Chas Henry on 1979's 'Forgotten Disaster' at Mount Fuji

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
My name is John Mounts, filling in for JT today.
He returns next Monday. He's got a little time off
for vacation with the fam. On October nineteenth, nineteen seventy nine,
a super typhoon struck a small Marine Corps camp near
the base of Japan's Mount Fuji and involved a typhoon,
a fuel spill, and a fire. Seventy three people were injured,

(00:20):
fifty four of them badly burned, and thirteen would soon die.
But on November fourth, nineteen seventy nine, hostages were taken
in the US embassy in Iran and attention shifted away.
And we've not heard much about this. Joining us now
to talk about this story and kind of revisit this
kind of uncharted piece of history is WT former WTP
reporter Chaz. Henry Chaz. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
Thanks Sean. I appreciate the invitation.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
So this story is one I have to admit I've
not heard before. And I study history pretty closely. I
remember all about the Iranian hostage crisis. I didn't hear
anything about this.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
You're not alone. So before before I had a second
career as a reporter, I did twenty years as a
US Marine, and I was on active duty when this
happened in nineteen seventy nine. In fact, I trained at
this camp in nineteen seventy eight, and across the Marine
Corps it was a kick in the gut. A casualty
figure of this size in peace time was just shocking,

(01:17):
and the character of the thing, this typhoon bringing more
rain to this small, ramshackle little camp in a day
than they would typically get it a month floating a
rubberized fabric fuel bladder up and a pump fell into it,
sliced the five foot rip, and five thousand, five hundred

(01:38):
gallons of gasoline flowed down hill into old World War
two era Kwanza huts that were packed with Marines and
that were heated by open flame kerosene eaters. It was
just a horrific incident, but again because of the hostage crisis,
so soon thereafter, attention shifted and it was largely forgotten

(01:59):
except by these people who continue to live with the
either the families that lost loved ones or the Marines
who live with the emotional and physical scars.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
We sometimes forget the training can be as serious as
actual battle in terms of it's dangerous, and the people
who are injured while training to serve in our military
are every bit as much wounded veterans as those who
were wounded on the battlefield.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
Absolutely, and this was at a time too, this is
post Vietnam, and it's often a sort of a forgotten
time in military history, sort of between you know, the
end of the Vietnam War and the period leading up
to Operation Desert Storm in nineteen ninety one. Not a
lot of attention was paid because America wasn't at war
during that time, but as you know, people were engaged

(02:46):
in activities that were you know, just in some major
risky you know, because training for war is not without
its own risks, And questions though were raised about you know,
were there things that could have been done? Could that
fuel have been stored someplace else as opposed to directly
above the camp? But you're right. The other day I

(03:11):
got an email from one of the Marines who was involved.
It wasn't somebody I talked with about the book, who
said that because this hasn't been mentioned in histories that
he's read and the Marine Corps history and such, the
people that were there almost feel a little bit guilty,
should we be ashamed, you know, asking themselves, you know,
did we do something wrong? And it was meant to be?

(03:32):
I think I feel very good about hopefully being able
to fill this gap in Marine Corps and US history
and get these guys their due.

Speaker 1 (03:40):
And survivors guilt is a very real thing. We were
actually talking about that earlier this morning with somebody else,
as you know, in the news this week or just
a few days ago, the flooding that happened at that
camp in Texas, and I think we're up to eighty
two people lost their lives there, very similar situation minus
the fuel part, but in terms of there was an
incredible amount of rain dropped all at once and caused

(04:02):
this flooding. And there's a lot of people who were
asking themselves, those who survived, you know, what could I
have done? Is there anything I could have done to
help save other people? So survivors guilt is a very
real thing.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
It is, and in many cases there really is nothing,
you know, if something comes up so quickly. But in
the course of reporting this book, I interviewed more than
one hundred and thirty people who were directly involved, and
survivor guilt was a recurring theme people thought maybe medical
Cormen who were there with the marine said it might

(04:34):
only paid more attention in school, but they'd only been
provided very rudimentary burn training at the time. They weren't
resourced to handle a trauma, a large scale disaster of
this sort. So in many instances it was you know,
everyone did the best they could, and there's a great
deal of heroism in this story as well. There were Army,

(04:54):
Air Force and medical teams and aviation teams that came
to the aid of these manes. And then there's some
amazing stories of fortitude. It's just you can't believe some
of the people, the terrible physical injuries that they sustained,
and yet through this inner fortitude, some of them were
able to We're just you know, able to this day

(05:18):
continue to lead productive lives and sadly some people who
had an inner strength. One Army doctor at the Army
Burn Center in San Antonio, where scores of these marines
were taken said that just days after arrival, marines were
out of their beds doing push ups. Then this is
while they're on beta layers. You know, they're terribly burned,
eighty percent of their body burned and yet some of those,

(05:39):
even with that fortitude, didn't make it. So there's there's pathos,
but there's a great deal of heroism and as well
as questions of accountability and leadership lessons to be taken.
It just it did amazed me that as I the
longer I kept researching this and I sort of fell
into the project. I was posting photos of the beginning

(06:00):
of the pandemic, posted a photo of myself at Camp
Fuji in nineteen seventy eight and said, just in passing
this was about a year before the big fire and
was shot by the number of people, to include fellow
Marines who asked what fire, and then embarrassed to realize
that a friend of mine who also replied to that
Facebook post by saying, you know, I escaped from one

(06:20):
of those huts, and I'd known him since nineteen eighty
one and hadn't been aware that he'd been caught in that.
As I started researching, I just found so many amazing tangents,
side stories that you couldn't make this stuff up. The
Air Force pilot who flew the first one one metabac
very terribly burned guys from Japan to Texas, where they

(06:43):
would be admitted it to the San Antonio Burn Center
on the Army base. There had been a prisoner of
war for nine hundred and seventeen days in Hanoi after
having been shot down from a fighter in Vietnam, come
back in, retrained, and was saving these lives.

Speaker 1 (07:00):
Chas Henry, a former WTP reporter and author of the
book about the Forgotten Disaster. Thank you so much for
joining us today on Alabama's morning News.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
Thanks Jean