An emptiness surrounds Janet Hall Meadows' memory of the brave brother she lost 26 years ago.

        “I have no closure,” Mrs. Meadows, who is 47 and lives in Tollesboro, Ky., says. “I have no grave I can visit.”

        But she has a 16-year-old son named Kenton who is as tall and slender as the uncle he never knew. “He looks like Gary so much,” Mrs. Meadows says.

Gary Lee Hall

        Gary Lee Hall of Covington joined the Marine Corps soon after graduating from Holmes High School in 1974. Less than a year later the 18-year-old private first class was among more than 200 Marines sent by President Gerald Ford to rescue the 40-man crew of the SS Mayaguez, a U.S. merchant ship seized by Cambodian Khmer Rouge troops.

        On May 15, 1975, the Marines attacked tiny Koh Tang island, where the Mayaguez crew was mistakenly believed to be held. A fierce 14-hour battle ensued. When the Marines pulled out under heavy fire and in darkness, three men were inadvertently left behind: Lance Cpl. Joseph N. Hargrove from Mount Olive, N.C.; Pvt. Danny G. Marshall from Waverly, W.Va.; and Pfc. Gary Hall.

        In The Last Battle: The Mayaguez Incident and the End of the Vietnam War (Carroll & Graf; $27), published this summer, author Ralph Wetterhahn reconstructs the story and offers the fullest account yet of what happened to the three Marines.

        “What drove me more than anything,” Mr. Wetterhahn says in a phone interview from his Long Beach, Calif., home, “was the thought of Joseph Hargrove, a lance corporal, walking out on that beach that night after all that had gone on that day, and finding that he's the senior man. It's his 24th birthday, he's got two 18-year-olds (Pfc. Hall and Pvt. Marshall) looking to him for guidance, and he's more than likely telling them, "We're Marines; they're coming back for us.'

        “And they didn't come back. That haunted me all those years, that no one went back.

        “It's time to honor these three guys.”

        Mr. Wetterhahn, 59, is a former Air Force and Navy pilot who flew 180 missions during the Vietnam war. To research the book, his first, he made six trips to Cambodia over five years.

        Other books about the Mayaguez incident have focused on the merchant ship's crew and the ground battle on Koh Tang. Mr. Wetterhahn merges those story lines while also including the Khmer Rouge perspective (through interviews with Cambodian veterans of the battle) and showing how decisions were made in Washington (using recently declassified National Security Council minutes).

        The Mayaguez seizure came two years after the United States had pulled out of Vietnam, and less than two weeks after Saigon had fallen to the communists. The Ford administration wanted to send a message not only to Cambodia, but to the world, that such piracy would not be tolerated, Mr. Wetterhahn says.

        But several factors conspired to make a mess of things, he asserts. Bad intelligence led to the decision to attack Koh Tang, where the Mayaguez crew had never set foot. The island was much more heavily defended than was believed. The attack was timed badly. And leaders in Washington were making decisions that should have been left to those in the field.

        All that was beyond the control of Gary Hall, who carried an M-60 machine gun into battle.

        Since joining the Marines, he had beefed up his lean 6-foot-2 frame, says his sister, who saw him a few months after he enlisted.

        “He matured a lot,” Mrs. Meadows says. “He grew up. And he loved it. He would have made a career of it, I really do believe that. That's why he joined the Marines. He knew they were the best.”

        The three-man machine gun team of Pfc. Hall, Pvt. Marshall and Lance Cpl. Hargrove was part of the second wave of Marines to land on Koh Tang. Unknown to them, the entire crew of the Mayaguez had been released unharmed shortly after the battle began.

        The island battle raged throughout the day. As darkness fell, and the Marines began their evacuation by helicopter, Pfc. Hall's machine-gun team defended the Marines' collapsing perimeter.

        Mr. Wetterhahn does not assign blame for the men being left behind.

        “It's nobody's fault,” he says. “It was dark. There was a lot of fighting, bullets flying around, the fog of war. I think (Capt. James H.) Davis (the last officer on Koh Tang) did an amazing job to get all but three off that island.

        “These kids (Pfc. Hall, Lance Cpl. Hargrove and Pvt. Marshall) are from the other company. (Capt. Davis) doesn't know they're out there.”

        Mr. Wetterhahn quotes battlefield radio tapes in which a helicopter pilot asks the Marine officer how many men are left on the island.

        “I just don't know,” the captain replies. “It's dark out here and I don't know who's gone and who's here. I'm just going to have to do the best I can.”

        Helicopters took battle-weary Marines to Navy ships, where a count showed 18 men were missing. Fourteen were believed lost when helicopters were shot down; one was known to have been killed on the island; Pfc. Hall, Pvt. Marshall and Lance Cpl. Hargrove were unaccounted for. (The toll also included 23 men who died in a helicopter crash in Thailand.)

        A Navy ship steamed close to Koh Tang, looking for survivors. Unsure whether the three men were alive, the military chain of command decided against sending anyone back to the island.

        Mr. Wetterhahn writes: “For (Pfc.) Hall, who joined the Marines as an 18-year-old boy, he had attained his manhood through the Corps and proved it better than his idol John Wayne ever could, humping the heavy machine gun up and down the beach and holding off the Khmer Rouge to the very end.”

        Fourteen months later, with no indication that Pfc. Hall, Pvt. Marshall and Lance Cpl. Hargrove had survived, the Marine Corps declared them dead. Their names were inscribed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

        Mr. Wetterhahn began piecing together the story of Mayaguez and the missing Marines in 1995 when he joined an expedition of the Joint Task Force for Full Accounting. The military unit is charged with finding the remains of MIAs from the Vietnam war and returning them to the United States.

        The Last Battle describes how one Marine was captured on Koh Tang the day after the battle, and executed on the spot. Descriptions of this Marine, Mr. Wetterhahn says, closely resemble that of Lance Cpl. Hargrove.

        Two other Marines, most likely Pfc. Hall and Pvt. Marshall, were captured later. “I've heard everything from a couple of days to a couple of weeks (later),” Mr. Wetterhahn says.

        They were taken to the Cambodian mainland, Mr. Wetterhahn reports, and executed.

        Joint Task Force investigators have recovered human bone fragments at sites where the Marines are believed to be buried. Identifying the bones through DNA tests can take years, however.

        Meanwhile, families wait.

        Pfc. Hall's father, Seldon, died in 1999. His mother is in a nursing home, suffering from kidney failure, Mrs. Meadows says. Gary Hall also has two brothers.

        “The only closure for me will be when they bring him back,” Mrs. Meadows, his sister, says. “He needs to be buried here.

        “He's my hero.”

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