Gone But Not Forgotten: Gary Hall, Joseph Hargrove, Danny Marshall
Peter Maguire's speech at the Mayaguez Veteran reunion, Las Vegas, NV, May 14, 2022
I’d like to thank the Koh Tang/Mayaguez Veterans organization for inviting me to speak at your reunion. It is a great honor. I would also like to thank Tom Noble and Don Raatz for putting this event together and Al and Tina Bailey for introducing me to this remarkable group of veterans. Finally, I need to thank the board and donors of Fainting Robin Foundation, my foundation, for funding my research into the Mayaguez Incident and paying my expenses to come to Las Vegas.
This sentence in Donald Rumsfeld’s 2018 book, When The Center Held, prompted me to revisit my decades-old research on the Mayaguez Incident, a bloody one day battle fought on May 15, 1975, between the United States and Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge. “President Ford’s successful handling of the crisis in Cambodia,” wrote President Gerald Ford’s Secretary of Defense, “was a turning point for President Ford because he demonstrated command at a time of international crisis.” Rumsfeld goes on to make a Freudian slip and erroneously claim that only three Americans, not 43, died during the operation. I never liked Rumsfeld, and his attempt to whitewash history pissed me off. I felt, as a professional historian, duty bound to correct this act of blatant historical revisionism.
First, a bit of a background on the stone-aged communists known as the Khmer Rouge. Led by a handful of western-educated Cambodians, their leader, known by his nom de guerre, Pol Pot, lived in secret and worked behind the scenes. The Khmer Rouge came to power in April, 1975, after defeating the U.S.-backed Lon Nol regime in a brutal four year civil war that left 250,000 dead.
President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger expanded the Vietnam war into Cambodia in 1973. Operation Menu, their secret bombing campaign, launched 3,630 B-52 raids that dropped 250,000 tons of bombs on the Kingdom of Cambodia. While it is difficult to estimate how many were killed, one fact remains certain: the bombings turned many uprooted Cambodian peasants into zealous revolutionaries.
Probably the greatest liability for the U.S. policy in Cambodia was Lon Nol, the corrupt leader they installed in 1970. While his soldiers fought bravely on the battlefield, his generals could usually be found in the capital, Phnom Penh, drunk by noon. As the rebels crept closer to the capital, Lon Nol ordered his army’s helicopters to sprinkle magic sand at key strategic points throughout the city, distribute pieces of magic plants, amulets, and white scarves that he claimed would make them bulletproof. After this secret bombing campaign was exposed, Congress cut off all military aid to Cambodia.
Although President Nixon resigned in 1974, his feral Secretary of State survived the purge, and next became President Gerald Ford’s Secretary of State. Longtime CIA official Ray Cline was harshly critical of the oversized role the manipulative Kissinger played in American foreign policy. “A single policy-maker [Kissinger] ended up controlling dissemination and analyzing of intelligence,” wrote Cline, “and yet intelligence provides the only possible basis for judging the wisdom of the policy.”
By 1975, the chances of a peaceful transfer of power in Cambodia were slim to none. The civil war had been raging for four years and had grown increasingly brutal. One group of western journalists watched Lon Nol soldiers kill, butcher, and cook a man in front of them. “They then fell on his body with knives, cutting open his chest and abdomen, and tore out his heart, liver, and lungs,” wrote Australian reporter Neil Davis, “They also carved out his biceps and calf muscles.” Brutality was not limited to the Cambodian government’s soldiers. U.S. diplomat Ken Quinn accurately predicted what life under the Khmer Rouge would be like: “Death sentences are relatively common…people are arrested and simply never show up again.”
In April, Lon Nol accepted cash and exile in the Honolulu suburbs as Phnom Penh’s population swelled with rural peasants seeking refuge from the fighting in the countryside. On April 12, U.S. Ambassador Dean folded up the stars and stripes, called in the Marines and CH-53 helicopters landed near the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh. Marines secured the perimeter and helicopters ferried hundreds of Americans and Cambodians to aircraft carriers in the South China Sea.
A single cannon shot marked the dawn of April 17, 1975, and the surrender of Phnom Penh as long, single files of teenaged Khmer Rouge soldiers streamed into the capital. These barefoot teens, some clad in black rags, others in Chinese olive green fatigues, all well armed, were glowering with malicious intent—Mao’s Red Brigade meets Lord of the Flies.
Most shocking to the westerners who remained was the regime’s decision to evict Phnom Penh’s 20,000 hospital patients from their beds and force them on a death march out of the city. “They will kill more people this way than if there had been fighting,” said Fernand Scheller of the UN, as he watched hospital patients roll by, many still in their beds, some with IV bottles attached, “What the Khmer Rouge are doing is pure and simple genocide.” Catholic priest François Ponchaud described the procession as “a hallucinatory spectacle,” and added, “I shall never forget one cripple who had neither hands nor feet, writhing along the ground like a severed worm.”
Khmer Rouge soldiers, on three-wheeled motorcycle carts with public address systems, ordered the population out of the city. Young soldiers divided the capital into zones with numerous checkpoints where soldiers and government officials were culled from the human herd. As eleven-year-old Aun Pheap searched for his mother, he watched “Khmer Rouge soldiers, who had never driven, run over people in captured military jeeps.” Journalists Jon Swain, Al Rockoff, and Sydney Schanberg were pulled from their car at gunpoint by Khmer Rouge soldiers. “They were boys, some perhaps twelve years old, hardly taller than their tightly held AK-47 rifles,” Swain wrote, “Their ignorance and fanaticism made them super deadly.”
“The Glorious April 17th,” the ghoulish national anthem of “Democratic Kampuchea,” as the Khmer Rouge had renamed their country, now played on the radio and provided a hint of things to come:
The red, red blood splatters the cities and the plains of the Cambodian fatherland,
The sublime blood of the workers and peasants,
The blood of revolutionary combatants of both sexes.
The blood spills out into great indignation and a resolute urge to fight.
17 April, that day under the revolutionary flag,
The blood certainly liberates us from slavery.
By May, 1975, the Khmer Rouge were implementing one of the most radical political programs of the blood-soaked twentieth century. Buddhist monks were made to plow fields, their pagodas were turned into killing centers, the National Library was converted into a pigsty, and books were only used to start fires. All private property, even money, was abolished. Now, ignorance was a virtue and the peasants, now called “The Old People,” were in charge of “The New People.” The two million residents of Phnom Penh—anyone with an education or contact with the west—were considered human livestock. Messages deciphered by U.S. intelligence told an ominous story: “Eliminate all high-ranking military officials, government officials. Do this secretly. Also get provincial officers who owe the communist party a blood debt.”
The early accounts of life under the Khmer Rouge sounded too bizarre to be true, as if George Orwell had written them to satirize life under a dictatorship of the proletariat: a place where parents feared their children and civilians were slaughtered in numbers and for reasons unimagined since Stalin’s purges or Hitler’s Third Reich. After they were forced into the countryside, the “New People” faced a simple choice: work or die. “We are turning our society upside down,” one Khmer Rouge officer said. “The people of Phnom Penh will grow rice,” he said, and as an afterthought added, “They will work or starve.” As one young Khmer Rouge soldier later admitted, “Old People and New People must clearly be kept apart. Townsfolk are New People. They are to be killed.” Between 1975 and 1978, in 3 years, 10 months, and twenty days, the Chinese-backed regime killed approximately 2 million of their own countrymen—20% of Cambodia’s population.
I got interested in the Khmer Rouge in 1993. I was completing my Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia University on the Nuremberg war crimes trials and the laws of war. My great-grandfather had been a judge at Nuremberg, and my Ph.D. advisor, Brigadier General Telford Taylor, had been chief counsel at Nuremberg.
My dissertation was awarded honors, but it was cold comfort. I felt hollow and fraudulent, like a boxing commentator who had never been in the ring. I was writing about modern conflict as a civilian leading a secure life at an Ivy League university. Twenty-eight and a product of one of the softest generations in American history, what did I know about conflict resolution beyond what I had read? To teach undergraduates about how the world should be without addressing that rapidly changing world on its own terms was to perpetuate a familiar cycle of fraudulence.
My Nuremberg research led me to Cambodia quite naturally, because Cambodia had shattered the “never again” promise once and for all. The Khmer Rouge had committed the most brazen atrocities since the Third Reich. There was overwhelming evidence that they had violated the Nuremberg Principles, the United Nations Charter, the laws of war, even the UN Genocide Convention. During the decade after their regime’s collapse, the Khmer Rouge had been rescued by China, the United States, and Thailand. Pol Pot and the other leaders lived in freedom and still wielded considerable power. Genocide was carried out and the perpetrators were rewarded. I began to see Cambodia as the modern paradigm for the resolution of a genocidal conflict, and Germany/Nuremberg as the anomaly.
I first went to Cambodia in 1994 to investigate Khmer Rouge war crimes after I learned that Chris Riley, an old high school friend working there, had found a cache of photographic negatives that were evidence of war crimes, so I decided to help him. My initial research centered around S-21 or Tuol Sleng Prision. In 1976, the Khmer Rouge turned this former high school into a torture and interrogation center. It was the end of the road, the last stop before the Killing Fields. More than 20,000 people entered S-21; possibly twenty survived. Before the prisoners were interrogated, tortured, and executed, they were carefully photographed. The simple, wordless documents were more eye-opening to me than the mounds of human bones, the instruments of torture, or even the killing fields.
By the time the Cambodian government finally divided and conquered the Khmer Rouge in 1997–8, I had found and interviewed the prison’s guards, survivors, an executioner, and even the photographer for my book, Facing Death in Cambodia.
During the course of my investigations in Cambodia, I had been haunted by one discovery. A friend in California had asked me to look for any records of Chris Delance, a friend who was rumored to have vanished in Cambodia. In 1994, I found his confession at Tuol Sleng. Delance was aboard a sailboat off the Cambodian coast in September of 1978 when they were captured by the Cambodian navy and sent to Tuol Sleng Prison.
For two months, they were tortured, interrogated, and forced to write their confessions. While some historians and journalists suspected that they might be CIA agents, I suspected that they were marijuana smugglers.
I made some discreet inquiries and confirmed that both boats had been on smuggling missions. Now I began to search for the Khmer Rouge soldiers who captured these Americans.
Between the Cambodian port of Kompong Som and Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base, the Khmer Rouge had eight Chinese escort boats, a dozen fast torpedo boats, leftover American Swift boats, and armed fishing boats that were all aggressively patrolling their small stretch of coastline. With my old Khmer Rouge fixer now dying of AIDS, I reached out to a friend in the Phnom Penh press corps who gave an introduction to a new Khmer Rouge fixer named Lokhai, but warned me—he is very smart, but keep him on a short leash. [Some of this material appeared in an earlier post, Fixers and Terps, Part One.]
Lokhai had served in the Khmer Rouge, in what capacity, he never disclosed. He distinguished himself during the UN’s occupation during the 1990s after open season was declared on the UN motorpool. In 1993, the UN human rights office had five cars stolen at gunpoint in a single day and Lokhai served as the broker for the UN’s buy-back of their vehicles.
We first made contact by phone and I described my investigation. A few weeks later, Lokhai called to tell me that he had arranged interviews for me with Khmer Rouge Navy chief Meas Muth and others who knew about the captured Americans. Initially, I was impressed by his initiative. However, after numerous late night calls, tales of woe, and requests for more money, I had doubts about the fixer who would be taking me to the former Khmer Rouge villages.
When we met at my guesthouse for the first time, Lokhai laid out a very formal and rigid, almost military itinerary of interviews. According to his plan, we would criss-cross the nation in my long-time driver Nek’s white Toyota, and conduct more interviews in two weeks than I usually did in two months. While it sounded ambitious, I knew from experience that investigations often take on a life of their own. Flexibility and a willingness to follow new leads had always led to my best discoveries.
First, we would go to the Kampot province to speak with a man who had served in the Khmer Rouge Navy. Lokhai claimed that he saw the captured Americans and had first-hand information about their deaths. Typically, the first meetings were meet-and-greets. I would bring fruit and flowers, introduce myself, and then arrange to conduct the interview later at a neutral location. Lokhai, my driver Nek and I set out for the Kampot province early in the morning. A few miles before we reached Kampot, we turned down a parched and dusty, red dirt road, drove around pot holes, and bounced our way to a crossroads where a half dozen men sat in plastic chairs under a palm-frond palapa.
Lokhai told Nek to pull over, and my driver turned around nervously and asked me, “You have gun?” My new fixer tried to reassure us that he had everything under control, but this only made me more nervous. We got out of the Toyota and all but one man stood up. He couldn’t because he had no legs. Between the six men in the tattered remnants of military uniforms, they had only five legs. Lokhai instructed Nek to stay in the car, I greeted the men with a wai and then offered each of them a cigarette. When I turned to offer one to the man missing both legs, I winced when I saw his face.
Although he had a krama covering half his head, I could see by his face’s asymmetry that one side of it had been blown off and what skin was left on his face had been pulled taut and somehow sewn back to his skull. His one, bulging, Cyclopsean eye studied me as I fumbled with the cigarette pack. One of the unsmiling men pointed to the plastic chairs and Lokhai said, “Sit, wait.” The cigarettes did nothing to dissipate the tension. When an older man driving an old, white Toyota Landcruiser pulled up, everyone who could, stood. I looked at the strange reddish-brown insignia on the door, and realized it was rust in the shape of the UN emblem that had been peeled off the door.
The older man approached Lokhai, but did not greet him. His facial muscles twitched as he gave my fixer an earful. “He want to know why you want to know this?” Lokhai looked at the ground and asked sheepishly. I told him that I was a historian trying to make sense of the past. It seemed to make things worse. The older man harangued Lokhai who just kept saying, “Ba, ba, ba, (yes, yes, yes)” over and over. When the older man finally stopped talking, Lokhai turned to me and said, “Okay, we go now.” We said terse goodbyes and as we were walking towards our car, one of the soldiers picked up a four-foot long section of concrete pipe, shouldered it like a bazooka, pointed it at us, pulled an imaginary trigger, and when he said, “Boom!” all of them laughed menacingly. That was it, meet-and-greet over. No interview.
A few days later, we drove to a village outside of Kompong Speu to interview Mao Ran, a Khmer Rouge soldier who had fought on Koh Tang Island during the Mayaguez Incident. After a long, bouncy ride down a dry, dirt road, we reached his village. When we got out of the car, most of the village turned out not so much to greet us, but to stare at me. Finally, the two heads of the village arrived. Much scarier than the older man giving me dirty looks, was the unblinking, skeletal woman who reminded me of a witch from a Grimms fairy tale. She was clearly the shot caller and carried great power. Once again, there was a harsh exchange that ended with Lokhai saying “Ba, ba, ba, ba” again. The witch barked some orders at different people and they went in different directions. “We wait, they get Mao Ran,” he whispered under his breath.
By the time Mao Ran showed up, the entire village was hovering around us. Bare-chested with a krama wrapped around his waist like a sarong, he had dead eyes, was missing his right forearm, and his body was tattooed with bullet wounds and shrapnel scars from the two decades he spent on the battlefield. We sat next to each other on a wooden bedframe and Lokhai explained that we wanted to talk to him about the capture of the American sailors. Although Mao stared unblinkingly off into space, the village chiefs did not miss a word.
After I handed him the flowers and fruit, I turned to Lokhai and said, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” He nodded and we stood up. I looked for Nek’s white Toyota, but it was gone. The witch had more harsh words for Lokhai, and I tried not to think too much about the fact that our car had disappeared. To take my mind of the situation and not show fear, I turned my attention to the one person in the village who seemed to like me. A four- or five-year-old boy, had been trying to get my attention since we arrived. When I let him play with my hat, he began to talk to me like he had known me his entire life. His seventeen- or eighteen-year-old mother was holding a tiny baby, and when I smiled at her, she smiled back.
I asked Lokhai to ask her where she had her baby and when he did, she pointed to a spot in the dirt a few feet from where we were sitting. The young mother smiled at me again and then began talking to the older village women excitedly. I was surprised when she, Lokhai, and the older women began to laugh. Next, one of them issued an order, a young girl scrambled off and then everyone really began to giggle. Now I was really confused, but made no effort to try to make sense of any of it. I was just happy that for whatever reason, the tension seemed to have magically dissipated. A few minutes later, one of the older women steered a beautiful, smiling fifteen or sixteen-year-old Cambodian girl towards me. Lokhai said simply, “You can take her back to Phnom Penh to stay with you.”
As I was politely explaining that my wife was waiting for me back in Phnom Penh and that second wives were not part of my culture, my driver Nek pulled up and provided me with a graceful exit. I said goodbye to Mao Ran, and when I reached the car I asked my driver where the fuck he had gone. “I saw Buddhist monk walking so I drove him to next village and got stuck in sand. Have to dig out car.”
Over the course of the next few weeks, I interviewed Mao Ran, Em Som and other Khmer Rouge who had seen the captured Americans. I soon realized that we were now talking about two different groups of Americans. While I was interested in the Americans captured on sailboats in the Gulf of Thailand, they were telling me about three Marines who had been captured on Koh Tang Island after the Mayaguez Incident. I was very excited to get the translations of my interviews back, but cringed when I read the transcripts. Lokhai had butchered my questions, and worse, the day after I interviewed Em Som, I received an email from a U.S. Embassy defense attaché requesting a meeting to speak with me about the “persons of interest” I had just interviewed. Lokhai had dropped a dime on me to my own embassy!
After Ralph Wetterhahn’s book, The Last Battle, came out, I shelved my research on the Mayaguez Incident, and focused on the war crimes cases against the senior Khmer Rouge leaders. Two decades later, after I read Rumsfeld’s whitewash of the Mayaguez Incident, I decided to revisit the subject. After I met and interviewed some of the Marines who fought on Koh Tang Island on May 15, 1975, I was surprised that some did not believe that a three-man Marine machine gun team had been left behind and insisted that they were killed in action.
In order to put this issue to rest, I convinced the board of my nonprofit, Fainting Robin Foundation, to launch a new investigation into the Mayaguez Incident. This time, I would not conduct the initial interviews and instead had my close Cambodian associate Sorya Sim, who I had known for two decades, conduct them. In 2020–2021, Sorya drove more than 5000 kilometers, traveled to seven Cambodian provinces and conducted interviews with members of the Khmer Rouge’s elite Division 164, some of whom were stationed on Koh Tang Island in May, 1975.
After taking power, Pol Pot created a ten-thousand-strong praetorian guard called Division 164. Commanded by his trusted subordinate, Meas Muth, and manned by soldiers who had distinguished themselves during the civil war, their first assignment was to secure Cambodia’s disputed offshore islands and protect them from the incursions of the neighboring Vietnamese. Meas Muth rewarded bloodied warrior Em Som with command of Division 164’s Battalion 450. Som had been seriously wounded sixteen times during the civil war, carried shrapnel in his legs from a mortar, and his body was covered with burn scars from an artillery shell that left him in a coma for three months.
In early May, 1975, Em Som received orders to go to Koh Tang and “defend the island.” He and seventy-five men were taken there by boat and when they arrived, they set up a radio on the top of the northern tip of the island. Nearby, they positioned four .50 machine guns and a recoilless rifle. On May 12, Em Som heard on his walkie-talkie that Khmer Rouge forces had captured a big, American container ship, S.S. Mayaguez.
Shortly thereafter, the huge American ship, escorted by a Khmer Rouge patrol boat, dropped its anchor less than a mile west of Koh Tang. Next, American planes arrived on the scene and conducted surveillance. On May 14, American ships, jets, and helicopters filled Cambodia’s waters and skies. Em Som ordered his soldiers to dig trenches and set up fighting positions near the big guns on the west and east beaches, the only places wide enough on the island to land a helicopter. Each three man battle group was armed with AK-47s and every trench had an RPG launcher and grenades.
Em Som was eating his breakfast of rice and fish just after sunrise on May 15, when he heard a thumping sound. As the sound grew louder, he spotted American helicopters approaching. “The dragonflies [helicopters] are rising up out of the water!,” Som yelled to his men, “Motherfuckers! Let’s go!” Some of the experienced soldiers ran to the guns at the top of the island, while others scrambled to their bunkers, trenches, and spider holes near the beaches.
“The first helicopter lowered right in middle of the battle line on west beach,” said Em Som, “It was hit, soldiers jumped out…and were on the beach. They spread out, and opened fire at us.” “Some of them hid behind the rocks, others hid behind the trees. We were fighting face to face,” said Mao Ran, “The most favorable part was that they were big, Even though they lied down they still had huge stuff on their back whereas I only had a bare body.” Mao Ran was impressed by the young American soldiers, “I can say that they were brave. They were not afraid of being killed.”
When Em Som spotted a helicopter flying straight towards his trench, he waited until it was 50 meters away, then shouldered his Rocket Propelled Grenade, and fired. “It moved in front of me, I shot my B41, hit its tail and the helicopter fell down. Soldiers jumped down with stretchy robes. There was exchange of fire.” Som could not see through the clouds of dust and smoke and prayed to Buddha for help, “I had been fighting all my life, but the fighting on Koh Tang was really terrifying.”
That night, after a long day of heavy fighting that left dozens of Americans and Cambodians dead, heroic Air Force pilots and pararescuemen (PJs) landed under fire on the island, packed each helicopter with twice the normal combat load and dropped the Marines on nearby Navy ships. When the final chopper was ready to take off, the Marines on board told the Air Force crew that a three-man machine gun team (Joseph Hargrove, Gary Hall, and Danny Marshall) covering their flank was still on the beach. It was after 8:00 p.m. when the radio aboard the AC-130 Airborne Battlefield Command and Control Center came to life. Air Force Sergeant Robert Veile was the last person to talk to the three Marines, “I had to tell them that nobody was coming back for them.”
Seal Team One commander Tom Coulter was preparing to go back to Koh Tang to conduct a search and rescue operation until Vice Admiral J.T. Coogan told him that the U.S. would first drop leaflets announcing the Seal mission. Worse, the Seals would return to the island unarmed and under a white flag. “First off, Admiral, we’ll have room in front of the boat for you and any of your staff who want to go on the mission,” said the stunned Seal, “This is suicidal! You’re going to drop leaflets? What language are you going to drop them in? Are you going to drop them in French, are you going to drop them in English? Are you going to drop them in Cambodian? What language?”
Next, Vice Admiral Coogan asked the Seal commander how he would conduct the mission. “First off, we won’t go in unarmed, we wouldn’t go in under a white flag. We would go in at night, we’d recon and find out.” When Coulter said, “I’ll personally be carrying a CAR with a 203,” the admiral put his hands on the desk and asked, ‘And just how the hell do you expect to get a car up on the beach?” “Admiral, a CAR is a Colt Automatic Rifle, a 203 is a grenade launcher. I’m not talking about a 57 DeSoto. If you don’t want to do it as I’ve just proposed to you, we don’t particularly want to do the mission,” replied the Seal, “It’s not that we can’t do the mission, but I’m not going to have myself and 13 of my men killed. They had no qualms about killing a whole dump truck full of people, they’re not going to have any qualms about killing us.” The meeting broke up, and according to Coulter, “Coogan was not happy, his chief of staff wasn’t happy, oh by the way, I was the junior guy in the room by about 27 paygrades.”
Tom Coulter was aboard the frigate Harold E. Holt when the captain called him into his stateroom. “They were on a phone hookup and Admiral Coogan, I knew his voice by that time,” said Coulter, “and they said, ‘It’s possible that the President will be on.’ I didn’t hear his voice, but I heard a German accent and I assumed that it was Kissinger and there was probably a couple of other high ups.” The voices on the other end asked the Seal what he believed the probability of success of a search and rescue mission would be. “The probability of bringing everybody home is the most important thing,” he replied, “It was at that time that they said, ‘It’s possible that some bodies were left behind’ which I had already figured out. I said, ‘Well, if there are bodies left behind and we can access them, we’ll bring the bodies back, but the pretense of us going in there rescuing black boxes out of a helicopter that they can’t fly, that doesn’t make a lot of sense.” The next morning, the Holt’s captain informed Coulter, “‘They’re scuttling the op, there will be no recovery.’ It’s unfortunate that those three guys were basically left behind, more importantly more than 40 souls perished in a poorly planned and poorly implemented operation that didn’t achieve anything.”
I am not going to go into the details of the sad fates of Hargrove, Hall, and Marshall. If you are interested you can read about it in my forthcoming book, Left Behind. Suffice it to say, that after reviewing my research, no less of an authority than Rich Arant, a former U.S. Air Force human intelligence officer, Defense Intelligence Agency field investigator in Cambodia, translator for the UN’s Khmer Rouge Tribunal wrote: “Multiple first-hand witnesses from the Khmer Rouge 164th Naval Division have given detailed sworn testimony regarding the capture of U.S. military personnel on Tang Island, events surrounding their handling on the island and the Cambodian mainland by the Khmer Rouge chain of command, and their final disposition.” “Based on the extensive evidence I have seen about the Mayaguez Affair,” wrote Craig Etcheson, the dean of Khmer Rouge war crimes investigators, who has been conducting field research in Cambodia since the early 1990s and was the lead investigator for the UN’s court, “I am convinced that several U.S. Marines were captured alive on Koh Tang and later executed by the Khmer Rouge.” Lt. Col. Conrad Crane, former West Point professor and former director of the US Army Military History Institute, wrote recently, “In a military culture of ‘no one gets left behind,’ this story is more than embarrassing, it is unforgivable.”
The more I have learned about the Mayaguez Incident, the more impressed I am by the selfless heroism of the Marines, sailors, and pilots who heroically fought together on Koh Tang on May 15, 1975. You stand in stark contrast to the Ford administration who treated command responsibility like public relations and have spent the past four decades trying to cover up their shameful failure.
For a decade I worked as a defense contractor and when I shared the story of the Mayaguez Incident with my colleagues, many of them distinguished post 9/11 warriors—from the British SBS, to DEVGRU Seals, to Marine Recon, OGA, MI6—very few had even heard of it. However, that will soon change. On August 5, I will be a guest on Jocko Willink’s podcast to discuss the Mayaguez Incident and the unsung heroes of May 15, 1975.
Finally, let’s raise our glasses to Joseph Hargrove, Gary Hall, and Danny Marshall. They are gone, but have not, and will not, be forgotten.