community on the base encouraged understanding.
At times we had tensions, but the strong personal relationships we built allowed us to work through them. Fortunately, our troops did not cause any significant problems during my tour. According to my local friends, this was the longest period without a serious incident between our troops and Okinawans. (All the work to cure the myriad problems from the aftermath of Vietnam was now paying off.)
Later two other commands were added to my original three responsibilities:
The 9th Marines was designated to provide the core unit for Regimental Landing Team-9, the Ground Combat Element of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade (MEB), our amphibious force in the Western Pacific. And during a visit to Okinawa, General Gray directed the commanding general of III MEF to develop and establish a MEU (SOC), the first in this command. I was ordered to organize, train, and command this unit.
The MEU has a battalion landing team as a ground component, a reinforced helicopter squadron as an air component, and a logistics component. We did extensive training in the highly specialized equipment, tactics, techniques, and procedures for the unit’s unique missions. This involved intense and demanding certification evaluations conducted in difficult locations like the Philippines.
In one night helicopter training event, we had a helo crash at sea and lost a number of Marines. This was not the first time I’d seen a fatal training accident, and it wasn’t the last. Despite all of our best efforts, shit happens. Yet, each time I’ve been torn by the loss of some great Marines. Peacetime training deaths in your unit are, in many ways, far more difficult to deal with than combat deaths. After a memorial service the next day and an extensive air and sea search, we resumed the training. Though I knew this was difficult for young men to understand (and it was hard for me as well!), I felt I had to send a message that we had to immediately get our minds back into our training. I knew the demands of combat don’t give us the luxury of grieving for long.
For over two years, 1987-89, I was blessed with these five grand responsibilities. The icing on the cake was the enjoyment my family got out of this tour of duty. They loved Okinawa. They had never been happier.
Meanwhile, like any commander, I wanted to have the best-trained and operationally capable regiment in the Marine Corps. We immersed ourselves in rigorous training and education programs.
Okinawa is small, which meant there were serious live fire and range restrictions. These problems had given the island a reputation as a difficult place for training, and impossible for large unit training. But I refused to accept this. To prove it could be done, I took the entire regiment to the field on exercises. This meant we had to look for innovative approaches and to ignore imagined limitations, but we got the job done. Of course, the island did have training limitations; and I scraped or volunteered for every opportunity to get my units off the island for training and exercises. They went to Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Guam, Iwo Jima, and many other locations in the region. In my two-plus years in command of the regiment, the RLT, and the MEU, I took these units to over twenty large-scale exercises, and sent smaller units to many more.
I have always enjoyed teaching operations and tactics. This experience had led me to conclude that most commanders neglect the operational education of their subordinate leaders. As a result, I established an extensive officer, Staff NCO, and NCO education program in the command. All the twice-weekly officer school sessions — classes, map exercises, and field sessions — were focused solely on war fighting, and were taught or supervised by me. We made every attempt to make them fun and challenging.
I tasked my sergeant major to run the Staff NCO sessions, and (together with the battalion sergeants major) to supervise the NCO program. But I taught many of these sessions as well.
Since the contingency requirement to respond to a crisis in Korea was our most demanding potential mission, the regiment and RLT spent a great deal of time engaged in enormous exercises there, involving thousands of U.S. and Republic of Korea (ROK) troops. Conducting operations in the Korean countryside among the small villages and towns made the exercises realistic and interesting for our troops. The training was tough, often done during the winter or early spring months when the weather was extremely harsh.
Twice my MEU was called out to handle crises in the Philippines, when assassins from the NPA, a Philippine terrorist group, murdered U.S. military personnel.
In the first incident, U.S. airmen from Clark Air Force Base were killed in the town near their base. In the second, the U.S. military attache to the Philippines, Colonel Nick Rowe, was shot while driving in Manila (Rowe was a hero, having escaped from Vietnam after surviving years of captivity there).
Our mission following both incidents was to provide immediate security to the naval base at Subic Bay and the nearby naval air base at Cubi Point. Our units patrolled the jungle around the bases and provided security for forces required for missions outside the bases.
I knew this jungle well, since we had done extensive training there. The Negrito scouts, from one of the many Philippine ethnic groups, had conducted the jungle training, and they were superb — teaching us about jungle plants that stopped infections and bleeding and helped wounds heal quicker, about other plants that were ordinarily poisonous but which could be bleached (to remove the poison) and eaten, and much else… a tremendous wealth of field skills. Though I had taken a number of jungle training courses and had firsthand experience in Vietnam, these scouts taught me more about jungle craft than I had ever learned before.
The most significant event during these deployments came when the admiral in charge of our forces in the Philippines decided we should conduct a humanitarian mission after a fierce typhoon had hit a remote area of southeastern Luzon. When U.S. troops were locked down on the bases the resulting tensions from the loss of revenue to locals had started to cause problems. The admiral saw the opportunity to help the ravaged coastal villages as a way of easing some of these tensions and improving relations.
The humanitarian mission he laid on us required my aircraft, C-130s and CH-53s, to move relief supplies. The C-130s flew the supplies to a dirt airstrip in the region, while the big CH-53 helos took the supplies from the dirt strip staging area into the villages.
Though I certainly appreciated the humanitarian and public relations benefits at a sensitive time, I was not comfortable with the mission. The area we were operating in was over three hundred miles from our base, and no one was paying much attention to security requirements and potential threats from the NPA and other terrorists and local insurrections.
Our aircraft ran the first missions with no problems and were into the second day of operations when I received a call that one of our CH-53s had made an emergency landing in a village and suffered minor damage. No big deal, my squadron asserted. They’d make a quick inspection and minor repairs, and the helo would be out in a few hours.
That estimate turned out to be wildly optimistic… The fallen helo was about to become the bane of my existence.
The next day, the news from the helo was not so positive. Damage was now seen to have been somewhat worse than originally reported, but the CH-53 could still be easily fixed.
“Okay,” I said to myself, but when I asked the Philippine Marines about local security and threats from bad guys I was shocked to learn that this particular area was heavily threatened and influenced by the NPA. The situation there was so bad that the Philippine military sent in only their most elite forces, Marines and Rangers. Though I was aware that these forces were operating in the region, I had not connected that with the threat information. My upset got worse.
I immediately ordered my battalion to rush a satellite communications- equipped platoon to the village to provide security for the one more day of work needed to get the helo functioning.
When the platoon arrived, its commander reported that the village chief was worried that all of this American military activity would attract NPA guerrillas. The platoon commander had accordingly set up security for the helo and the village. That was the good news. The bad news was that the helo was actually in much worse condition than previously reported.
I decided to get down to the village for a firsthand look. After putting my executive officer in
