On this episode of the War Room, we cover a very special event happening right now as the sun begins to set in Washington, D.C. and President Trump leaves the White House for a trip to the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, VA. We are joined by Sergeant Major Justin LaHue, the Hero of Nazarene, who is walking from Ground Zero to arrive at Quantico.
00:05:07.460They get reunited with their families if they can find them.
00:05:10.880Which is why it's very important if you have missing family members to let the Department of Defense know so that, or History Flight or something like them, so that they can do the DNA matches because there are also bodies that are waiting to be identified.
00:05:24.840History Flight was founded by Mark Noah, who's an aviation fanatic, enthusiast, and so had the capability to do the transport and get around and know what was going on.
00:05:40.720And also Sergeant Major Justin LaHue, who is the hero of Nazarene, Navy Cross winner, an unbelievable retired Marine, who at this very moment is walking from Ground Zero, from the memorial site of the Twin Towers in New York, to Quantico.
00:06:00.760He's walking 250 miles to arrive at Quantico on the 250th anniversary of the founding of the Marine Corps, because next year they want to bring 250 more men home.
00:06:16.220So that's one of the History Flight events that you saw, and that's what's going on right now.
00:06:23.120You'll see him walking through, I hope he's escaped New Jersey now, but he'll be by the side of the road.
00:06:42.420And you can go to historyflight.com to hear more about History Flight, and the Long Road also tracks their road.
00:06:52.760Let's bring in Sergeant Major Justin LaHue.
00:06:55.420Sergeant Major, walk us through again, so I understand this, you've left Ground Zero, you're walking to Quantico, you're going to arrive on Monday, the 250th, commemoration of the birthday, of the birth of the Marine Corps.
00:07:14.020Just take us through the whole thing, the logistics of it, what are you doing, and why are you doing this?
00:07:18.520Steve, thanks for having me on, and Cleo, I don't think that could have been a better, more encapsulating intro, so kudos to you.
00:07:31.220This is about the fourth leg of our 2022 continuation journey.
00:07:36.580In 2023, it was 300 miles arriving at the Pentagon on National POW MIA Day.
00:07:45.9002024 was all the way across, 120 miles across the Florida Keys, highlighting the history of the Florida Keys, the military history of that region.
00:07:56.780And then this year was from Ground Zero on 9-11.
00:08:00.780We really started at Fort Hamilton, very historic Fort Hamilton, as everybody should be aware.
00:08:05.800And we've been covering 20 miles a day, 20 to 40-pound packs, and for the 250th, 250 miles for the 250th anniversary of the world's finest fighting force.
00:08:23.000And we're currently, last night we walked into Philadelphia, and Philadelphia is the home base.
00:08:29.080It's Ground Zero, it's the birthplace of the United States Marine Corps.
00:08:33.220Just held a fabulous ceremony here for the city just about a week and a half ago, and went down to the Tunn Tavern sign.
00:08:42.000We are going to continue, we took a day off today, going to continue on down the road through Wilmington, Delaware, down through Baltimore, Fort McHenry, down through Washington, D.C., the Marine Barracks, the War Memorial, the 9-11 site, the Pentagon, past the Arlington National Cemetery.
00:09:03.260Remembering all those for veterans who have fallen in the service of their nation or served in the service of their nation.
00:09:12.100And then ending up at a cake-cutting ceremony on 10 November at the beautiful and historic National Museum of the Marine Corps.
00:09:20.000And a few years ago, Steve, I walked into a post office in 2022.
00:09:25.580We were coming out of the pandemic shutdown that really killed a lot of international operations and recoveries of our service members abroad.
00:09:36.400And it was, I found out that that black POW MIA flag that flies over every federal installation, every post office, and is the only flag that is authorized to fly underneath the American colors in all 50 states and territories.
00:09:51.080Now, if you're from Iowa, you can fly the Iowa flag underneath the U.S. colors.
00:09:59.400But there's only one other flag all the way across our nation that's authorized to fly in all of those states and territories, and that's the black and white POW MIA flag.
00:10:09.640And I found that people were really forgetting why that was created and what that was.
00:10:14.780And I walked into a post office to mail a package in spring of 2022.
00:10:20.800I talked to a very nice young lady that had a tattered POW MIA flag.
00:10:25.820I asked if I could replace that for them.
00:10:28.520They said that they had that on order.
00:10:31.760And when I kind of walked out after failing the package and I offered to put one up for them again, she just stopped me and she said,
00:10:40.360Can I ask you why that matters so much?
00:10:42.600I've worked here a long time, and a lot of people asked to replace the American flag, but no one is ever asked to replace that flag.
00:10:52.160And after about five minutes of talking to her, that woman was in tears.
00:10:56.280And she said, I will get right on that, sir.
00:10:58.460And when I walked past that post office the following morning, that flag was up.
00:11:01.760And I figured, you know, if I can have a five-minute conversation and do that with one person, you know,
00:11:10.440maybe I could walk across the nation or do a few other things and go where the rubber meets the road
00:11:17.340and talk to individuals and get out there in the hometowns of America and remind people what that flag means and that service and sacrifice.
00:11:27.460So it's an incredible honor right now, walking 250 miles.
00:11:32.240We were in a rainstorm yesterday, about 50 mile per hour wind gusts.
00:11:37.480A lot of people saying, hey, you knew that weather was coming.
00:11:40.220Why didn't you just take the day off yesterday?
00:11:43.720And it was like, you know what, since 1775, our nation and Marines have hiked in a lot worse weather than that.
00:11:52.880And it was an honor and a privilege to be able to walk into the beautiful city of Philadelphia yesterday under those conditions,
00:12:00.320representing 250 years of the United States Marine Corps.
00:12:03.500So that's a little bit of the tidbit of why we're doing what we do,
00:12:07.560a little bit of motivation behind that, Steve.
00:12:10.180And again, thanks for having me on the program today.
00:12:14.860Sergeant Major, we had the, after 17 years, we had the first premiere of the Last 600 Meters,
00:12:22.700a film that Michael Pack wrote and directed, I produced with his wife.
00:12:28.800And for 17 years, it's been suppressed by the PBS who paid for it.
00:12:34.840And so we screened it for an audience of Marines last night who were actually in the film.
00:12:41.020And it's the battle of First Fallujah, Najaf, and Second Fallujah.
00:12:47.440And we've got a couple of minutes here.
00:12:48.680I'm going to hold you through the break.
00:12:50.260But one of the young Marines, who's not young now, the film was really made 20 years ago,
00:12:58.700said that the thing that got him about the Marine Corps when he first showed up
00:13:02.200is the sense of history that they instill in you every day.
00:13:07.080Give me a minute or so about that before we go to break, sir.
00:13:09.880Well, Steve, it's coincidence that you said that because I was a first sergeant in Charlie
00:20:25.500Once you unleash that on the enemy, if you let that continue to go, they are going to route out every position.
00:20:32.960They're going to route out every insurgent.
00:20:34.920They are going to secure every block, and they are going to hold every position and every line in any place that you send them around the world.
00:20:44.540That is the confidence level that we had in 1st Battalion, 4th Marines, when we were in the cemetery fighting Najat.
00:20:51.820Steve, that was the confidence level I had when I rolled into the invasion of Iraq in 2003 on March 23rd in Nazaria,
00:20:59.700and that was the confidence level that I had in 1991, and you name it.
00:21:05.260That was imbued in me as a young Marine that we fight and we win.
00:21:11.780We win our nation's battles, and we are in a nation that we have the most powerful military on the face of human existence to do that.
00:21:22.560And we have a military, unlike a lot of other countries, that is not controlled in a martial society.
00:21:30.400And I do believe that the United States, you know, rules of engagement come up all the time.
00:21:36.040I believe more than probably any country that's been out there, the United States has adhered to more of – you hear of atrocities and a few other things,
00:21:48.580but not at the scale when you deal with U.S. troops.
00:21:52.300United States troops, when they're unleashed onto an objective, Steve, we call it controlled chaos.
00:22:03.060We know the target set that we need to employ.
00:22:05.540And we know the objective before we even start onto the issue.
00:22:09.580So being an implementation of that kind of policy on the ground gives you, you know, north, south, east, and west, and the man to your left and your right,
00:22:21.840it gives you the utmost confidence that there is no nation on the world that is ever going to take a piece of ground away from a U.S. Marine.
00:22:28.900Talk to me about – so the best review the film ever got was 15 years ago when Michael and I were taking it around and showing it to Marine Corps groups.
00:22:40.640And Michael lined up a group in – I think it was in Northern California.
00:22:45.220And it was alumni of World War II, the greatest generation.
00:22:50.160It was the Force Recon Marines of Peleliu and Terawa, which I would argue are the best of the best.
00:22:57.400They watched this film of you guys in Fallujah, in Najaf, and in Second Fallujah, going tomb to tomb, going door to door, kicking down doors.
00:23:08.500You know, what is it, a million rooms in Fallujah when finally the Marines went through there for the second battle.
00:23:15.000And at the end of it, one of the Marines, and it had to be in his 80s or 90s at that time, said,
00:23:23.140I can't believe the valor and courage of these young guys.
00:23:26.060And, of course, Michael goes, well, hang on.
00:23:49.420He says, here, going door to door and all the pressure and tension of the little children and women running around, he says, you know, that's a very different war.
00:23:57.180He said that would be 100 times harder.
00:23:59.620And I'm sitting there going, wow, Terawa and Peleliu, the best of the best, the hardest of the hard, sitting there and talking about what the Marines is.
00:24:08.000This is one of the reasons I've worked so hard with Michael to make sure this picture gets out there because you see – and this is nothing but grit for an hour and a half.
00:24:17.280And the reason is it's how Marines live their life day-to-day in combat.
00:24:21.800The whole film, 90 minutes, you're in combat the entire time.
00:24:27.380There's nothing about the politics of the war.
00:24:29.180It's just Marines, what they do every day.
00:24:31.580But this is why I'm so intrigued by your walk.
00:24:34.600Look, people don't realize at Terawa and Peleliu and all these places in the Pacific, which is so important to the United States today, geopolitically, this is so important.
00:24:45.680There are men who have not been brought home.
00:24:50.100Can you tell us about that for a second?
00:24:51.460Because I think the audience is going to be shocked that we actually have – and it's not a government effort.
00:24:56.140It's kind of a private charity effort to do this.
00:24:58.900Can you walk us through what exactly is happening with Terawa and Peleliu?
00:25:06.960Most people don't know the Kiribati Island Chain.
00:25:09.620When you're talking about island chains in the Pacific and you're always hearing about the first island chain and you're always hearing about strategic impacts out there in the first island chain or others,
00:25:20.800what most people don't look or are aware of is when you have an overabundance of concentration, say, the Senkaku Islands or these contested areas between the slots in the Philippines and that.
00:25:34.460What has happened is on 20 November of 1943, 18,000 Marines took on 4,600 Japanese Ruka Sentai.
00:25:43.300Japanese Marines are special naval landing battalion individuals.
00:25:48.300Admiral Shibasaki, Kenji Shibasaki, said it would take a million men, a hundred years, to take the island to Tarawa.
00:25:54.500It took the U.S. Marine Corps 76 hours.
00:25:56.560And if I move 76 hours in that brutal, hellish condition where basically there almost wasn't a living thing across that 800-meter-wide, a mile-and-a-half-long spit.
00:26:08.520Once the Marines secured that island, that was the test case for Admiral Nemesis Island Hopping Campaign.
00:26:16.980I mean, Guadalcanal was right before that.
00:26:29.500Tarawa was the first full-scale amphibious invasion that put people on a bayonet point and just rooted them out.
00:26:37.960There was only 17 Japanese survivors on that island.
00:26:41.960And one of them said that we thought we had the Marines dead to rights out 700 meters into the water as a reef that circles the island of Tarawa, Basio.
00:27:33.140That was the test to take those amphibious landing craft and those assault forces and Marines that were going to then move into Saipan, into Kenyan, into Kwajalein, and just push all the way up into Japan.
00:28:21.800Ask the hundreds of thousands of Americans who've made the switch and are now supporting causes they believe in simply by joining Patriot Mobile.
00:29:03.140I don't know if we could have a more signal-not-noise start to a show.
00:29:13.660And, yes, we've got a lot of politics to cover, a lot of economics, a lot of capital markets, but you have to separate out the most important thing.
00:29:20.220And one is that we don't leave our dead on a battlefield.
00:29:26.240This thing, correct me if I'm wrong, Sergeant Major, I think it was history flight a couple years ago.
00:29:33.980Didn't they say it was a terror, I'm pretty sure, not Peleliu, that they found some of these bodies, it was underneath the tarmac of the runway they had built there, that somehow they had been under there.
00:29:45.940But the 300 bodies, there's 300 bodies of Marines who died in combat that are scattered around Tarawa somewhere, correct?
00:29:57.080Either under this tarmac or in other places just buried in the sand or just where they fell?
00:30:05.780And what's even more important than that, Stephen, I think when people see, they think of American cemeteries or burials.
00:30:15.420They envision Arlington National Cemetery or Omaha Beach or something of these really brilliant, beautiful headstones and crosses laid out in these fabulous rows.
00:30:26.460Well, the problem is out on Tarawa, that's not the case.
00:30:29.520So on that small little island that's 800 meters wide and about a mile and a half long, there were 541 U.S. Marines that were left on that island at the end of the war.
00:30:40.140And in 1946, the American Grace Registration was given a tremendous task, and that task was go all over the world in a year and try to locate and return any of America's fallen and missing in action.
00:30:57.600Most people don't understand, in 1945, we were celebrating in Times Square and everything, but we're bankrupt as a country after fighting since 1941.
00:31:09.580And they're given this minimal task, so they go out.
00:31:12.980In some cases, they're told, hey, grab, just get the skulls because it has dental records.
00:31:18.260Just get the femur, if you can, and move on down the line, just something to try to get an identification of an individual.
00:31:27.260And so in 1946, they return, they consolidate all those records, and then the American government sends out another wave of telegrams.
00:31:35.740Now, understand, we're getting ready to go into the holiday season here in America, but specifically the Battle of Tarawa, of the 1,000 Marines that were killed and sailors on that island,
00:31:50.380most of the American families received a telegram that their son was killed on that island, over 1,000 of them, on December 23rd and December 24th of 1943.
00:32:02.940So Christmas decorations are in the windows, Christmas trees are out, knock on the door, Western Union telegram, Merry Christmas, your son was just killed on Tarawa.
00:32:48.280They're buried underneath public urinals with no marking whatsoever of their heroism, valor, and sacrifice.
00:32:56.100They are out there right now because the CCP has moved into a lot of these islands, unobstructed, it seems.
00:33:04.500And they are doing construction projects.
00:33:07.300And now there's a Chinese backhoe or anything else out there on Tarawa just digging up the ground and scooping up American boys and probably for the most part just dumping them out in the ocean somewhere very unceremonially while they're building the next parking lot.
00:33:26.300And that is absolutely abhorrent to me, Steve, because that's not just one island.
00:33:31.140It's like that all through the South Pacific and in other places around the world.
00:33:34.740So the purpose, I want to make sure that people are focused on, the purpose of your walk is obviously to commemorate the history and tradition of the Marine Corps.
00:33:45.020But very specifically, you are working with history flights to identify where the actual bodies are on places like Tarawa and other places to get people over there to start looking for them so that we can collect them and bring them home?
00:34:01.280Absolutely, Steve, since I retired from 31 years in the U.S. Marine Corps, I was the sergeant major at Training and Education Command with a great commanding general named Major General James Lukman.
00:34:15.220And we held a honorary Marine Corps, and that honorary Marine Corps, there was less than 100 of those in history.
00:34:31.880And Mark Noah was being honored that year for his efforts on trying to do this.
00:34:37.540And that is where Mark and I linked up until about three years later when I called it quits as a career.
00:34:42.740And Mark and I circled back around again.
00:34:45.040He asked me after a short interview, I laid out battle histories and everything else.
00:34:51.340And he said, hey, I'd love for you to come over here and run this organization.
00:34:55.680I signed on there with him as a great partner.
00:34:59.540As the chief operating officer and now the chief executive officer.
00:35:02.980And we have searched with offices in the Philippines, Kabamituan, Palawan, operations going on there.
00:35:12.080The island of Tarawa, it's still being contested by the Chinese, which we've had work visas frozen out to go back in to get those individuals, Steve, for going on five years now.
00:35:44.500Let me, President Trump, when we first took office in 17, he put a executive order out about Vietnam and the MIAs and the POWs still there.
00:35:57.280What that had, what was it, correct me, give me the details, 56 boxes were sent back, I believe, immediately.
00:36:07.580So, of course, there's no operations going on in North Korea.
00:36:12.840And that's where a predominant amount of American troops were either incarcerated, died in prison, in Chinese prison camps, or were killed outright in North Korea.
00:36:26.000So, in Korea, there's roughly still about 7,400 missing, probably about 5,300 of those are in North Korea.
00:36:35.880And in 2017, President Trump had negotiated with North Korea to return 55 boxes of remains.
00:36:44.140Now, in those boxes of remains, those should not be equated to an individual.
00:36:53.880There were co-mingled sets of remains inside each of those boxes.
00:36:57.960And when those were turned over to the Defense POW MIA Agency and their great labs out there in Hawaii, they started to cull through all of the bones and start to run down families, do DNA, try to get some material evidence, whatever they could.
00:37:15.400And of those 55 boxes and remains, there were about 250 individuals when that was all laid out and all tested that had now been positively identified from those 55 boxes of unilateral turnover of remains.
00:37:32.360And I really thought at that point, wow, we get it.
00:37:37.380If we can do that and do that with North Korea, you know, we should be able to do that with just about anybody on this great humanitarian mission around the world.
00:37:46.980But in a lot of ways, since 2017, access to a lot of those areas, not just in North Korea, but these other contested areas we're talking about, really hasn't opened up the door for this great humanitarian thing we have going on.
00:38:00.360And a lot of momentum is not being moving forward.
00:38:03.060And now, you know, these remains that still are out there getting turned up in the ground, Steve, you know, without people, without the money, without the resources, without the passionate people out there to do that, they're going to get lost forever.
00:38:20.700Sergeant Major, I'm going to ask for your coordinates.
00:38:26.800But I want to give you a reality check.
00:38:28.880How many of those remains were men that were killed by the North Koreans and the Chinese after the at least the armistice or the ceasefire?
00:38:39.440We don't have there's we're not at peace in Korea.
00:38:42.340Understand the Korea Peninsula is still essentially in a suspended state of war between North and South.
00:38:48.380But when that was agreed to, I think, in 1953, that kind of armistice, how many of these Americans that got shipped back were still held in prison camps, being tortured and died in North Korean and Chinese prisons after the armistice?
00:39:04.240You know, I don't know if a lot of people can put the number on a ski, but you're correct.
00:39:09.620When I was walking across the nation in 2022, I met a very nice spry couple in their 90s.
00:39:19.800And Cabrera and his wife, Madeline, they were missing Madeline's brother, Jack Mather, United States Army, missing from Korea.
00:39:33.440Well, he was in POW. He was known to be in POW Camp 5 for a while when the remains and everybody else who died in captivity of POW Camp 5 were turned back over at the end of the war.
00:39:45.340Jack Mather and a known POW, his remains was never turned back over or his remains lay in an unmarked grave waiting for DNA testing.
00:39:55.120But there are a lot when that when that ended and it never ended.
00:40:00.660I don't think you can put a finger on how many Americans suffered at the hands in those brutal winters up there, probably for one, two, three.
00:40:15.100And in 1946, people, I mean, you get a telegram and a couple of years later, you get another telegram.
00:40:21.120People just moved on. Well, we ain't moving on anyway.
00:40:24.260Anyway, Sergeant Major, your coordinates, where they get to, where they get to everything about history flight, where they get to everything about your walk.
00:40:31.960I know you're putting up stuff every day video.
00:40:34.320We're going to continue to follow this and we'll obviously be there and have people there when you finish on the 10th.
00:40:40.340The 10th all day, we're going to be celebrating, commemorating the 250th birthday of the United States Marine Corps.
00:40:49.040www.historyflight.com for the main overall mission.
00:40:52.800You'll find a lot of fabulous information about returns, recoveries, and things like Cleo was talking about, about how to get DNA and how to find and help other families.
00:41:16.340And right now we're streaming, Steve, on multiple social media platforms between Facebook and over on LinkedIn to try to capture.
00:41:26.060Because not only are we out here just raising awareness for that, you know, we're out here to raise funds in the private sector to be able to go after and try to be one of the last hopes that a generation or American family has.
00:41:41.140So, you know, if I'm pulling down between 25K and 50K out here, which is a nice swag window to be, you know, we've been out here for about eight days now.
00:41:51.900And we are getting and generating some donations.
00:41:56.900We've got another week and a half to go.
00:41:59.080And every dollar that anybody donates over here, Steve, goes right to the field to give another American family possibly their last chance at hope to bring home their fallen American hero.