The 9th Marines was designated to provide the core unit for Regimental Landing Team-9, the Ground Combat Element of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade (MEB), our amphibious force in the Western Pacific. And during a visit to Okinawa, General Gray directed the commanding general of III MEF to develop and establish a MEU (SOC), the first in this command. I was ordered to organize, train, and command this unit.

The MEU has a battalion landing team as a ground component, a reinforced helicopter squadron as an air component, and a logistics component. We did extensive training in the highly specialized equipment, tactics, techniques, and procedures for the unit’s unique missions. This involved intense and demanding certification evaluations conducted in difficult locations like the Philippines.

In one night helicopter training event, we had a helo crash at sea and lost a number of Marines. This was not the first time I’d seen a fatal training accident, and it wasn’t the last. Despite all of our best efforts, shit happens. Yet, each time I’ve been torn by the loss of some great Marines. Peacetime training deaths in your unit are, in many ways, far more difficult to deal with than combat deaths. After a memorial service the next day and an extensive air and sea search, we resumed the training. Though I knew this was difficult for young men to understand (and it was hard for me as well!), I felt I had to send a message that we had to immediately get our minds back into our training. I knew the demands of combat don’t give us the luxury of grieving for long.

For over two years, 1987-89, I was blessed with these five grand responsibilities. The icing on the cake was the enjoyment my family got out of this tour of duty. They loved Okinawa. They had never been happier.

MEANWHILE, like any commander, I wanted to have the best-trained and operationally capable regiment in the Marine Corps. We immersed ourselves in rigorous training and education programs.

Okinawa is small, which meant there were serious live fire and range restrictions. These problems had given the island a reputation as a difficult place for training, and impossible for large unit training. But I refused to accept this. To prove it could be done, I took the entire regiment to the field on exercises. This meant we had to look for innovative approaches and to ignore imagined limitations, but we got the job done. Of course, the island did have training limitations; and I scraped or volunteered for every opportunity to get my units off the island for training and exercises. They went to Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Guam, Iwo Jima, and many other locations in the region. In my two-plus years in command of the regiment, the RLT, and the MEU, I took these units to over twenty large-scale exercises, and sent smaller units to many more.