Sergeant Major Justin LaHue
speaker
52 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2025
last heard 31 Oct
Sergeant Major Justin LaHue’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.
Appearances
And when you have the best people, the most tested people, the best grown military, and the United States Marine Corps are putting in, you know, we don't leave our dead and wounded on the battlefield. We only go forward. We don't go backwards. Once you unleash that on the enemy, if you let that continue to go, they are going to route out every position. They're going to route out every insurgent.
They 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. That is the competence level that we had in 1st Battalion, 4th Marines when we were in the cemetery fighting the Jaques. Steve, that was the competence level I had when I rolled into the invasion of Iraq in 2003 on March 23rd in Nazarea.
And that was a confidence level that I had in 1991, and you name it. That was imbued in me as a young Marine, that we fight and we win. We 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. And we have a military, unlike a lot of other countries, that is not controlled in a martial society.
And I do believe that the United States, you know, rules of engagement come up all the time. I 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, but not at the scale when you deal with U.S. troops. United States troops, when they're unleashed onto an objective, Steve, we call it controlled chaos.
We know exactly what we're doing. We know the mission at hand. We know the target set that we need to employ. And we know the objective before we even start on to the issue. So 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, it 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.
Absolutely, Steve. Most people don't know the Kiribati island chains. When 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, what 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,
What has happened is on 20 November in 1943, 18,000 Marines took on 4,600 Japanese Ruka Sentai. Japanese Marines are special naval landing battalion individuals. Admiral Shibasaki, Kenji Shibasaki, said it would take a million men, 100 years, to take the island to Tarawa. It took the U.S. Marine Corps 76 hours. And upon those 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. Once the Marines secured that island, that was the test case for Admiral Nemesis' island hopping campaign. I mean, Guadalcanal was right before that. You know, the Macon Island raid. Every one of these pieces were testing how much farther we can go, what kind of equipment we're going to need. Push, push, push.
Tarawa was the first full-scale amphibious invasion that put people on a bayonet point and just rooted them out. There was only 17 Japanese survivors on that island. And 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, Bayfield. And he said, we thought we had them. We saw all their landing boats.
We saw the Marines start to spill out over the sides and they started to have to wade to shore 700 meters and the Japanese were just slaying them in the water before they could get. And then he said, my troops were emboldened, we were going to win. And then he said, we saw then these landing craft crawl up over the reef with Marines inside like spiders and then start crawling more and more towards us and they just would not stop.
And he looked at his troops and he said, the gods of death have come. This has secured our fate. We're all going to die here. That was the test to take those amphibious landing craft and those assault forces, the Marines, that were going to then move into Saipan, into Kenyan, into Kwajalein, and just push all the way up into Japan. By the end of that battle,
Yeah, that's correct. And what's even more abhorrent than that is, I think when people see, they think of American cemeteries or burials, they envision Arlington National Cemetery or Omaha Beach or something of these really brilliant, beautiful headstones and crosses laid out in these fabulous rows. Well, the problem is out on Tarawa, that's not the case. So 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. And in 1946, the American Graves Registration Unit was given a tremendous task, and that task was to go all over the world in a year and try to locate and return any of America's fallen and missing in action.
Most 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. And they're given this task, so they go out. In some cases, they're told, hey, grab, just get the skulls, because it has dental records. Just get the femur, if you can, and move on down the line. Just something to try to get an identification of an individual.
And so in 1946, they returned and consolidated all those records. And then the American government sends out another wave of telegrams. Now 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, most of the American families received a telegram that their son was killed on that island.
over a thousand of them on December 23rd and December 24th of 1943. So 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. 1946, they get another telegram. Not only was your son killed on Tarawa, we looked for him and he's still unaccounted for.
And then in 1949 must have been the most heartbreaking telegram. It said, not only was your son killed, not only is he missing, but we're no longer looking for him. And I found that to be abhorrent because those individuals are not buried underneath these beautiful cemeteries like you and I know. They're buried underneath pig styes. They're buried underneath public urinals with no marking whatsoever
of their heroism, valor, and sacrifice. They are out there right now because the CCP has moved into a lot of these islands unobstructed, it seems, and they are doing construction projects, and 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 unceremoniously while they're building the next parking lot. And that is absolutely abhorrent to me, Steve, because that's not just one island. It's like that all through the South Pacific and in other places around the world.
Absolutely. 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 Lukeman. And we held a honorary Marine ceremony. And that honorary Marine ceremony, there was less than 100 of those in history. I mean, Chuck Norris is one. There's some children with cancer. It's a hard bar to make.
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