US Marine Sergeant’s final farewell to American MIAs in Cambodia

KOH TANG, Cambodia – US Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Clark Hale (Ret.) has agonized about the fate of three men in his platoon for 50 long years.

US Marines Private First Class Danny Marshall, Lance Corporal Joseph Hargrove and Private First Class Gary Hall were inadvertently left behind on Koh Tang in what has been called “The Last Battle of the Vietnam War.”

Ironically, that battle took place in Cambodia, on a remote, uninhabited island of marginal significance. But Hale has thought about his soldiers almost every day since May 15, 1975, which has brought him back to Cambodia five times in the last 30 years, longing for some kind of closure he now admits will probably never happen.

The Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975; Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese on April 30. In theory, the war was then over. But on May 12, the Khmer Rouge navy seized a US-registered container ship, the SS Mayaguez, headed from Hong Kong to Sattahip, Thailand.

There are debates to this day as to whether the ship was in Cambodian or international waters. The ship was first taken to Cambodia’s Paulo Wai Island, where it anchored overnight, then moved to Koh Tang about 160 kilometers north.

Unbeknownst to the Americans, the crew was taken off the boat and moved to Rong Samlem island, closer to the mainland.

Believing the crew was still on Koh Tang, US President Gerald Ford ordered an invasion of the island. US intelligence indicated it was thinly defended, with maybe “20 to 30 irregulars.” The intel was wrong.

When US Marines hit two beaches on the morning of May 15, they were met with well-placed weapons and between 100 and 200 Khmer Rouge soldiers dug in behind the shoreline.

The hail of gunfire was horrendous. Three US helicopters were shot down just off shore, and Marines on the beaches were under heavy AK-47, .30- and .50-caliber machine guns, and RPG fire.

Later in the day, Clark Hale and his Marines landed on the East Beach. He laments the fact that he and his platoon, based in Okinawa, had had almost no time to train together. He said he couldn’t even name the soldiers in his unit.

Even worse, when they landed on the island, his unit only had one radio. Hale, a two-tour veteran of action in Vietnam in the 1960s, said that when platoons went into the field, they always had four radios.         

On Koh Tang, he couldn’t communicate with his men spread along the beach, only with ships or aircraft offshore – in part a recipe for the disaster to follow.

“There was no communication—we had one radio per platoon. For a company commander to put a platoon in a combat situation (with one radio) was unheard of,” he laments.

One of the most painful aspects of the whole operation was that when the Khmer Rouge realized how serious the US was about recovering the ship and its crew, especially as the US started bombing sites on the mainland, they agreed to release the sailors. They were picked up by the USS Wilson at around 10 am that morning.

With mixed communications between the White House and various military services involved, more Marines were sent to Koh Tang two hours later, at around noon.

When the Marines were pulled off the beach eight hours later that day, the situation was chaotic as soldiers, still under fire with some badly wounded, scrambled in the dark, sloshing through the sea to get on helicopters hovering offshore.

There was no easy way to ensure that everyone had made it off the island. Hale and some of his men were flown to the USS Coral Sea. Others were taken to different ships.

“We were spread out on three ships,” says Hale. “I started doing a head count; after an hour, I thought we were missing three men.”

But he wasn’t sure where they were. “If I’d known they were (on the island), we maybe could have gotten them out…we just don’t leave men behind.”

When Hale got back to Okinawa, he was told, “not to talk about it.” That is: the possibility soldiers were left alive on the island.

Of the roughly 220 Marines who landed on Koh Tang in several waves and related helicopter crews carrying them, after a daylong struggle, 18 Americans were dead and another 50 wounded. 

Twenty-three US Air Force personnel also died when their helicopter—as part of the rescue mission—crashed in Thailand shortly after takeoff.

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Over the years since, in interviews with former Khmer Rouge, it is believed – but not confirmed – that of the three Marines left behind, Hargrove was captured on May 16 and killed shortly after.

Marshall and Hall were captured on the island after about a week when they were caught trying to steal food from the Khmer Rouge base on the island.

Former Koh Tang Khmer Rouge commander General Em Son said in 2015, when Hale also visited the island, that when Hargrove tried to escape, one of his men fired into the sand and the bullet “ricocheted up and killed one.” 

Son said the other two soldiers were sent to the mainland and held there before being executed in a temple used as a prison. Then one body was buried near the coast and the other dumped in the ocean. What happened after he turned over the captives, Son said, was not his responsibility.

At the time, Em Son was no doubt aware of the ongoing Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Phnom Penh and most likely worried he might be arrested and tried for war crimes. Was he telling the truth? It is impossible to know for sure.

In 2015, Hale and six other Mayaguez vets were taken to the temple and then to spots along the coast of Sihanoukville where Marshall and Hall’s bodies were allegedly left by the ocean.

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Hale and his wife Teresa, from Noble, Oklahoma, were joined on their latest return visit to Cambodia by Danielle Jones, the niece and surviving next of kin to MIA Danny Marshall.

Born in 1983, Jones never met her “Uncle Danny”, but her family has anguished over his fate, especially Marshall’s mother and grandmother–both now deceased–for decades.

Jones, from Marietta, Ohio, became close over the years to members of an informal Mayaguez veterans group. She said she has spent countless hours on the phone letting the vets talk at length – some of whom she says still suffer from “survivors’ guilt.” 

“I gained two platoons worth of uncles,” Jones said, referring to her involvement with Mayaguez vets over the last two decades.

When Hale called her seven weeks ago and asked if she wanted to go to Cambodia, she had to scramble to get her first-ever US passport.

The flight to Phnom Penh—paid for by Mayaguez vets – was her first time on an airplane, and the trip to Koh Tang was the first time she had seen an ocean.

On May 14, Hale, Jones and others on the trip organized by Vietnam veteran John Muller were taken to the temple in Sihanoukville, where the two Marines were thought to have been executed.

The place where her uncle was possibly buried is now an abandoned construction site and the beach was unreachable. But that didn’t prevent her from becoming overcome with grief she has harbored for so many years.

“Here we are 50 years later and none of the three Marines are back,” she grumbled to this reporter later that day.

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The US government, for its part, has spent multiple thousands of hours and a bundle of what the US military sometimes calls “treasure” looking for American MIAs in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.         

When official relations were re-established—after an 18-year hiatus – with the Cambodian government in 1993, recovery efforts were started under an effort called the Joint Task Force/Full Accounting (JTF/FA), which has been re-named the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA).

After 1975, there were 81 American servicemen listed as “Missing” in Cambodia. Over the last 32 years, 41 remains have been recovered in the country.

Digs have been undertaken all over Cambodia, including as many as 15 on Koh Tang. The exact number of recovery missions undertaken on Koh Tang was not available from US government sources on short notice to this reporter for this article.

DPAA is understandably reluctant to openly discuss details of their ongoing recovery efforts (and their previous ones) out of fears that hopes will be raised with loved ones back in the United States, only to be dashed again if no remains are found.

Some skeptics, however, accuse the government of trying to hide the truth.

The work is exhausting, time-consuming and often frustrating, like looking for a needle in a haystack when even the location of the haystack itself is open to serious debate.

One of JTF/FA’s more extensive operations—which this reporter visited – took place on Koh Tang in November 1995, when the USS Brunswick, a navy salvage ship equipped with underwater search gear and teams of SCUBA divers, spent several months examining the three helicopter wrecks off the beaches there, while separate teams also scoured sites on land.

Multiple teams were set up who sifted through buckets of silt and soil, looking for bones or other human artifacts, including clothing or anything that might be used for identification purposes.

Sixty Cambodian soldiers based on the island were paid to help dig and sift. In the sea, gear was used to siphon up silt and debris from helicopter wreckage.  

Offshore, 161 pieces of human remains—teeth, arms, legs, fingers, ribs and jawbones—were recovered at one helicopter crash site, after which they were sent to labs in Hawaii for DNA testing. The remains of nine servicemen killed in action were identified from that operation. 

Over the years and multiple visits, remains of 13 of the 18 servicemen who died on Koh Tang have been identified. There have been six books and dozens of articles written about the Mayaguez Incident. They are all tough to read.

A recent May 6, 2025, article by David Vergun in DOD News quotes Navy Commander Richard Hughes, who some years ago wrote, “The US ground assault was ill-advised, a risky insertion of poorly prepared troops on an island where none of the crew was located. The crew’s release was made in spite of, not because of, the island assault.”

Ralph Wetterhahn, in his book “The Last Battle: The Mayaguez Incident and the End of the Vietnam War”, gives a summary overview of the operation with a bit more oomph. He writes:

The struggle on Koh Tang was, in a sense, a metaphor of the entire Vietnam War: an action begun for what seemed a good cause and a noble purpose, which quickly degenerated into an ugly, desperate fight, micromanaged by no less than the office of the president of the United States.

While Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger improvised tactics, confusing political expedience with military reality during a black-tie dinner, Americans lay bleeding and dying needlessly on a distant spit of land. In so many ways, the Mayaguez Incident mirrors the outcome of the Southeast Asian conflict itself.”

For Clark Hale, 77, his latest visit to Koh Tang is probably an incomplete closure to a half-century ordeal.

“This is my last time to come here—as a Marine looking for my Marines,” he said haltingly at the US Embassy ceremony on May 16 honoring those who died and Hale’s three men still listed as fate “Unknown” on the embassy memorial. “As far as the Mayaguez and my men…I don’t think they will ever be found.”

As a small personal coda to this sorry tale, and having visited Koh Tang three times since 1995, the whole episode is part and parcel of the larger conflict in Indochina that lasted too many decades.

In Cambodia, literally millions of citizens, especially those now still alive and over 40, lost family members during almost three decades of war since 1970.

The Khmer Rouge Tribunal has determined that as many as one million people were executed during the Khmer Rouge’s three years, eight months and 20 days in power between 1975 and 1978.

Among my own Cambodian newspaper staff, numbering about 100 over many years, all lost relatives during the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror and none, to my knowledge, have any idea where family members’ remains are.     

There is no closure for these folks, just the determination to try and cope forever with terrible loss and move on. Wars are often most painful for the survivors.

Michael Hayes was co-founder, publisher & editor-in-chief of the Phnom Penh Post from 1992 to 2008.