Frank Wright - The Last Living Original Marine Raider From WW2 | SRS #348

Episode Overview

• Host Shawn Ryan (CEO of Vigilance Elite, former Navy SEAL, and former CIA contractor) interviews 101-year-old Sgt. Frank S. Wright, the last living original WWII Marine Raider and author of Battles in the Pacific, to document his firsthand combat and post-war experiences.
• The narrative traces Wright’s journey from falsifying his age and weight to enlist at age 16 after Pearl Harbor, through elite hand-to-hand combat training under Major James Roosevelt in the 4th Marine Raider Battalion, to brutal Pacific theater campaigns in New Georgia, Guadalcanal, Guam, and Iwo Jima.
• Wright provides unfiltered accounts of close-quarters combat, testing experimental weaponry, surviving a bayonet stabbing on Guam, witnessing the second flag raising on Iwo Jima, executing controversial "clear-cut" orders, and enduring a near-fatal machine gun wound.
• The episode concludes with Wright's harrowing medical aftermath—fighting off a surgeon attempting to amputate his arm and being repeatedly placed in psychiatric wards due to a mislabeled medical tag—alongside his post-war reflections on faith, marriage, and self-advocacy for veterans.

Key Concepts

• Speaker Background, Commendations, and Disclosed Ties: Sgt. Frank S. Wright is a 101-year-old Christian who was married for 74 years. Having served in the 4th Marine Raider Battalion and later the 21st Marines (as well as 6 months of his 4-year tour as a Marine Corps Drill Instructor after recovering), his decorations include the Purple Heart with 1 star, Presidential Unit Citation with 2 stars, Navy Unit Commendation, American Campaign Medal, Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with 3 stars, Fleet Marine Force Combat Operations Insignia with 4 stars, Marine Corps Expeditionary Medal, Combat Action Ribbon with 4 stars, World War II Victory Medal, and Navy and Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal. Sponsors and business ties disclosed during the episode include the host's company Vigilance Elite (Vigilance Elite Gummy Bears at vigilanceelite.com), Ridge 5-in-1 Travel Power Bank (ridge.com/srs - Buy 2 Get 1 Free), Babbel language learning app (babbel.com/srs - Up to 60% off), Amazon Prime Video (The Terminal List Season 2, premiering October 21 on Prime), and ROKA prescription and performance eyewear (roka.com, code SRS for 20% off, which mentions a Dr. Andrew Huberman partnership on the "Wind Down" line).
• Underage Enlistment and Early Service Realities: On December 7, 1941, Wright was making a Fokker D.VIII airplane out of balsa wood at his dining room table when he heard the news of Pearl Harbor (though in a memory slip/anachronism for 1941, he states at one point that he saw Pearl Harbor on television). Drawn to the Marine Corps because the uniform was a "chick-getter" and promised by a recruiter that he could be an airplane mechanic in the Marine Air Force (though he never worked on a plane), he tried to enlist at age 16. After being rejected for being too young and underweight, he bypassed the age limit by having his aunt (his mother's sister) fill out an uncertified delayed birth certificate, and bypassed the weight limit by stuffing 5 pounds of bananas into his blouse (he hedges that he does not remember his exact weight, only that 5 pounds did it, and suspects the recruiting sergeant fudged the paperwork a little). While stationed at Tongue Point, Oregon in 1941, Wright got into a bar brawl with a Navy sailor who knocked his cover (hat) off; Wright decked the sailor with his right fist, was hit in the face with a beer bottle by the same sailor, knocked unconscious, placed behind the bar by friends, and locked inside when Shore Patrol closed the bar until he woke up around 2:00 AM and called the base for a ride.
• Marine Raider Doctrine and Lethal Conditioning: Recommended by his senior drill instructor A.H. Allen, Wright was the 4th man picked out of his whole company for the Raiders. Under Raider officer Major James "Jimmy" Roosevelt (the President's son) in the 4th Marine Raiders, the unit's sole mandate was summarized in Roosevelt's first word to them: "Kill." Wright was trained to kill an enemy with two blows using his hands (breaking the nose and breaking the thorax/throat), a method he used to kill his first Japanese soldier using the side of his hands across the throat when he was, he thinks, 17 years old.
• Pacific Theater Realities (New Georgia and Guadalcanal): Wright's first combat deployment was New Georgia, where he did not take fire on landing and did not kill anyone. There, his squad of 5 guys (himself and 4 others) were the first Marines to test the .55 caliber Boys anti-tank rifle in combat (firing at tank tracks, requiring 2 other men just to carry the ammunition), and he encountered native headhunters with black hair on the lower skull and 1.5 to 2 inches of red hair on top who severed enemies' heads from the shoulders and placed them on statues inside a smokehouse. He also notes that Marine regulations strictly forbade tattoos because the Japanese would skin tattoos off Marines' bodies to make lampshades. On Guadalcanal, ordered to stand guard on Henderson Field, two Marine squads were ambushed in a coconut grove because scouts missed Japanese soldiers hiding in coconut trees—prompting the commander of all 4 Raider battalions to recommend teaching camouflage in boot camp. A chaplain asked Wright to turn over dead Marines in the road for last rites, which Wright stopped doing after turning over a dead friend he played cards with; the next day, Wright's unit (the 21st Marines) was caught in the same position and lost 2 men.
• Close-Quarters Survival and Post-War Reconciliation on Guam: Wright landed on the beach at Guam scared and under fire, and was wounded the day after the first landing when Japanese tanks came down the hill from Asan followed by 400+ Japanese soldiers attacking the Marines' foxholes. A Japanese soldier charged Wright twice; on the second charge, Wright tripped backward over his foxhole berm and was stabbed in the upper stomach with a bayonet. A neighboring Marine either shot or stabbed the attacker (Wright hedges that he does not know which), who fell into the foxhole on top of Wright; Wright then pulled his Gung Ho knife from the dirt and slashed the soldier's throat and head, lying underneath the dead, bleeding soldier all night until Marines pulled the body off him the next morning and a corpsman cleaned and taped the shallow, slanted wound at the aid station. On Guam, Wright found many Japanese soldiers and officers who had committed hari-kari (ritual suicide with a dagger in the stomach), though American officers often took the daggers first as souvenirs, and he praises the native Chamorro people who took Marine squads in war canoes deep into the jungle because the Chamorros could smell the food Japanese holdouts were cooking. Years later, invited back by the Governor of Guam as Grand Marshal of their liberation parade, Wright stayed on the 12th floor of the Hilton Hotel with "Marvin" and a photographer; at sunrise on the balcony, while speaking from his heart in his shorts, 2 dogs sat below looking up at him and a flock of butterflies flew up from underneath the balcony in front of him before disappearing. During the parade, the female Governor stopped the procession, shook his hand, and gave him a "Liberator Frank" T-shirt as another flock of butterflies flew right between them and disappeared.
• The Brutality and Moral Complexity of Iwo Jima: After 8 months of training following Guam, Wright landed on Iwo Jima with 2 new recruits (a BAR man and a scout); when 2 scared Marines ignored his warning to exit the left side of the Higgins boat/LST to avoid a Japanese spotter/gunner on the right, both were shot in the legs. Knocked unconscious by what he hedges was either a shell, round, or piece of rock/boulder that knocked his helmet off, Wright woke up on February 23rd to yelling and hooping in time to see the second flag raised by the 28th Marines of the 5th Marine Division—an event both Americans and Japanese initially cheered, each thinking their own side had won the war, before the Japanese realized it was an American flag and ran back into their caves—after which Wright picked up a replacement helmet from among the dead. Prior to being shot, Wright and his squad led the 21st Marines across Airfield Number 2 to the sulfur pits (Iwo Jima's main supply of sulfur to Tokyo, dug by kidnapped young boys from different islands) and chased the Japanese to Hill 227 (Motoyama Village), which spotted for the radio station on Hill 228 (he hedges "228, I think it was"). There, a Major General confiscated Wright's group and ordered a "clear-cut" to kill every living thing; they ran down paths throwing hand grenades into windows and shooting survivors—killing men, women, boys, and girls—while Wright's BAR man liquidated everything alive inside the Hill 228 radio station, destroyed the low-powered radios, and later shot 4 or 5 rounds into a cave bottom to kill a Japanese soldier and his girlfriend digging themselves out. Wright states it is his personal opinion that the women killed were kidnapped "comfort girls" used by Japanese officers and were ordered killed because they had seen airfield intelligence/operations, noting Japan later apologized for kidnapping the boys/men but still has not apologized for kidnapping the comfort women.
• Severe Trauma and Bureaucratic Medical Neglect: Wright's unit attempted to take a hill 5 times (he hedges "fifth, I think") until March 2nd (he hedges "3rd—no, 2nd of March") around Hill 382 (hedging "280, 382—382, I think it was"). While coming over a hill with 2 corpsmen carrying extra BAR ammo, a Japanese soldier ran into a pillbox and fired a Nambu .25 caliber machine gun; the first 2 rounds went together through Wright's upper right chest, cracked his clavicle, went across his lungs, exited his left side leaving a big hole, and took all the muscle out of his raised left arm. The 2 corpsmen pulled Wright by his pack straps into a shell hole, where his BAR man McCoy joined him after a grenade put what Wright estimates was "a hundred or so maybe" shrapnel wounds in McCoy's back; as Japanese dropped grenades into the hole, Wright held McCoy's arm and walked back to the 3rd Division aid station past Airfield Number 2 while a huge plane flew low overhead toward Airfield Number 1. On a hospital ship, when 2 doctors saw the muscle shot out of his left arm and one reached for a saw to amputate it, Wright woke up, threw a lethal right cut at the doctor's throat, knocked him across the room, and knocked over the surgical tray before 2 guards restrained him and the doctor agreed not to amputate. However, because a corpsman mistakenly wrote "Combat Fatigue" instead of "GSW" (Gunshot Wound) on his medical tag, doctors across 4 or 5 hospitals (including the hospital ship, Saipan, and Honolulu) never examined his chest and placed him in psychiatric/"nut" wards until his chest wound spontaneously drained into a pool of blood in his bed one night (sparing him a needle chest tap). Wright notes that during a later visit to Iwo Jima, he broke down crying when an aggressive newspaper reporter pressed him on how and why he was shot until Marvin pulled him away, and he claims no doctor has checked his chest since leaving Iwo Jima—stating that he was in the hospital 2 weeks ago for blood in his stool (requiring him to wear a diaper) and doctors still dismiss his chest as "another department."

Quotes

• At 0:00:15 - "So I just found out before, right before we sat down, that you are the last living original Marine Raider." - Shawn Ryan introducing the historical significance of Sgt. Frank S. Wright's surviving status.
• At 0:03:32 - "And I heard this news at first, I said, 'Well, that's pretty sneaky, you know, doing something like that,' but I didn't know where Pearl Harbor was." - Wright recalling his immediate reaction as a 16-year-old hearing about the December 7, 1941 attack.
• At 0:05:01 - "The weight was concerned, I had gone home and bought five pounds of bananas and stuffed them in my blouse. And so I joined with five pounds of bananas in my blouse, really." - Wright explaining how he bypassed the Marine Corps minimum weight requirement after being initially rejected.
• At 0:06:05 - "The Marine Corps has a heck of a lot prettier uniform, as you can see. And I thought that was a great—well, we called it a chick-getter." - Wright sharing his youthful motivation for choosing the Marines over other military branches.
• At 0:12:40 - "When Roosevelt came in contact with the 4th Marine Raiders, the first word that he said to us—we were all hunched down on our butts—and he says, 'Kill. That's what I want you to remember. Kill. We're not here to defend anything else, but kill.'" - Wright describing Major James Roosevelt's uncompromising combat mandate to the Raiders.
• At 0:14:00 - "Well, I can kill a guy in—with two blows, and that's it. That's all I needed. I was able to break his nose, I was able to break his thorax, on it, and I used that method that he taught us all the time." - Wright detailing the lethal hand-to-hand combat technique he learned in Raider training and used at age 17.
• At 0:22:31 - "Regulations, we were not—and I repeat—not to have any tattoos on our body at all, because the Japanese favorite thing was to skin that tattoo off of your arm, shoulder, or wherever it was on it, and skin it and use them for lampshades." - Wright explaining the grim reason behind the strict ban on Marine tattoos in the Pacific theater.
• At 0:24:39 - "We were the first ones to put the anti-tank rifle in combat, and they wanted to see what we could do, and we had five guys in my squad." - Wright discussing his squad's deployment of the .55 caliber Boys anti-tank rifle on New Georgia.
• At 0:37:45 - "As I was going backwards, well, I tripped and I fell. Just as I fell, the Jap lunged and he stuck me in the stomach with his bayonet." - Wright recounting the moment he was wounded during a night attack on his foxhole in Guam.
• At 0:38:51 - "I pulled it out, and on my—went so up and I cut his head, his throat, and he started bleeding all over me and all over the place on it." - Wright describing how he used his Gung Ho knife to kill the Japanese soldier who had fallen on top of him in the foxhole.
• At 0:48:30 - "Now, if you want to see what freedom looks like, you look into the eyes of those who survived it." - Wright reflecting on the gratitude of the people of Guam when he returned decades later as Grand Marshal of their liberation parade.
• At 1:02:47 - "That's when they raised the flag up on Iwo Jima. I got up in time to see it, the second flag—I didn't see the first flag, the second flag." - Wright describing waking up from a head injury on February 23rd just in time to witness the iconic flag raising by the 28th Marines.
• At 1:10:45 - "The first two rounds went together, on it, and went through my upper right-hand side of the chest, went through, cracked my clavicle, across my lungs, on it, and it came out on my left side, left a big hole in my left side." - Wright detailing the catastrophic Nambu .25 caliber machine gun wounds he sustained on Iwo Jima.
• At 1:18:13 - "And his orders, the Major General's orders, were to clear it, clear-kill, and that everything—every living thing would be, in our language, were to be killed." - Wright recounting the haunting order to eliminate all men, women, and children around Motoyama Village and Hill 228.
• At 1:31:51 - "He started grabbing for the saw to cut my arm off. About that time, I woke up real good and I gave him a right cut to him through his throat—I was going to kill him—and he jumped back, and I hit him and knocked him across the room, knocked over the surgical tray." - Wright explaining how he physically fought off a Navy surgeon on the hospital ship to save his left arm from amputation.
• At 1:35:51 - "I thought I was going to see GSW, gunshot wound, right chest and left chest, but all it said was 'Combat Fatigue.' That was it." - Wright revealing the corpsman's labeling error that caused four or five hospitals to place him in psychiatric wards without treating his chest wound.
• At 1:46:01 - "Don't take it yourself, son. Seek help, ask someone—doesn't make any difference who it is, but tell someone and let them know what you feel and how you feel." - Wright offering his primary advice to veterans and listeners struggling with trauma or distress.

Takeaways

• Advocate fiercely for your own body in medical settings: do not passively accept a doctor's decision or a bureaucratic label (like Wright's mistaken "Combat Fatigue" tag or modern departmental silos) if you know something is physically wrong or if a drastic procedure like amputation is proposed without exploring alternatives.
• Medical professionals and caregivers must look beyond a patient's chart or intake tag and physically examine and listen to the patient, recognizing Wright's principle that "the patient knows his body."
• Never carry emotional or psychological trauma alone; actively reach out to someone—regardless of who it is—and verbalize what and how you are feeling rather than isolating yourself.
• Heed the warnings and situational awareness of experienced leaders in high-risk environments, as illustrated by the two recruits on Iwo Jima who ignored Wright's directive to exit the left side of the landing craft and were immediately shot.
• Adapt training protocols immediately when enemy tactics expose a vulnerability, following the example of the Raider commander who pushed to integrate camouflage training into Marine boot camp after witnessing superior Japanese concealment in the coconut trees of Guadalcanal.
• Leverage the local knowledge of indigenous allies when operating in unfamiliar territory, just as the Marines relied on the Chamorro people of Guam to navigate deep jungle waterways and detect Japanese holdouts by the smell of cooking food.
• Protect individuals who are being pushed past their emotional breaking point by aggressive questioning, modeling how "Marvin" stepped in to pull Wright away when a persistent reporter on Iwo Jima drove him to tears.
• Maintain mutual support with peers during acute crises to survive otherwise fatal situations, exemplified by Wright and his heavily shrapnel-wounded BAR man McCoy holding onto each other to walk out of a grenade-targeted shell hole to the 3rd Division aid station.
• Honor and reconnect with the communities impacted by your service or past hardships, as Wright did by returning to Guam to participate in their liberation parade, which brought profound closure and meaning to both the veteran and the local survivors.
• Preserve and share the unfiltered, difficult truths of history—including traumatic moral complexities like the "clear-cut" orders on Iwo Jima—through writing and testimony so future generations understand the true human cost of war.