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It did. The lieutenant colonel battalion commander was relieved of command. He subsequently retired and, unfortunately, died a few years later in a tractor accident on his farm.

I was a Captain on active duty in the Marine Corps at the time and his brother, a Major, was one of our discussion group leaders at the Amphibious Warfare School (now the Expeditionary Warfare School). He shared some of the details of the tragedy with us.

If I recall correctly, in addition to the platoon commander lieutenant, the company commander captain was relieved and some battalion staff officers
were also punished.

The missing Marine was a road guide posted at a critical intersection in the desert to direct vehicles onto the correct road as they returned to their exercise base camp (Camp Wilson) at the conclusion of a major combined arms exercise (CAX). The plan called for the Marine (along with all the other road guides) to be picked up in a final sweep after all the convoys had passed through.

In the meantime, the Marine had apparently concluded he had been forgotten and decided to self-recover back to the base camp by his own route (which was not by following the main service road). Being an infantryman, he had his rifle with him. The recovery team didn’t find him and just assumed he had otherwise hooked up a ride back to camp.

And leadership, from his platoon commander on up, also simply assumed he was somewhere in the 1000+ Marines of the BLT busy in the base camp. Upon return, the BLT immediately cleaned up (themselves and their equipment), turned in borrowed equipment and excess ammunition, settled exercise-related accounts, began turning over camp facilities and property to the next training unit, and began the complicated air movement back to Camp Lejeune. The infantry companies had the least amount of clean up and turn in to do, so they were slated to begin movement almost immediately.

The Expeditionary Airfield (EAF) has subsequently been improved, but, at the time, the air movement required a short flight in C-130s from the EAF to Norton AFB where the troops were reassembled into larger passenger loads to fly on chartered jet airliners to MCAS Cherry Point. On arrival at Cherry Point, they were then reconfigured again into charter bus loads to move by road back to Camp Lejeune proper.

I’ll stand corrected on this if I am wrong, but I seem to recall that the Marine wasn’t actually missed and the active search began to find him until his rifle was not turned in to the battalion armory. This absence was discovered while the unit was still midway through its movement from 29 Palms to Camp Lejeune.

It’s typical Marine humor to think that you can be missing/UA/AWOL for days but your F’ing rifle either better be on you or in its F’ing assigned slot in the F’ing armory or there will be F’ing Hell to pay.

It took a while to locate him, but, yeah, the Marine still had his rifle with him when they found his body.