Colonel Henry Mucci
In 1994, on a dreary, quiet Sunday afternoon - which it had to be, since the place was always packed on weekdays - I was in the weight room at Patrick Air Force Base in Melbourne, Florida. I had the place to myself, except for one other guy, a strange, gnomish little old-timer, well into his 80’s, with scaly, permanently tanned skin. He was bald, bent, and determined, with an enormous hook nose, which added to his otherworldly appearance, and he was going at it pretty hard, knocking out reps with an empty bar of a sort of a clean-slash-curl to his shoulders and then a press.
He’d put the bar down and then, hands on hips, push out some concerted puffs, with his mouth rounded into an ‘O.’ Around the back of his neck and tucked into his white T-shirt was a rolled towel. Beneath that, he was in ancient gray sweatpants. This was a very old fashioned way of bearing one’s self in a weight room.
Eventually, he came closer and sat at the end of a bench with his legs out wide and his hands on his knees. He and I gave each other a nod, and soon he commenced a series of questions.
‘Where are you from?’ he asked.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Who was your father?’
He furrowed his brow, seeming to search his memory. ‘He was in broadcasting, in New York,’ I said. The man shook his head, but sensing I should hit the ball back across the net, I asked, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Henry Mucci.’ (MEW-see)
‘Colonel Henry Mucci? There’s a highway named after you. I’ve been on it many times.’
‘Yep,’ he nodded. ‘I founded the Sixth Army Rangers. We were in the Philippines.’
‘My Dad was in the Philippines, in a tank battalion.’ A second later, I added, ‘He died in 1990.’
Mucci gave kind of a quiet ‘Yeah,’ as he took that in. Since nobody could fill me in on the Sixth Rangers, he explained, ‘We rescued a bunch of prisoners of war. That’s what all the honors were for.’
We talked for a while. Years later, when I finally learned about that rescue, I could have predicted every part of it, based on Mucci’s stories.
In May 2001, on a sleepy Saturday morning of pancake making, NPR’s Scott Simon was interviewing OUTSIDE magazine’s Hampton Sides about his new book, GHOST SOLDIERS, when suddenly I had to leap across the kitchen and crank the volume. ‘It’s one of World War Two’s least known but probably most daring commando missions,’ Sides was saying [and I’m paraphrasing] ‘and it was led by this dynamo of a guy, a West Point grad named Henry Mucci.’
121 members of the Sixth Army Rangers penetrated 30 miles behind enemy lines and freed 513 emaciated, diseased, and all but forgotten survivors of the Bataan Death March, who had been held by the Japanese in the brutal Cabanatuan Death Camp for nearly three years.
The instant the book arrived, I cracked it open to the picture section in the center. There he was, that dynamo of a guy from the Patrick weight room.
When I brought up that fancy highway named after him, Mucci pointed out that in the 1930’s, ‘there were no highways,’ but in the summers when he was home from West Point, he was all over the roads, squiring one date after another to fancy Italian restaurants. Mucci was a little guy even in his prime, part of the first American-born generation of a Sicilian family that sold horses. He had money and a car, and it must have been the uniform, but he had no problem sailing into WASP-ier communities to pick up their daughters for nights on the town. Among cadets at West Point, Sides says, he was legendary for bringing phenomenal looking women to dances.
A decade later, he arrived in New Guinea to turn the mule skinners of the 98th Field Artillery into the Sixth Rangers, training 500 men practically singlehandedly in jungle warfare, judo, and commando tactics. As Sides puts it, ‘Some of the Rangers had come to call him ‘Little MacArthur,’ not only because he smoked a pipe incessantly but also because he had, like the Supreme Commander, a firm grasp of the theatrics of warfare . . . . Mucci was a fitness enthusiast who could outrun and outmarch most subordinates ten years his junior. Thirty three years old, he was a short, sinewy man with a pencil thin mustache, thick, black eyebrows, and enormous forearms bristling with dark hair.’
It was January 30, 1945 on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. My father was a Harvard University kid spending his junior year abroad, commanding a tank platoon attached to the 43rd Division, as the Sixth Army worked to broaden its zone of control. The high command had another problem. Intelligence was bringing them horrifying tales from desperate escapees, that the Japanese were executing their last remaining American prisoners, in some cases by forcing them into ditches, soaking them with fuel, and burning them alive. The Cabanatuan camp was thirty miles into unsecured territory. ‘Tell Mucci I want to see him,’ the American general ordered.
Two other units deserve recognition for this raid. The Alamo Scouts, themselves quite the story, were the first to lay eyes on the camp and get critical information back to Mucci. The Rangers were also accompanied by 250 Filipino guerrillas, who provided cover for Mucci’s mission by attacking and slaughtering a nearby encampment of Japanese soldiers.
When Mucci and the Rangers struck in the darkness, they too were merciless, annihilating the guard towers and pillboxes in seconds and fanning out though the camp in an assault geared to deny the guards any chance of mounting a response. Burly Rangers carried heavy machine guns and sawed through bamboo barracks walls, thuds turning into increasingly wet sounding smacks as bullets laid into Japanese bodies. The prisoners by and large were stunned. They had no idea these were Americans who had come for them; the uniforms, the weapons, and the sheer size of these guys were all unfamiliar. Mentally they were pretty fragile and simply couldn’t process the idea of their enemies - their tormentors - being disemboweled before their very eyes. The prisoners were led, pushed, or carried out of the prison gates, where they encountered Mucci, who was standing on a hilltop and would guide them to freedom.
One of the picture sections in GHOST SOLDIERS has a shot of Mucci shaking hands after the raid with Dr. James Duckworth, who had functioned as American commander in the prison camp. Mucci has some guns. His sleeves are rolled up in such a way to make this clear, in case anyone wondered. On that cloudy Sunday afternoon, he and I did not talk about the raid. It was all girls and cars - so to the story of the raid itself I can add only one observation: he was the real deal. He was there to lift that day. (It occurs to me that maybe he approached me because he thought I could use someone to talk to.)
He’d roll back and do a set of bench presses from time to time - and I think he stood up and did some curls with a cable machine as well. (Guns - Pipes - Until You Die)
Mucci died a few years after this, from complications after breaking his hip while swimming in heavy surf. The dude was in his late 80’s, and bodysurfing.
Back at Cabanatuan, Mucci had 30 miles to travel to the American zone. Staggering toward him, egged on by his Rangers, were 513 tortured, starved, and disease ridden skeletons.
This was Mucci, however, the fast talking, roadster driving Italian Stallion who had already liberated nearly that many young ladies, one at a time, deep behind enemy lines. He had wheels. Through his Filipino guerrilla counterparts, Mucci had arranged for a carabao caravan to meet them further up the trail. The fragile prisoners would ride in wagons.
The Rangers greased a light Japanese tank at one point, and air cover obliterated a set of troop transport trucks, but the slog home, hard as it was, was quiet until they encountered a ‘Huk’ village.
The Hukbalahap were Communist guerrillas who were anti-Japanese and anti-American, and not willing to let anyone pass. In the negotiations Mucci began to have suspicions about his own Filipino translator. Finally he grew impatient. With a gesture toward his radio operator, he said he was about to call in an artillery strike that would level the village. Then he racked the slide on his .45, chambering a round. He put the barrel at the base of his translator’s spine. ‘Walk,’ he said.
That radio was broken. Mucci was bluffing.
When they did make contact with their command, they were told that American forces - quite possibly my father among them - had advanced 15 miles. They had a much shorter trip to safety.
You never know whom you’ll run into in the gym, including some guy who’s had books and movies - plural - made about him. The closing sequence in John Wayne’s BACK TO BATAAN is actual footage of the Rangers and Cabanatuan prisoners crossing back through American lines.
In Cleveland, I pulled a woman out of icy cold water after she had capsized her kayak. I once had to go tearing down a grassy highway median in a Jeep to get someone to a hospital in an emergency. Whenever I had an epic story to tell, I’d sign my e-mails, ‘Mucci, 6th Rangers.’
