By Jack Jones

In the early morning hours of Sept. 24, 1965, I sprawled face-down, struggling to breathe after scaling and leaping from the top of a tall, barbed wire-tipped fence behind the U.S. Naval Security Group operations building in Kamiseya, Japan. About a dozen of my shipmates crawled and wandered in dazed confusion around me.

Inside the smoke-filled building from which we had escaped, twelve others — 10 sailors and 2 Marines — were dying or already dead.

As I coughed and vomited smoke, my mind began to clear enough to sense the urgency of what was happening. The secretive maze of buildings and underground security tunnels in which we worked was on fire. About a half-hour earlier, I had informed the Chief Petty Officer in charge of our communication and encryption center at the rear of the Kamiseya complex that I smelled smoke. He had dismissed my warning as “probably just tobacco smoke.”

About ten minutes after the chief ignored my warning, the smoky odor became overwhelming. Moments later, heart in my throat, I fought down a “fight or flight” burst of adrenaline when a Marine watch officer raced down a tiled hallway past the crypto center intake window behind which I worked. The Marine, Capt. Roger L. Miner, struggled as he ran to buckle a holstered .45 caliber handgun around his waist. I watched in stunned curiosity, wondering if I should follow as he ran toward the apparent source of the smoke beyond and out of sight past underground tunnels that flanked the descending hallway. Scores of sailors and Marines sat with headphones on at their posts inside the concrete-lined tunnels, monitoring Soviet Russian, Communist Chinese and North Korean, Vietnamese and our own armed forces’ communications, as we were ordered to do in shifts around the clock.

As I turned back to my comm center duty station, the electricity went dead throughout our building complex. I momentarily froze, panic-stricken in a suddenly ink-black, smoke-filled darkness. It is a primal, shamefully selfish fear that takes control when one is suddenly plunged from familiar, safe surroundings into impenetrable darkness, unable to breathe. My fear was near-overwhelming as I began to move, guided only by my equally stunned shipmates’ voices, in a direction I sensed might lead to an exit. The eventual activation of dim emergency lighting did little to alleviate heart-pounding terror of thinking I would choke and fall unconscious inside a burning building.

Struggling against my self-survival instinct once outside the building and over the barbed wire, I began to think of others doubtless still trapped inside. At the time, I was a 20-year-old Communications Technician Operator Second Class, with a “Top Secret Crypto” security clearance. My CT2 (E-5) rank gave me some responsibility for the organization of a rescue effort and direct the actions of junior shipmates in the absence of senior officers.

Still fighting back panic of being trapped for minutes that seemed like hours in darkness and lung-searing smoke, I struggled to my feet and found myself moving among dim shadows and darkness in the direction of flames and sparking ash that pierced the night sky. The flames illuminated massive clouds of smoke and ash above our communications complex. To my relief, a more senior NCO appeared from the shadows and took charge. Under his direction, we staggered in ragged formation from the rear to the front of the complex only to find the multi-story, Korean War-era wooden superstructure an unapproachable inferno.

After what seemed an endless trudge from the edge of oblivion, we spilled into a parking area. Fire trucks and ambulances were just beginning to arrive. A man in a  khaki uniform that marked him as a Marine lay struggling and semi-conscious on the ground. Shadows of rescuers working to save him flickered strobe-like across the fallen Marine’s body against a background of ever-rising flames.

I found myself at last in a group ordered to man fire hoses. The heavy canvas hoses were just being unspooled from tankers that had arrived moments before onto the chaotic scene.  A short distance away, rescuers swarmed around another Marine who lay unmoving at their feet. He would be hospitalized and pronounced dead a short time later. Capt. Miner, the officer I had seen earlier racing toward the smoky tunnels, was himself rescued by CT3 Fred Ames and hospitalized after falling victim to carbon monoxide poisoning. Miner would identify the body of fellow Marine, Sgt. Paul Rodrigues, the next morning at nearby Camp Zama Army hospital where both were treated.

As I stood in a line of men struggling to direct the nozzle of a powerful firehose onto a blaze that was beyond of control, I began to feel within myself a sense of shame — for running from the fire while several other men, including Capt. Miner, had run toward it at risk of their own lives.

My shame over fear that had seized me inside the burning building gave way to anger as I struggled to direct a futile stream of water into the hopelessly raging fire. My anger grew as I began to suspect the unfolding tragedy could have been prevented. If the Chief Petty Officer to whom I had earlier reported the smell of smoke had investigated rather than order me back to routine duties, might the fire have been found and extinguished in time to prevent its spread?

For weeks and months after the fire, I recall going through a period of mourning lost shipmates who had become friends, second-guessing my own actions and experiencing the beginnings of what would later be labeled “survivor’s guilt”.

Because of the “highly sensitive national security” nature of our work at Kamiseya, we remained under orders to never discuss our jobs, even after our discharge from active duty. We were strongly advised after the blaze to say little or nothing about circumstances surrounding it. There was no official “debriefing” beyond a heart-wrenching memorial service for our fallen shipmates.

About seven months later, I was discharged from the Navy to face unexpected challenges upon my return to civilian life. Without family wealth or savings, I was caught up immediately in the need to earn a living in support of my young wife and baby daughter. I struggled to attend college classes while working a full-time evening shift at a metal smelting foundry near Cleveland, Ohio. I found it difficult to maintain my emotional balance as both a military veteran and college student during our nation’s “Vietnam Era”. My circle of friends included those who were both pro- and anti-war. I still struggled to bury nightmares and intrusive memories of the fatal fire.

The nightmares eventually subsided. For a while. The fear never went away.

About 20 years ago, I began waking in the night to the smell of smoke. Night after night, I would wake to a real or imagined odor of smoke and get up at all hours to check for signs of fire.

The middle-of-night fire inspections continued on-and-off for more than a decade. But I didn’t begin to connect them to Kamiseya until about five years ago when I discovered “Station Hypo” and came across riveting posts by fellow fire survivors, Roger Miner, Lt.Col., USMC (retired) and former CT3 Fred Ames. Col. Miner had thoughtfully posted his personal contact information. I soon got in touch with both men. We discussed our memories of Sept. 24, 1965, our post-Kamiseya decades of misgivings, our “what-ifs” and nightmares.

I was dismayed to learn that in the “official” fire report, investigators dismissed compelling eye-witness accounts by Col. Miner that, before being felled by smoke and fumes, he had discovered a fiery glow in a bulkhead adjacent to the towering chimney of a recently installed classified documents disposal incinerator.

Fred Ames and others testified during the investigation that the incinerator had overheated, backdrafted and injured at least one sailor in the days before the fatal fire.

Ames, who testified at length before the fire investigation board, wrote in a previous Station Hypo post:

 “I know that the review board determined that the fire started because of an electrical problem.  I do not believe that to be accurate.  The incinerator had known problems before the fire, and I am convinced that the vent pipe had been installed in a flammable wall rather than directly to the outside through a properly insulated pipe.   I believe our public works department did the installation and, if so, I wonder whether they installed the incinerator following appropriate safety guidance.   I believe that improper installation of the incinerator was the direct cause of the fire and the loss of life.  I believe the review board reached a conclusion that was politically “safe”, but incorrect.  Perhaps deliberately so…. I remember that there was an edition of the base paper, the Kamiseyan, put out in the day or so after the fire.  I have no recollection of whether it was a regular edition or a special flyer, but I do know that whatever it was, it was confiscated.  We were ordered to turn in our copies.  I suspect that because from the time of the fire a number of us were blaming incorrect installation of the incinerator, that the paper mentioned this, and therefore was recalled because it questioned the intelligence/ability of Command.   As I do.”

The stated reason for the ultimately deadly decision to relocate the incinerator was to reduce risks that classified documents would be lost en route to the former, self-contained burn site at the far end of the base.

Col. Miner confided during our conversations five years ago that he had contemplated writing a book about the tragedy to “set the record straight.” He said he had decided against exposing a possible “coverup” out of concern it would harm the reputation of “some good officers” — who made a tragically wrong decision to relocate a massive incinerator for what they believed to be the right reasons at the time.

Col. Miner, who was in ill health the last time we spoke and has been unreachable for the past two years, also said he had been dismayed that Kamiseya commanding officer Navy Capt. James Pearson had rejected his advice the night of the fire. Miner said he advised Pearson shortly after fire was discovered to evacuate the complex before it flamed out of control and put men at risk of being trapped.

Capt. Pearson was torn, Miner said, between the need to maintain security of U.S. airborne assets at the time of the fire deployed over enemy territory — and the safety of Kamiseya sailors and Marines on duty keeping our “airborne assets” electronically undetected by foreign forces.

Eyewitness evidence notwithstanding, the fire that killed our 12 shipmates was “officially” ruled the result of an electrical short. That ruling was made by an “investigative” body of officers like those who before the fire had made a clearly erroneous decision. In that decision, senior officers had ruled that our aging Kamiseya operations complex faced little fire risk and rejected a plan for a fire-control sprinkler system.

The “command decision” to reject sprinklers was based on several incorrect assumptions – most notably, that our sprawling, mission-critical electronic intelligence complex was manned around the clock. Therefore, the previous board had reasoned, any fire that were to occur would be quickly discovered by on-duty personnel and extinguished.

Despite senior officers “most likely scenario” and investigative rationales, for six decades some of us have struggled consciously and subconsciously with a tragedy that, as we recall, was both foreseeable and preventable.

As Fred Ames, Col. Miner and I agreed, one can only speculate whether an unlikely “electrical short” or a massive incinerator, with its observed defects, caused the fire. Official designation of the incinerator as cause of the Kamiseya tragedy would have doubtless led to charges of poor “command decisions” by officers.

Regardless the actual origin of those long-ago flames, the fact remains that those in charge of the well-being of skilled men at a mission-critical base made a dubious decision — to relocate a massive burn unit to dispose of a top secret paper trail. That highly classified trail included hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and reams of encoded teletype tape. The super-secret trove of trash until 1965 had gone up safely in smoke each week since the U.S. Naval Security Group station was opened in 1952 at Kamiseya, the former site of an Imperial Japanese Navy WWII torpedo manufacturing plant.

Six decades later, a painful question still lingers: Why was a massive, hazardous incinerator moved from a proven safe location and shoe-horned into an aging building complex where more than 100 of us were on duty and 12 died in a pre-dawn inferno on Sept. 24, 1965?