, in any burn center in the world.

They had quite a staff, but they plussed up.

They doubled the number of nurses, and it was so long, so they had a 16 bed intensive care unit.

A good number of those Marines, that was filled for a large portion.

In Japan, one Marine had died at the camp on the day of the fire.

Three others would die in Japan.

One died while the group was being medevaced.

And then there were, I guess, perhaps eight remaining.

Eight or nine would die over time of infections, typically.

And that's the, you know, when your body's not covered, you're susceptible to infection in so many different ways.

And there were also problems.

In a fire, there are problems having to do with having breathed in toxic smoke and fire.

So there are issues associated with that.

Your body leaks like a sieve and so every organ in the body can be impacted.

And so all of those issues had to be addressed at the burn center.

Had they not been taken there, the casualty figure would've been significantly higher.

- Can you tell us a little bit about the camaraderie of the Marines?

There are some stories that you share in the book about Marines with grievous injuries, but being more concerned about their buddies in the next bunk or in the next bed and how they're doing.

Can you tell us a little bit about that and what that tells us about Marines more generally?

- Well, it was striking.

You know, a lot of this we see reflected through the perspectives of the Army, Navy, Air Force medical people who were taking care of them, who found it striking.

As a Marine, some of these things seem just natural to me, but I think maybe people don't understand the camaraderie that one becomes part of, you know, on earning the title Marine, and at an Air Force hospital where the Marines were taken for a couple of days before they could be medevaced to Texas, one Navy nurse who'd been a combat corpsman in Vietnam, commented that they had a couple Marines in the room and they were taking one out just to have some lab work done and said the other Marine just, he was frantic and they couldn't calm him down until that Marine was brought back and he knew that his buddy was okay.

In San Antonio, there's a procedure that, this is after people get out of the intensive care unit when they're just, you know, continued life is not guaranteed, but they're out of the immediate emergency of, you know, you could die in the next ten minutes.

They're out in the general wards and they have to be taken every day to have their wounds cleaned, scrubbed, cut off.

And this is particularly the second-degree burns that exude something that can attract infection.

So they have to be scrubbed.

It's an incredibly painful process, even with having been given morphine or some other pain reliever beforehand.

And nurses commented on the fact that as a Marine was walking to that, you know, what everybody knew was going to be a painful experience, other Marines would get out of bed and walk with them just to the door of where that was gonna happen just to physically show this support, this, you know, we're there with you, if not physically.

We know what you're going through.

We're going through the same thing, and we're going through it together.

- Wow, that's incredible.

Was there any media coverage of this fire after it happened?

Immediately after it happened?

- There was.

There was limited.

The wire services had stories, and this happened on a Friday.

It was October 19th, 1979.

And of course, with the time difference, you know, happened a lot earlier in Japan.

It's still Friday.

On Friday evening, there were short reports on ABC and CBS news, on the evening news, as much about the typhoon as anything, because the typhoon created a lot of other damage in Japan.

There were people who died when ships were scuttled offshore and such, and it created a lot of damage.

So there was reporting on that with mention of something had happened at a Marine camp.

The following Monday, Walter Cronkite on the "CBS Evening News" followed up, briefly noting that the casualty figure was much higher than had initially been reported.

There were some news articles.

It was mostly wire service reporting.

Down the road, there were a couple of articles on the Marines at the burn center.

There was really quite a moving piece that was in "Reader's Digest."

"The New York Times" wrote a long piece and there was a "Washington Post" piece about that aspect of it.

But subsequent to that, after the hostage situation had occurred in early November 1979 in Iran, there's very, very little.

Occasionally maybe an article in a hometown, small town newspaper about, you know, injured Marine comes home now, that sort of thing.

- Was anybody, so I'm just thinking about the investigation now.

Was anybody ever held accountable or responsible for the fire?

And if you read the book, you know that those fuel bladders were placed uphill from huts where Marines were living, which seems like just an awful idea.

Was anybody ever held accountable?

- God was named as the principal culprit in the Marine Corps investigation that was conducted.

There were a couple of investigations, interestingly.

The day after the fire, Japanese military investigators came and did really a quite comprehensive investigation of damage.

They took measurements.

And I was able to get a copy.

The Japanese military shared this with me.

But it wasn't until about four days later that the Marine Corps assigned investigators and two investigating officers to put together a report.

One was a colonel who I argue had vested interest.

He actually had himself conducted a maintenance inspection on the camp during a period where the bladders had been moved.

And so seemingly might have, you know, not raised an objection to that.

The second investigating officer was a Marine Corps lawyer, who I attribute, you know, a really well done investigation to him.

And the material they provided, it really helped me with the chronology.

But to your question, in the end, you know, they noted what they thought had happened over time, but they said that no one, no human being was responsible for this, and it was solely, you know, an act of God.

Now, the placement of the bladders did not contradict the Marine Corps technical manual on, you know, how to lay these things out.

But the technical manual also didn't address issues of inclining terrain.

Other service manuals did.

For at least ten years before that, the Army Fuel Handling Field Manual said, "Do not place fuel uphill or upstream from where troops are billeted."

Two years beforehand, the Army had updated its manual to say, "Never place those fuel bladders uphill or upstream from where you have troops."

- That's interesting.

Chas, we've only got about a minute left here, but I wonder, we're broadcasting this around Veterans Day.

What does this tell us about people who serve and the reality of service in the armed services, whether it's in wartime or peace time?

- Well, there's some risk that comes with it, and I think that might even have been a surprise to those of us, you know, in the military at the time because the Vietnam War was behind.

And we may have, you know, underestimated the amount of risk that occurs in a natural setting, you know, in this case a typhoon being principally responsible.

But it also points to the fact that we need to be concerned and think about and at least appreciate what people have done in service, be it in combat or not, because they did take on risks that, you know, whether known or unknown, just by being forward deployed, by being ready, and by taking part in training that has some intrinsic risk to it, even though it could be mitigated by safety concern.

And so, know that some of the people who, you know, were injured in service to the nation, not all were hurt while fighting an enemy, other humans.

- Chas Henry, the book is "Fuji Fire."

Thank you for spending some time with us and telling us this story.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit salve.edu/pellcenter where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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