First came the water pouring down the slopes of Japan’s Mount Fuji on October 19, 1979. Then on top of the torrents came the fire that killed 13 U.S. Marines and burned dozens more. Though investigators afterward may not have consulted the Bible, they ended up attributing the unusual mix of elements involved to the same force that, per the Book of Exodus, enveloped ancient Egypt in hail and fire. “It was an act of God,” investigators concluded.
In Fuji Fire, Marine veteran-turned-journalist Chas Henry gives “the worst-ever peacetime disaster in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps,” as the incident quickly became known, a much-needed new look. The idea for the book came to Henry several years ago after he posted about the fire on social media, only to discover that many of his followers had no memory of it. More than one responded, “What fire?”
Until it was too late that October day in 1979, the more than 1,200 Marines based at a Spartan training camp on Mount Fuji would have asked the same. They had received word to watch out not for a fire but for a typhoon named Tip, which still holds the record for strongest cyclone ever recorded. The military had learned the hard way to take these storms seriously. In the final year before the Japanese surrendered in World War II, typhoons had killed hundreds of American sailors and damaged scores of ships in the Pacific.
Forecasters, however, expected Camp Fuji to miss the worst of Tip. Hearing that it would bring only “moderate to heavy rain,” Marines made plans to ride out the storm in the metal huts that passed as their living quarters. The men read and played cards, even as a pounding rain, which would eventually total nearly 11 inches, hinted at an error in the forecast. Water rolling down the mountain seeped through cracks in the huts until the bunks turned into islands in a stream more than an inch deep. To keep out wind gusts of more than 80 miles per hour, Marines bolted the doors closed without considering they had barred their own escape.
A few hundred meters up the mountain from the barracks, the soaked ground eroded around a site where Marines stored and dispensed fuel. A bladder containing more than 5,000 gallons of gasoline fell, ruptured, and released its contents into the rain heading down the slope. When the Marines smelled the fumes and spotted the shimmer in the water, there wasn’t time to put out cigarettes or turn off the kerosene heaters warming the huts. Either source, Henry speculates, could have started the blaze.
The Marines had gone to Camp Fuji to test their combat readiness, but no training could have prepared them for what followed. Quotations from the more than 100 Marines whose recollections serve as the backbone of Henry’s book re-create the scene best: the “giant whoosh, sort of like a blast furnace starting up,” “the fireball … twice the height” of a hut, and then water “up to your knees and the fire … on top it.” Inside a hut, one Marine remembered facing a “wall of fire.” Outside, another saw “a river of fire” flowing from one building to the next.
More searing than the flames were the images of the injured. “It was pretty horrible,” one witness said, “because all their hair was gone, some of them their ears were gone. And you couldn’t tell whether they were a black guy or a white guy.” In some cases, their skin had simply fallen off.
All of this happens before the halfway point in Fuji Fire. If the book had followed the recent trend in natural disaster chronicles, most of the rest would have focused on the question of fault. No storm, it seems, makes landfall today without bringing days of news coverage seeking to link the destruction either to a failure of presidential leadership or climate change. A history of the fire at Camp Fuji could easily have gone this direction, especially given it had an unmistakable man-made component: Unlike the U.S. Army, the Marines lacked a sensible policy against storing fuel uphill from buildings. Some at Camp Fuji had harbored concerns.
But Henry takes his story in a more surprising direction. While rejecting the act-of-God explanation, he concerns himself less with the search for individual blame than with an opposing idea: the selflessness that makes men into Marines. “Until you see it, and experience it firsthand,” says one observer whom Henry quotes, “you don’t really understand what that Marine esprit de corps is all about.” As much as in any story about Marines fighting their way toward Japan during World War II, Fuji Fire gives a sense of this esprit.
It is evident in the unexpectedly quiet hospitals where injured Marines resisted the urge to moan about their misfortune because they worried others had it worse. “If we were in a civilian burn ward right now, the screaming would be unbelievable,” one surgeon said.
It is evident in the daily trips severely burned Marines made to the so-called tank where doctors would scrub off the scabs forming over wounds. Men who barely could walk themselves to the tank would get out of bed without fail to escort a buddy there.
It is evident in the way the Marine community mobilized to make it possible for the families of the injured to remain at their bedsides at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. Without receiving any orders or pay to do so, a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve drove a few hundred miles to the hospital with a trunk full of grocery bags stuffed with cash, as he put it, “for anybody that needs money,” and then proceeded to give something even more valuable: his time.
In conveying the esprit of the Marines, Henry has a great advantage: He lived it for 20 years. His writing—particularly his descriptions of a weather reconnaissance plane flying through Tip and of the C-141 flights evacuating the injured to the United States—has the detail, crispness, and polish of the uniform he wore. Ultimately, he concludes the fire at Camp Fuji resulted from what he calls a “system accident” involving so many interconnected parts that it is impossible to separate any of them from the others. A Marine would understand.
Too rapidly Americans moved on from what happened at Camp Fuji. The start of the Iran hostage crisis a few weeks after the fire forced the story out of newspapers and off television news. Little more than a stone memorial on the slopes of Fuji remained to commemorate what had happened at the camp, but Henry did not forget. The fire had burned the faces of even many survivors beyond recognition, but he remembered who they were and tracked down as many of them and the loved ones of the dead as he could for his research.
As the Marine Corps celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding this November, Fuji Fire stays faithful to the history. For its author, there could be no higher praise than semper fidelis.
Fuji Fire: Sifting Ashes of a Forgotten U.S. Marine Corps Tragedy
by Chas Henry
Potomac Books, 328 pp., $36.95
Jonathan Horn is the author, most recently, of The Fate of the Generals: MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines.
AloJapan.com