Fighting brings back memories for area Marine Beirut veterans

[Phantom Blooper]

July 18,2006
CHRIS MAZZOLINI (http://www.jdnews.com/SiteProcessor.cfm?Template=/GlobalTemplates/Stories.cfm&ByReporter=CHRIS MAZZOLINI&Section=News)
DAILY NEWS STAFF
Mike Fresia watches the turmoil in Lebanon and wishes he was there.
“We’ve got 25,000 Americans over there,” said the retired Marine who served two tours at the Beirut airport during the early 1980s. “That was the first question I got asked from one of the members here in the (Disabled American Veterans) chapter. He said, ‘What do you feel about this?’ I said, ‘I wish I were there.’”
For many in Jacksonville, the strife in Lebanon is not only an indication of the region’s growing chaos, but also a haunting reminder of a conflict more than two decades ago, when U.S. Marines were dragged into a factional stew of warfare.
The result of that is the somber Beirut Memorial near the Camp Johnson entrance, a monument to the 241 Marines, sailors and soldiers who died October 23, 1983, when their barracks were destroyed by a vehicle-borne suicide bomb.
Although many details of the conflicts are different, it’s impossible for those who fought in the war-torn country or who helped pull the bodies of their comrades from beneath the rubble not to think about their own time in Beirut while reading the news today.
The situation that developed in 1983 had its roots in a Lebanese civil war that began in 1975, a fight that pitted Islamic, Christian and other factions against each other in a one-upmanship of escalating violence against each other and innocent civilians.
The conflict surged to higher levels in 1982, when Israel invaded southern Lebanon in a bid to push the Palestinian Liberation Organization out of the country.
The parallels to the current conflict — which has the Israelis pushing into southern Lebanon to root out Hezbollah fighters and reclaim captured soldiers — are obvious to Fresia.
“It sure does (remind me), unfortunately,” the Jacksonville resident said. “It’s a repetitive type of warfare they’ve got going.”
The conflict in 1982 resulted in U.S. Marines entering Beirut as part of a multinational peacekeeping force tasked with protecting evacuating civilians. The haunting words on the Beirut Memorial, “They came in peace,” echo that mission.
One of those Marines was Orval Hunt, then a staff sergeant with 1st Battalion, 8th Marines. He was in the barracks when an explosion ripped through it. He was injured severely and says “Only by the grace of God am I alive.”
“I’m tuned in to everything going on over there,” Hunt said.
Right now, the only U.S. forces involved in Lebanon are the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which was in Beirut in the 1980s as the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit.
According to a MEU press release, 21 Americans were flown from the U.S. embassy in Beirut to Cyprus on MEU helicopters. The MEU said it is preparing to “lay the groundwork” for follow-on operations, if necessary.
An estimated 25,000 American citizens are in Lebanon.
While there is no telling where the current conflict will go, Fresia said he believes it will be a grave mistake to send U.S. troops into Lebanon for anything beyond getting American citizens out.
“There’s speculation for a multinational U.N. force, getting them to be a buffer between the problems over there,” he said. “That would be the worst thing in the world they can do. It’s not just a buffer, it’s a target of opportunity for terrorists. I think the biggest thing is to evacuate those citizens that want to be evacuated.”
But all the veterans can do is watch and wait, and confront their stirred memories. Hunt, for his part, said he didn’t need the current conflict to remind him of that grim day in 1983.
“It never leaves my mind,” he said. “There’s no doubt it never leaves my mind.”

Contact Chris Mazzolini at cmazzolini@freedomenc.com (cmazzolini@freedomenc.com) or 353-1171, Ext. 229.

[thedrifter]

July 31, 2006

‘Surreal’ return for Beirut vets

By Gidget Fuentes
Staff writer


The lore of the Marine Corps is steeped with images of places — Iwo Jima, Saipan, Guadalcanal and Kuwait City — where leathernecks braved enemy fire to raise the flag in victory and liberation.

In the modern-day Corps, though, the name “Beirut” conjures the smoky memory of a cruel ambush as its men slept in their barracks one Sunday morning. That Oct. 23, 1983, attack by a truck bearing terrorists’ explosives showed the Achilles’ heel of an occupying force many believed had become complacent.

Very few Marines in uniform today were among the thousands of leathernecks who landed in Lebanon’s capital as part of the 1982-1984 “peacemaking” missions of a multinational force. But some of those leathernecks are still serving. And at least one has a front-row seat for the new action as members of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit pull Americans from the rocket-pocked country.

Brig. Gen. Carl Jensen is the military’s overall commander of the evacuation. He pulled a Beirut tour in 1983 and now commands Task Force 59.


A July 19 helicopter flight to the U.S. Embassy gave Jensen vivid reminders of the tragedy that his helicopter squadron — Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron 167 — witnessed when he was deployed in Beirut for the Marines’ 1983 mission.

“It feels just a little bit surreal,” Jensen said, his voice solemn. “When I flew over the embassy today, the view hasn’t changed.”

“It was moving,” he added. “And there’s no way that a Marine can come to Beirut without having some memories.”

Jensen is commander of the San Diego-based Peleliu Expeditionary Strike Group, a six-ship flotilla that includes the Camp Pendleton, Calif.-based 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit. The strike group left San Diego on Feb. 15 for a six-month deployment.

A hard awakening

On Oct. 23, 1983, the phone rang at 6:30 a.m. in the North Carolina home of then-2nd Lt. Mike Thorsby, waking him up.

“The voice said, ‘You’re being recalled.’ Click,” recalled Thorsby, now 48 and an Iraq war veteran and Reserve colonel. “I was thinking, ‘What are they doing?’ I had no idea what had occurred.”

Thorsby was a logistics officer with Camp Lejeune-based Battalion Landing Team 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines, the “air alert force” for the 2nd Marine Division at the time. The battalion had spent most of its six-month deployment earlier that year with the 22nd Marine Amphibious Unit in Beirut.

Before the call that day, Thorsby and 2/6 had been prepping for a deployment to train in Honduras. No longer. In the pouring rain, he and 350 Marines loaded themselves and tons of vehicles and equipment onto waiting Air Force C-141 transport planes at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point.

“Eighteen hours after I received that phone call, I was back in Beirut,” he said.

They landed in Lebanon to a scene that shocked him.

“I rounded the corner of the airport, and for six months I’d always seen this four-story building,” he recalled. “And here I looked, and there was no building. It had been squished.”

The office Thorsby had occupied on his first tour was gone. That day, and over the next three months, he helped dig out the dead and collect documents and personal belongings among the carnage and wreckage.

“I prayed,” he said. “I really felt guilty, because it easily could have been me. You go through a myriad of emotions.

“I’m a religious person, and it kind of came to me that I experienced it for a reason, to take what I could learn from it and share it with others.”

For Thorsby, now married with three sons and living in Holland, Mich., that return to Beirut marked “an epiphany.”

“The experience of Beirut defined who I am today, absolutely,” he said. “How I treat Marines and treat intense issues, because every person that I met in our transition from BLT 2/6 to BLT 1/8 … every single person was killed.

“I lived in that building for a good five-and-a-half months of my life, and every person was killed in the 4 shop, except for one person who was actually on emergency leave.”

Lessons about security

The memories of that second tour in Beirut became lessons for him, especially when he went to Iraq in 2004.

A young second lieutenant when he first stepped into Beirut, Thorsby wore a colonel’s eagle when he landed at Al Asad Air Base in western Iraq with that lesson — complacency kills — at the forefront of his mind.

It was a reminder not just posted on plywood boards, but reiterated in talks that Thorsby, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing’s assistant chief of staff for logistics and supply and the base’s de facto mayor, had with Marines.

Thorsby remembered how critical a security posture was during that first Beirut deployment.

“I realized then that life could be snuffed out with the blink of an eye, the snap of a finger.”

He thinks back to that time.

“Before that moment, I used to get so stressed. I was as tight as a drum. Now, I am not going to sweat the small stuff. You can’t stress about it. You wake up and you have another day to live.”

Christian Lowe, reporting from Cyprus, contributed to this report.

Ellie