On Oct. 19, 1979, more than 1,200 Marines and sailors were sheltering from a powerful typhoon at Camp Fuji, Japan, when fuel spilled from storage bladders positioned uphill from their living quarters. The fuel ignited, and walls of flame tore through the camp.

Seventy service members and three Japanese civilians were injured, including 54 who suffered burns. Thirteen young Marines eventually died. Yet what was likely one of the worst peacetime disasters in Marine Corps history largely faded from public memory. Sixteen days later, Americans were taken hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Iran, beginning a crisis that would dominate the news for more than a year.

Retired Marine and journalist Chas Henry had trained at the camp a year before the fire. He stumbled into telling the story decades later, after mentioning the incident online and being surprised by how many Marines responded with some version of the same question: What fire?

Henry spent the next four years searching for the answer. He interviewed more than 130 Marines, sailors, family members, doctors, and others affected by the disaster; searched archives in the United States and Japan; and reconstructed an unredacted version of the Marine Corps investigation from two partial copies. His reporting became Fuji Fire: Sifting Ashes of a Forgotten U.S. Marine Corps Tragedy, which examines not only what happened that night but how the Marine Corps responded—and why the disaster became so little remembered.

In the following excerpt from Chapter 8, the typhoon is closing in on Camp Fuji. Fuel has begun escaping from the bladders above the Marines’ living quarters. Within minutes, the camp will be engulfed in flames.

Friday, October 19, Afternoon

Being burned to death, being killed that day, was the furthest thing from anybody’s mind. I think in some ways that can be more of a traumatic or shocking event than it can be for a Marine that’s out on a combat patrol.
— Sergeant Major Mike Tuttle, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.)

The water was up to your knees, and the fire was on top of it. When we opened the front door to try to go out, we were already burning up.
— Lance Corporal Issac Williams, U.S. Marine Corps

By noon Navy Exchange managers at Yokosuka had recognized the potential threat posed by Typhoon Tip. They telephoned Camp Fuji NEX supervisor Akira Yamada, telling him that he and the store’s three clerks should close early. First, though, they would have to serve the many Marines and Sailors by then queued up to purchase ride-out-the-storm provisions. As they sold snacks, boom boxes, music cassettes, and the like, wind gusts well beyond the by-then-twenty-two-mile-per-hour average noisily slammed the store building. 

“Suddenly the roof starts roaring like it’s going to fly off,” Mark Bedwell remembered. “I noticed the Japanese women working there were getting scared.”

Some in the camp turned for information to the U.S. military’s Far East Network radio station. Via a 50,000-watt transmitter in suburban Tokyo, it usually offered English-language music and news. At some point, though, the station’s frequency, 810 AM, began yielding only static. Tip’s winds had toppled FEN Tokyo’s 300-foot antenna.

Fox Company commander Jefferey Bearor double-checked his unit’s preparation. His Marines had “pulled everything possible into the huts,” he said. “Any supplies we had outside had been covered with tarps.”

It was at this same time that Private First Class Ki Lewis Smith, a communications specialist with LSU 3/9, was assigned sentry duty at the fuel storage area. He was placed on his post by Corporal Andrew L. Stowell, the LSU’s corporal of the guard that day. As Smith recalled, Stowell instructed him to “walk along the large berm in front of the fuel farm and occasionally to walk along the small berms around the fuel bags.”

At 12:15 p.m. camp commander Allan Lamb declared a Tropical Storm Condition One Emergency. This indicated that the camp was being hit with wind gusts of between fifty-eight and sixty-nine miles per hour. The declaration restricted all but essential operations and directed that everyone not involved in such operations move indoors.

Combat engineer officer Jacob Evans peered out the window of his hut. Driving rain poured all around. Looking upward he glimpsed the passing of what seemed the storm’s eye. 

“That was calm as it comes,” he remembered. “The sun was shining right though.” 

He ran to get a camera. By the time he returned to the window, the serene center had accelerated beyond view.

Within fifteen minutes rain and winds were pounding fuel farm sentry Smith so ferociously that he radioed for permission to retreat inside a steel cargo container just downhill of the large berm. On his last walk around the area, he would recall, the small berms around the three pillow tanks “were getting soft.” There was, he reported, “about two or three feet of water around each bladder and the water almost covered the MOGAS [motor gasoline] bladder.” The doors of the metal storage structure in which Smith hunkered faced northeast; from just inside, as visibility permitted, he could observe a portion of the large berm’s downward-facing edge.

By 12:45 p.m. conditions were such that the LSU guard officer determined it unsafe to leave the sentry in place. He told Stowell to retrieve Smith. Stowell did so. The two returned to the LSU Duty office in Hut D-407. There Smith was able to change from rain-drenched clothing into a dry uniform.

At the BLT 2/4 headquarters, the officer of the day logged: “Storm Condition 1 Caution set.” Ten minutes later: “All companies notified of storm condition.” The level 1 “caution” had been received at the base camp two hours beforehand; thirty minutes previous, the base camp had set the further escalated “emergency” status. For whatever reason storm condition information was not moving quickly uphill.

Between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., more than three inches of rain had fallen. With the ground saturated, the liquid film on its surface became slippery. 

“So when you walked on the water,” Bill Dyer recalled, “the volcanic dirt underneath it would roll— kind of like BBs. It was like you were walking on ice.”

Some Marines had been ordered to do what they could to keep their huts from flooding. 

“We were supposed to be filling sandbags and setting them around our Quonsets,” said Charles Dickerson, then a private first class with Weapons Company. “And we did pretty good on ours. We had ’em about four high—pretty much all the way around except the doors.” 

Hut to hut such preventive measures were inconsistent.

“I remember looking to the one to the left of us,” the Harrodsburg, Kentucky native reflected, “and they hadn’t done nothin.’”

In Barracks D-214 rain began trickling in the back door. 

“That was the uphill side of our Quonset hut,” Mike Tuttle recalled. 

To keep it dry, Marines lifted gear up onto their racks. Pushing the bunks together, they sat on their mattresses and continued games of spades and the like. Over time the entire floor was covered by an inch or two of flowing liquid. 

“You could see water moving through the barracks,” Tuttle remembered, “from the back door, going out the front door.”

In the Echo Company area, Andy Bonwit was eyeing a retaining wall behind his platoon’s hut. Water had accumulated behind it. 

“It smacked down,” he remembered, “made a big noise, and suddenly the barracks was flooded.” Someone in his platoon scavenged several wooden pallets from outside. “And we started stacking footlockers on those, and seabags on top of those.”

In a Fox Company hut, nineteen-year-old Michael Bendt of Charleston, South Carolina, was on fire watch. From noon until 4 p.m. that day, the private was tasked with ensuring the safety of the Marines and Sailors inside. Per the eighth of the Corps’ eleven general orders for sentries, he was “to give the alarm in case of fire or disorder.” At the moment his attention was focused on stopping the flow of water under their hut’s rear door. He grabbed a blanket laying atop a nearby rack. A Marine objected. 

“He’s like, ‘Hey, that’s my blanket,’” Bendt recalled. “I went and got mine, stuffed it underneath the back door to slow the water down. And it seemed to do a good job.”

Sometime around 1 p.m.—as average wind speeds swiftly accelerated toward forty-seven miles per hour—Rickey Lamon’s noncommissioned officer-in-charge, Staff Sergeant Henry R. Simmons, braved the elements to make one last check on conditions at the fuel storage site. It appeared intact, he affirmed. The three bladders were in place, as were the two pumping systems atop the long berm.

Wind-hurled raindrops were by this time, as Lamon described, “as big as nickels. You felt like they were stripping the skin off of you.” Private First Class Mark Ferrara likened the feeling to being blasted with shards of glass. If one wasn’t wrapped in three or four layers of protective clothing, swore another Marine, “you’d have literally gotten bruises from it—it was that bad.”

Inside some barracks hard-driven rain sounded like BB shot slamming against the metal roofs. Some of it flowed through crevices in the corrugated sheets. 

“We had leaks everywhere,” Headquarters and Service Company’s Rob Ahrens recalled. To catch the dripping liquid, he said, “we were running around putting coffee cans on the floor.” 

As winds rattled huts’ loose sheeting, a “kind of metallic roar” filled the spaces, Richard DesLauriers remembered. “You could hardly hear yourself talk.”

A few days previous, Lance Corporal Steve Haishuk and a couple other Weapons Company Marines had purchased a thirty-cup coffee pot to use in their Quonset hut. A hunkered-down afternoon seemed the perfect occasion for percolation. Running through rain and wind, the West Allis, Wisconsin native found a faucet from which he could fill the large metal canister with water. 

“On my way back,” the twenty-one-year-old recalled, “the wind got so strong—I don’t know if it blew me over, but I do remember dropping the coffee pot and then losing the insert for the coffee grounds.”

Nineteen-year-old Private First Class Allen Wheland of Centre Hall, Pennsylvania, was performing what remained an essential duty: standing watch just south of the training camp huts at the “ammo dump”—a fenced-in compound storing explosives ranging from pistol bullets to artillery rounds. 

“One of us was posted in the tower, and we’d rotate out between the tower and walking posts,” he explained. 

Wheland was taking his turn in the tower as conditions deteriorated. Rain blasted horizontally. Whipping winds howled. 

“I decided at that point it was time to get out of the tower. As I’m starting to climb down, one of the heavy gusts hit and just threw me off the ladder. I sailed about twenty feet through the air and hit the ground.” 

He landed on saturated sandy soil—overlaid by fast-flowing, if barely inch-deep, floodwaters. 

“I slid another twenty feet,” he recalled, “being pushed along.”

At a guard post some distance from the camp’s living area, Joe Macdonald and another Marine were told by an NCO passing in a jeep to return to their units’ huts. As the two neared their respective barracks, they reached a retaining wall. 

“And the guy that was in front of me jumped off it like we always did. When he did, he went right through the ground up to like his chest.” 

Standing in shock, Macdonald watched the fellow Marine struggle for some time to free himself from the water-saturated, lower-level soil.

Gusts barreling into some huts would push open the flimsy door on one end while slamming shut the thin plywood hatch at the other. A moment later gales from another direction would do the same in reverse. With the wind came rain and grit. To prevent the problem, unit leaders tried to reinforce some of the doors—in several cases, nailing plywood over the outside of door frames. 

Mike Cummings recalled that someone came into his hut, explained the problem, “and they nailed the back door closed.” 

In Joe Macdonald’s hut, a similar announcement was followed by “the sound of the nails being hammered into the door. . . . It seemed like someone’s on the ball. Like someone’s out in this crappy weather right now, thinking of the things that need to be done, and doing ’em. I was actually a little bit impressed.” 

Others at the camp barricaded hut doors from the inside, pushing wall lockers against the portals. Padlocks were clamped into hasps securing the east exit of hut D-220 and the west exit of D-316. Other doors were lashed as securely as possible with twisted coat hangers, communications wire, or parachute cord. 

“If you had to take a piss really bad,” Mike Tuttle recalled—an issue since so many had bought large bottles of soda at the exchange—“you’re doing a little bit of a dance trying to figure out how to pick apart that knot to get the hell out of the door to run down to the head real quick.”

At 1:15 the BLT officer of the day telephoned his base camp counterpart—passing along radio frequencies on which Range Company could reach training camp units in an emergency. Meantime, an updated typhoon advisory radically recalculated the time of the storm’s arrival. Tip was moving more swiftly than had been forecast that morning, and along a substantially altered path. Now, U.S. military meteorologists predicted, it “should pass CPA [Closest Point of Approach] 109 miles northwest of Yokosuka” at about 2:30 p.m. local time. That would place its CPA to Camp Fuji even sooner—some seven hours prior to the morning estimate.

In the late 1970s, forecasting errors of this magnitude were not unusual. It was easier to predict a cyclone’s movement when it ranged over tropical waters; in those conditions, a storm moved at fairly consistent speeds. Forecasting became notoriously difficult, however, if typhoons neared the jet stream—a river of high-speed air at around thirty thousand feet. The stream’s winds could grab and guide a storm, accelerating it to exceptional speeds. During October it was not uncommon to find the jet stream directly over the Japanese mainland. A forecaster could never be certain if or specifically when it might begin steering a storm—and data were not always available to determine the exact speed of its acceleration-inducing winds. When the jet stream grabbed Tip, it was as if the storm was a block of wood floating from a meandering creek into a river’s raging rapids.

Between 1 and 2 p.m., 3.03 inches of rain fell on Camp Fuji and the nearby town of Gotemba. In addition to causing flooding, the severe downpour instigated a less intuitive meteorological effect: it pulled even stronger winds down to the earth’s surface. The phenomenon was beyond metaphorically breathtaking. Roger Miller gasped after experiencing “wind so strong that you couldn’t breathe outside.”

Twenty-year-old Private George S. Dye—who went by “Steve”—rushed from the chow hall to Hut D-220; he was on mess duty, so had been cleaning up after breakfast. The Columbus, Ohio, native changed from a wet uniform into a pair of cut-off jeans.

Intensely-pounding rains pared visibility outside to near zero. Water cascaded downhill. Even in structures that had been sandbagged, doorways remained vulnerable to the push of floodwaters.

Mark Bedwell noticed the sloshy deck when he made it back to Hut D-214. His shopping bag was wet, but purchases remained intact. 

“I still had my Doritos and Coke,” he said. He slipped the new watch onto his wrist and tossed the Playboy onto his rack. 

Warmed by their huts’ kerosene heaters, many Marines and Sailors pulled off rain-soaked uniforms, hanging them on makeshift clotheslines. 

“So they’re drying out,” Steve Neal remembered. “We’re wearing our boxer shorts, with—I think I had a T-shirt—and I was wearing some socks. And we were drinking coffee and playing darts.” 

As others relaxed in the Corps’ distinctive scarlet running shorts—“red silkies”—decks of cards, chess sets, and backgammon boards were broken out. Given freshly filled wallets, a certain urge to wager could be felt in the air. Conversations hummed; in barracks vernacular, people were “shootin’ the shit.” Some lit cigarettes. A handful employed hut furnaces as stovetops. 

“I remember people heating up corned beef hash,” Louis Sanford said.

At 1:20 the BLT 2/4 officer of the day logged: “All electric power is out at this time.” In Hut D-215 what struck Lance Corporal Jesse Lugo about the outage was the sudden absence of music. It no longer blasted from barracks boom boxes. 

“Everyone climbed in their rack,” the Weapons Company Marine said, “and talked or read by flashlight.”

Five minutes later the battalion OOD noted: “Companies [have been] notified to keep people inside unless an emergency, then helmets will be worn.” A five-ton truck had been placed at the ready, he noted, “pioneer tools”—axes, sledgehammers, shovels, and such—piled inside should they be useful for clearing storm debris.

Gale-force winds began to topple small structures at the camp and rip roofs off others. 

“The storm was just beatin’ it up,” Issac Williams remembered. Torrential rains pushed eroding soil up against a number of huts—in some cases blocking barracks doors.

In the camp chapel, which—unlike most huts—was set on above-ground cinderblocks, a deafening wind whistled over the roof and under the floors. Inside Chaplain Mel Ferguson felt the sharp cold.

In nearby Gotemba City, “heavy rains and wind were causing serious damage,” firefighter Haruhiko Katsumata recalled. Some first responders helped clear away wind-wrought destruction; others filled and stacked sandbags in areas prone to flooding.

Having finally been able to close the Navy Exchange store, Akira Yamada, Taeko Matsuzaki, and two other NEX workers jumped into a small car. Yamada would drive them to their respective homes. First, though, he had to ensure that exchange vendors offering shoe repair, snack bar, and laundry services on the camp had closed their shops, as well.

At 1:40 p.m. Typhoon Tip was as close to Camp Fuji as it would get. Its circulating center was some sixty-two miles to the camp’s north-northwest. Though it had been reduced to tropical storm status, the tempest was still—across Camp Fuji, and nearby portions of Shizuoka prefecture—generating winds averaging forty-seven miles per hour. That figure factored sustained winds of at least thirty-two miles per hour, with structure-jolting gusts of eighty-two miles per hour and well beyond. Wind damage in that moment included an overhead electrical line blown to the ground near the training camp laundry.

Massive volumes of rainwater had accumulated in the LSU 3/9 fuel farm area—uphill of the long, road-bordering berm and within the berms surrounding each of the three fuel bladders. Its liquid weight pressed against the earthen barriers. Inundating rains dive-bombed the soil structures from above.

Eventually the pressure proved too much. A portion of the long berm began to erode. Floodwaters carried away dissipating chunks of volcanic soil. The rapid disintegration left a gaping breach fifteen to twenty feet wide. The two trailer-mounted pumps atop the berm—each weighing 1.6 tons—tumbled into the opening, hoses to bladders still connected.

Of the three fuels stored in bladders at the uphill fuel farm, the 86 octane MOGAS contained the fewest carbon molecules. Though all were lighter than water, the gasoline was least heavy of the three. At that moment containing 5,933 gallons of gasoline, the rubberized fabric tank weighed 32,000 pounds.

The bladder—Serial Number P-4449, manufactured by the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in July 1969—floated up and over what remained of its encircling earthen embankment. Pulled by the downhill flowing rain-water, the bladder rode the rapid into the razed portion of the 440-yard berm. There it became ensnared, wrapped around one of the fallen pumps.

“The frame of the trailer that the pumping system sat on was just kind of like angle iron,” John Brosnan recalled. “And the corner of the angle iron would pierce pretty much anything.”

The sharp metal edge ripped a five-foot-long tear about six inches above and parallel to the bladder’s horizontal seam. MOGAS gushed from the sliced fuel container. An estimated 5,500 gallons of the fuel—enough to fill 100 55-gallon drums—flowed downhill atop already flooding rainwater.

No one at the camp saw it happen. The fuel farm sentry, for safety purposes, had been pulled from his post. Too, LSU commander Brosnan would explain shortly thereafter, “there appeared no valid reason to suspect unusual drainage problems in the site.”

Some of the buoyant gasoline streamed into drainage ditches constructed throughout the camp to channelize rainwater and prevent erosion. Silt had accumulated in the normally two-or three-foot-deep concrete or corrugated steel trenches. Much of the fuel overflowed the now-shallower gullies. It poured over the ground between huts, then under doors, and across the floors of structures in which Marines and Sailors were sheltering.

On the training camp’s topmost tier, deep water had accumulated in D-211 and adjacent huts. Trying to keep personal possessions from water-logging or washing away, LSU maintenance platoon members living in the structures lifted foot lockers, boots, and such onto their racks. Most moved outside. Some broke out their small folding shovels—“entrenching tools” in arcane supply terminology Marines shortened to “e-tools”—and began digging a trench they hoped would divert the deluge. Amid the downpour the effort struck Sergeant Anton Koncaba as of marginal benefit. He told the Marines to simply tie open each hut’s uphill- and downhill-facing hatches. Let gravity, he instructed, stream the insistent torrents in one door then out the other. Koncaba watched as the flow issuing from D-211’s downhill doorway cascaded over the edge of the hut’s concrete base. At first a foot-long waterfall, it grew in length as the soil it impacted washed away.

One level below nineteen-year-old Lance Corporal Jerry Holt, a Weapons Company Marine from Boyle, Mississippi, was among the last to be darting back from shopping at the exchange. He smelled gasoline fumes as he rushed toward Hut D-220, his platoon’s quarters. Once inside he shouted, “If any of you guys are smoking, put it out.” Glenn Roberts, twenty-three, of Fletcher, Vermont, recognized the petroleum odor, yet it seemed out of context to the corporal: “You don’t really think about that in the middle of a typhoon.”

Corporal Paul Verdier of Weapons Company had been riding out the storm not with platoon mates, but in the hut of his friend Corporal David Skaggs. Stepping outside Skaggs’s building to check conditions, the twenty-three-year-old from Burien, Washington, looked toward the area where he was routinely quartered. 

“I could see our staff sergeant,” he recalled, “and two, maybe three other guys sandbagging a corner of the hooch, the hooch I lived in. Well, crap, that’s my house. I’d better go over and help them.” 

Horizontally blowing rain and groundwater rushed nearly shin-deep over the tops of his combat boots. About halfway to the hut, he remembered, “I looked down and I could see the shininess of fuel on the water. And suddenly I could smell it, and taste it on my lips, because the wind was blowing so freakin’ hard. 

“And so I picked up my pace, and I ran over—and the first person I grabbed, I grabbed the staff sergeant, and I said, ‘Hey! This area is covered in fuel.’ And he said something like, ‘What?’ And then he goes, ‘You’re right!’”

Anton Koncaba again glanced at the waterfall emanating from D- 211’s downhill-facing door. It had taken on a prismatic sheen. Koncaba yelled, “Fuel!” in the direction of his platoon commander, Warrant Officer Joe Piper, then turned to warn Marines billeted one tier below. A former machine-gunner himself, Koncaba empathized with the Weapons Company Marines. He had seen them return—muddy and tired—from field exercises the day before. Unlike along the first tier, he did not see many Marines below outside their huts. As the twenty-four-year-old from Scottsbluff, Nebraska, prepared to jump down from the upper retaining wall, a hut on that next lower level whoomphed and flared. Building D-215, he believed.

MOGAS had pooled on the hut’s floor. Vapors from the fuel had risen, mixed with oxygen, then flashed. It is not inconceivable that a lit cigarette sparked the first ignition. More likely, though, the vapor-air mixture had ascended to a height at which it interacted with flaming kerosene inside one of the hut’s heaters.

Across the upper training camp, an instant of brilliant light burst through windows. In the artillery headquarters hut, “somebody says, ‘Geez, is that lightning?’” Richard DesLauriers recalled. 

“I said, ‘I don’t know. That would be pretty weird.’” 

In one of the amtrac platoon barracks, Anthony Senatore remembered, “we heard—thunder. And somebody says, ‘It don’t thunder during typhoons.’”

Outside Paul Verdier felt a rush of heat as he watched a fireball develop at the back of a hut some fifty feet away. It looked, he recalled, “like somebody dropped a napalm canister on that hooch.” The consuming blaze moved forward and upward, fed by millions of MOGAS droplets that had been blown into the air. 

“The wind was full of fuel,” Verdier said. “As the fireball grew, it was easily twice the height of the Quonset hut.”

Inside Hut D-215 Marines had been preparing to move outside to join the sandbagging effort. When gas fumes became evident, Jesse Lugo wrote soon after, Corporal Colin Miller stood and turned off the nearby stove. Issac Williams watched as Miller then moved toward the western-facing portion of the building. 

“He opened the back door,” Williams recalled. “Water flushed in so fast that it knocked him off his feet. . . . The water was up to your knees, and the fire was on top of it.”

When Donald Fox heard a loud, rushing whoomph, he would later recall, “I turned around to see what I heard. What I saw,” the lance corporal from San Jose, California remembered, “was a wall of fire. I also saw Corporal Miller standing beside the rear exit. He turned to face me, and as he did, he put his arms up from his side like a cross, and went up in flames. When our eyes locked, I saw death in his eyes.”

L. C. Malveaux of Beaumont, Texas—consumed by the fire—fell to the floor. The twenty-one-year-old lance corporal died, in the words of BLT 2/4’s medical officer, “almost immediately.” In Beaumont, not quite a year before, the Weapons Company Marine had married Lois Marie Johnson. While he was overseas, Lois had given birth to Adrian Nicole Malveaux. Father and daughter would never meet. Nineteen-year-old Tyrone Elem tried to pull Malveaux to safety. The attempt to save his friend left the lance corporal from Alexandria, Virginia, with life-threatening burns of his own.

As flames swept through the hut, Donald Fox and platoon mate Lance Corporal Philip du Pont ran to the hut’s eastern-facing door. 

“I felt something like a hand of heat pick me up and push me out the door,” Fox recounted. “I turned around to see where du Pont was, and all I saw inside was fire and darkness.” 

Fox realized that his own shirt was on fire.

“When we opened the front door to try to go out,” Issac Williams recalled, “we were already burning up.”

The fireball over Hut D-215 remained airborne for some time, fed by beads of gasoline the cyclonic winds continued to hurl into the air. Eventually, portions of the sky fire settled to earth. They ignited vapors rising from floating MOGAS. Resulting flames surfed the flooded ground. They forced Anton Koncaba into a quick retreat. 

“The fire burned the fuel on top of the water and chased me up the hill,” he wrote soon after.

Koncaba was able to scramble to safety. Two of his fellow LSU Marines—Lance Corporals Michael Freeman and Thomas Glasper Jr.—were not as fortunate. On the training camp’s uppermost tier, Freeman had fallen into ground-hugging flames beside D-207. Second-degree burns covered more than half his body. Glasper—“Glass” to his friends—was burned just outside hut D-208.

“I looked down the row of buildings to my right,” Sergeant Koncaba recounted, “and saw that Building 207 was already burning. Then Building 205 caught on fire.” 

The waterborne fire would also enter and consume Buildings 210 and 211. Even as those four top-tier huts were destroyed, Glasper and Freeman would remain the only burn casualties on that level. Gushing water had forced most Marines out of the LSU-occupied upper huts before the fire broke out.

No such luck accrued to Marines billeted on the training camp’s second descending tier—site of the first ignition. Fifteen-foot curtains of flame moved to surround huts there, prompting more whoomphs.

“A river of fire spread through the structures,” Gunnery Sergeant R. R. Keene would write in the Okinawa Marine newspaper, “forcing Marines, many clad only in skivvies or athletic clothing, to flee into the typhoon.”

Excerpt from Fuji Fire: Sifting Ashes of a Forgotten U.S. Marine Corps Tragedy by Chas Henry by permission of the University of Nebraska Press and imprint Potomac Books. © 2025 by Chas Henry. Available wherever books are sold or from the University of Nebraska Press 800.848.6224 and at nebraskapress.unl.edu