thedrifter
10-22-03, 07:53 PM
Etched in memory: '83 Beirut bombing
241 died in the attack but others were spared
By James W. Crawley
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
October 22, 2003
The sun had only been up for an hour, but it was already getting warm in Beirut.
It was October 1983, and 2,000 U.S. Marines and sailors had occupied parts of the city for more than a year on a peacekeeping mission that separated warring Israel and Lebanese forces.
Joe Ciokon decided to skip his morning run and breakfast to sleep in. It was Sunday, for Pete's sake, a day of rest for the Navy senior chief petty officer.
Michael Gorchinski was fixing some electronics gear in the nearby headquarters of a Marine battalion landing team. He was an electronics expert from the battleship New Jersey, which was steaming offshore.
The Marines' radar was on the fritz, so the Navy chief petty officer had volunteered to go ashore.
The past few days had been peaceful, compared with recent months of random sniping and artillery rounds aimed at their positions at Beirut International Airport and the April car-bombing of the U.S. Embassy.
A USO troupe had even performed the day before. And, in a few weeks, the Marines would leave Beirut and return home to Camp Lejeune.
As Ciokon slept and Gorchinski tinkered, a Hezbollah suicide bomber was driving a truck loaded with a ton of explosives toward the airport.
SCOTT LINNETT / Union-Tribune
Poway's Joe Ciokon, overcome with emotion in remembering the Beirut bombing, was a Navy broadcaster there.
At 6:22 a.m., he barreled past startled guards and into Marine headquarters. A horrific explosion lifted, then dropped the four-story building into a smoldering heap of fractured concrete and jagged steel.
In a dark second, 241 Marines, sailors and soldiers died or lay dying in the rubble. Ciokon lived. Gorchinski died.
Twenty years later, the scars of Beirut may have been forgotten by many or trumped by subsequent terrorism.
Yet, for the survivors and the families of the dead, Oct. 23, 1983, is painfully present in their everyday lives.
Although most of the dead and wounded Marines were based in North Carolina, the tragedy touched many in San Diego, then and now.
Every day, a memory from Beirut will invade Ciokon's thoughts.
"You'd think after 20 years it would be a blur now," he said. "But, it's as fresh as the day I was there."
Retired twice from the Navy, first as a master chief petty officer and then as a civilian public affairs officer, Ciokon lives in Poway.
In 1983, he was running the military's TV and radio station in Beirut.
If the terrorist had attacked on any other day, Ciokon has little doubt that he wouldn't have survived.
Normally, he got up early to run with several Marine friends, then he would stop at the headquarters' mess hall for breakfast. That Sunday he stayed in bed.
The blast tossed the sleeping Ciokon beneath a table.
Thinking that a militia faction had fired an artillery shell at his building, Ciokon threw on his flak jacket and helmet and ran outside in his skivvies. Thick dusk choked the air.
As he stopped to help a bleeding officer, one of his subordinates yelled, "The BLT (battalion landing team) is gone!"
A mile away, Sgt. Dan Wilson had just come off duty with a sniper team on a rooftop. "It was heart-stopping," said Wilson, now a sergeant major at Camp Pendleton.
As the dust cleared, stunned survivors focused on the fractured bodies and amputated limbs of their comrades. Ciokon recognized something in the rubble. Looking closer, he realized it was the battalion first sergeant's torso.
"That was all that was left," he recalled, closing his eyes and crying softly.
Regaining his composure, he said, "It was an impossible sight."
The sounds
The sounds Ciokon still remembers today.
"The moaning. You hear 300 guys moaning. It was like the earth was moaning," he said.
Cpl. Al Silva, at a checkpoint several hundred yards away, joined other Marines guarding the rescue operation, which was hampered by snipers and looters.
"People were really ****ed off," said Silva, now a master gunnery sergeant.
"The Lebanese were taking souvenirs," he said. "Marines took out their .45s and put them to their heads to make them stop."
Back in San Diego, Judy Gorchinski was getting her three children ready for church and Sunday school. She flipped on the TV to CNN.
Seeing the first pictures from Beirut, she sat on the coffee table to hear the announcer tell about the bombing at the Marine post.
Because her husband's battleship was off the coast of Lebanon, she wasn't too worried.
"My level of concern was minute because he was on a battleship," she said in a recent telephone interview from her home in Sacramento.
She and the children went to church.
The next night, she saw a Navy car parked on the street when she came home. She walked past it, entered the house. The doorbell rang and she could see three pairs of dress whites through the bottom of the screen door.
"When you see (the Navy men), then you know," she said. "All they could say – he was missing."
Final word came on Halloween. "We were lucky. We only waited a week," she said.
Some families didn't learn the fate of loved ones for more than two weeks as Marines searched the rubble.
Documenting damage
In Beirut, Ciokon and his crew of military journalists had a special assignment. Within an hour, they were told to get their TV cameras and sound equipment and begin documenting the damage and rescue efforts.
Twenty years later, Ciokon choked back tears as he talked about trading a shovel for a camera.
"But that was our job," he said.
For the past 20 years, Judy Gorchinski's job has been keeping her husband's memory and legacy alive for their children.
The kids grew up with his letters, pictures, even a snippet of videotape taken before his final cruise.
Now, as young adults, they want to know more about their father.
"Who he was tells these kids who they are," she said.
"My son is his dad all over again, but he doesn't know that yet," Gorchinski said.
Her daughter just finished serving a stint in the Navy as a fire control person. The memory of her dad was her motivation for joining, and her inspiration throughout boot camp and training school.
"He did this, so I'm going to get through this and do well," she told herself during the difficult times of recruit training.
The war against terrorism has stabbed like a hot poker into the hearts of those who survived Beirut.
In the months and years after the Beirut bombing, the U.S. military bolstered its guard against terrorists but, as time lapsed, the guard seemed to lower.
More attacks
Then, in June 1996, a truck bomb killed 19 U.S. service members at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. In 1998, two U.S. embassies in Africa were targeted, killing hundreds of people, including Americans.
Again, forgotten lessons were relearned and security was tightened.
But terrorists continued to target the U.S. military, killing 17 aboard the destroyer Cole in Yemen's Aden harbor in October 2000.
Force protection – the military's term for safeguarding bases and troops – became a high priority following the Africa and Cole explosions. And the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have kept military installations, here and overseas, at the highest level of security since World War II.
"The first impulse is to wonder why (terrorism) happens again," Ciokon said. "But, they'll pick innocent targets at the time that it's to their advantage.
"You can't defend against it."
Judy Gorchinski said that watching the World Trade Center towers collapse on television, "It was the building in Beirut coming down again. I felt the pain of those people."
And tomorrow's anniversary, which will be marked by memorial services at Camp Lejeune and the battleship New Jersey memorial in Camden, N.J., will provoke further memories for survivors.
"There are some things you don't want to remember, but you do want to remember the people, just not the situation," said Sgt. Maj. Wilson. "I will remember my friends."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
James W. Crawley:
(619) 542-4559; jim.crawley@uniontrib.com
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/military/images/031022beirut.jpg
Photo by Dan Wilson
Dan Wilson, now a sergeant major at Camp Pendleton, took this photograph of the bombed Marine barracks in Beirut. Wilson, a sergeant then, described the 1983 scene as "heart-stopping."
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/military/20031022-9999_1m22beirut.html
Sempers,
Roger
:marine:
241 died in the attack but others were spared
By James W. Crawley
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
October 22, 2003
The sun had only been up for an hour, but it was already getting warm in Beirut.
It was October 1983, and 2,000 U.S. Marines and sailors had occupied parts of the city for more than a year on a peacekeeping mission that separated warring Israel and Lebanese forces.
Joe Ciokon decided to skip his morning run and breakfast to sleep in. It was Sunday, for Pete's sake, a day of rest for the Navy senior chief petty officer.
Michael Gorchinski was fixing some electronics gear in the nearby headquarters of a Marine battalion landing team. He was an electronics expert from the battleship New Jersey, which was steaming offshore.
The Marines' radar was on the fritz, so the Navy chief petty officer had volunteered to go ashore.
The past few days had been peaceful, compared with recent months of random sniping and artillery rounds aimed at their positions at Beirut International Airport and the April car-bombing of the U.S. Embassy.
A USO troupe had even performed the day before. And, in a few weeks, the Marines would leave Beirut and return home to Camp Lejeune.
As Ciokon slept and Gorchinski tinkered, a Hezbollah suicide bomber was driving a truck loaded with a ton of explosives toward the airport.
SCOTT LINNETT / Union-Tribune
Poway's Joe Ciokon, overcome with emotion in remembering the Beirut bombing, was a Navy broadcaster there.
At 6:22 a.m., he barreled past startled guards and into Marine headquarters. A horrific explosion lifted, then dropped the four-story building into a smoldering heap of fractured concrete and jagged steel.
In a dark second, 241 Marines, sailors and soldiers died or lay dying in the rubble. Ciokon lived. Gorchinski died.
Twenty years later, the scars of Beirut may have been forgotten by many or trumped by subsequent terrorism.
Yet, for the survivors and the families of the dead, Oct. 23, 1983, is painfully present in their everyday lives.
Although most of the dead and wounded Marines were based in North Carolina, the tragedy touched many in San Diego, then and now.
Every day, a memory from Beirut will invade Ciokon's thoughts.
"You'd think after 20 years it would be a blur now," he said. "But, it's as fresh as the day I was there."
Retired twice from the Navy, first as a master chief petty officer and then as a civilian public affairs officer, Ciokon lives in Poway.
In 1983, he was running the military's TV and radio station in Beirut.
If the terrorist had attacked on any other day, Ciokon has little doubt that he wouldn't have survived.
Normally, he got up early to run with several Marine friends, then he would stop at the headquarters' mess hall for breakfast. That Sunday he stayed in bed.
The blast tossed the sleeping Ciokon beneath a table.
Thinking that a militia faction had fired an artillery shell at his building, Ciokon threw on his flak jacket and helmet and ran outside in his skivvies. Thick dusk choked the air.
As he stopped to help a bleeding officer, one of his subordinates yelled, "The BLT (battalion landing team) is gone!"
A mile away, Sgt. Dan Wilson had just come off duty with a sniper team on a rooftop. "It was heart-stopping," said Wilson, now a sergeant major at Camp Pendleton.
As the dust cleared, stunned survivors focused on the fractured bodies and amputated limbs of their comrades. Ciokon recognized something in the rubble. Looking closer, he realized it was the battalion first sergeant's torso.
"That was all that was left," he recalled, closing his eyes and crying softly.
Regaining his composure, he said, "It was an impossible sight."
The sounds
The sounds Ciokon still remembers today.
"The moaning. You hear 300 guys moaning. It was like the earth was moaning," he said.
Cpl. Al Silva, at a checkpoint several hundred yards away, joined other Marines guarding the rescue operation, which was hampered by snipers and looters.
"People were really ****ed off," said Silva, now a master gunnery sergeant.
"The Lebanese were taking souvenirs," he said. "Marines took out their .45s and put them to their heads to make them stop."
Back in San Diego, Judy Gorchinski was getting her three children ready for church and Sunday school. She flipped on the TV to CNN.
Seeing the first pictures from Beirut, she sat on the coffee table to hear the announcer tell about the bombing at the Marine post.
Because her husband's battleship was off the coast of Lebanon, she wasn't too worried.
"My level of concern was minute because he was on a battleship," she said in a recent telephone interview from her home in Sacramento.
She and the children went to church.
The next night, she saw a Navy car parked on the street when she came home. She walked past it, entered the house. The doorbell rang and she could see three pairs of dress whites through the bottom of the screen door.
"When you see (the Navy men), then you know," she said. "All they could say – he was missing."
Final word came on Halloween. "We were lucky. We only waited a week," she said.
Some families didn't learn the fate of loved ones for more than two weeks as Marines searched the rubble.
Documenting damage
In Beirut, Ciokon and his crew of military journalists had a special assignment. Within an hour, they were told to get their TV cameras and sound equipment and begin documenting the damage and rescue efforts.
Twenty years later, Ciokon choked back tears as he talked about trading a shovel for a camera.
"But that was our job," he said.
For the past 20 years, Judy Gorchinski's job has been keeping her husband's memory and legacy alive for their children.
The kids grew up with his letters, pictures, even a snippet of videotape taken before his final cruise.
Now, as young adults, they want to know more about their father.
"Who he was tells these kids who they are," she said.
"My son is his dad all over again, but he doesn't know that yet," Gorchinski said.
Her daughter just finished serving a stint in the Navy as a fire control person. The memory of her dad was her motivation for joining, and her inspiration throughout boot camp and training school.
"He did this, so I'm going to get through this and do well," she told herself during the difficult times of recruit training.
The war against terrorism has stabbed like a hot poker into the hearts of those who survived Beirut.
In the months and years after the Beirut bombing, the U.S. military bolstered its guard against terrorists but, as time lapsed, the guard seemed to lower.
More attacks
Then, in June 1996, a truck bomb killed 19 U.S. service members at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. In 1998, two U.S. embassies in Africa were targeted, killing hundreds of people, including Americans.
Again, forgotten lessons were relearned and security was tightened.
But terrorists continued to target the U.S. military, killing 17 aboard the destroyer Cole in Yemen's Aden harbor in October 2000.
Force protection – the military's term for safeguarding bases and troops – became a high priority following the Africa and Cole explosions. And the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have kept military installations, here and overseas, at the highest level of security since World War II.
"The first impulse is to wonder why (terrorism) happens again," Ciokon said. "But, they'll pick innocent targets at the time that it's to their advantage.
"You can't defend against it."
Judy Gorchinski said that watching the World Trade Center towers collapse on television, "It was the building in Beirut coming down again. I felt the pain of those people."
And tomorrow's anniversary, which will be marked by memorial services at Camp Lejeune and the battleship New Jersey memorial in Camden, N.J., will provoke further memories for survivors.
"There are some things you don't want to remember, but you do want to remember the people, just not the situation," said Sgt. Maj. Wilson. "I will remember my friends."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
James W. Crawley:
(619) 542-4559; jim.crawley@uniontrib.com
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/military/images/031022beirut.jpg
Photo by Dan Wilson
Dan Wilson, now a sergeant major at Camp Pendleton, took this photograph of the bombed Marine barracks in Beirut. Wilson, a sergeant then, described the 1983 scene as "heart-stopping."
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/military/20031022-9999_1m22beirut.html
Sempers,
Roger
:marine: