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thedrifter
10-19-08, 08:07 AM
Keeping Beirut Memories Alive
Exhibit Marks Marine Barracks Bombing's 25th Anniversary

By Jennifer Buske
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 19, 2008; PW01

At 6 a.m. on Oct. 23, 1983, the alarm clock for Marine Maj. Robert Jordan began to sound.

It was a Sunday in Beirut, Jordan said, which meant he got to roll over and hit the snooze button instead of report to duty.

The Defense Department and Marine Corps spokesman pulled his camouflage blanket over his head to go back to sleep. But after just 22 minutes, a deafening noise erupted and his building began to shake.

One of the deadliest attacks on Americans overseas had just occurred 100 yards from his building's front door.

"It was the loudest explosion I had ever heard," Jordan said. "It imploded all our doors and windows. . . . It's all still very vivid."

On Wednesday, Jordan and about a dozen other Beirut veterans assembled at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico to share their stories and unveil a new exhibit that commemorates that day 25 years ago when a terrorist drove a truck filled with explosives into the four-story Battalion Landing Team 1/8 Headquarters in Beirut, killing 241 Americans and wounding hundreds.

The exhibit, "Where Do We Get Such Men?," uses photos and quotes to chronicle the Marines' peacekeeping mission from August 1982 to February 1984. It goes over the attack on the Marine barracks as well as the attack the same day at the French headquarters in Lebanon in which 58 paratroopers were killed.

"The anniversary of the attack is marked each year by fellow Marines, and it should be remembered and studied by all," Museum Director Lin Ezell said about opening the exhibit. "Many historians tracking the history on the global war of terrorism go back to what happened in Lebanon."

The exhibit is the first of several that will come through the museum and mark the period since 1975, Ezell said, noting that the museum currently covers World War II, Korea and Vietnam. It will remain open for a year and is financed by a donation from Marine H. Furlong Baldwin. The amount of the donation was not disclosed.

"I was very disappointed when the museum opened and only had one piece of concrete from the bombing," Jordan said. "Because it wasn't a war, it gets forgotten."

Jordan said he is happy to see the three-panel display the museum now has to commemorate the event. Although some have forgotten what happened 25 years ago, he never will.

Jordan said that after his building stopped shaking that day, he shuffled through the debris and put on his "battle dress," still unaware of how bad the situation was. As he headed toward the barracks, on the grounds of Beirut International Airport, he began to realize the extent of what had just occurred.

"As I approached the site, at first I thought there were broken tree pieces around," but there was blood, the 70-year-old Florida resident said. "I realized they were parts of my comrades."

Jordan helped his fallen brothers and shuffled through the debris until he was forced to leave and do his job as a public information officer -- relaying the news of the event to people back home.

That, he said, was the hardest thing he had to do.

Like Jordan, fellow Marine Paul Roy clearly remembers that day. Roy, who joined the Marines in 1973, was the Alpha Company commander, stationed less than two miles from the barracks.

"It was just before 6:30 a.m., and the ground shook. I knew something had been hit," the Stafford resident said. "As I looked up across the way, I saw the BLT headquarters engulfed in a huge black cloud. I got on the radio and called the battalion, but there was no answer. . . . I knew something devastating had happened."

Roy said Beirut was fairly peaceful when he arrived in May 1983. The Marines had been stationed in Lebanon for a while, helping the Lebanese people and trying to maintain some normalcy in the war-torn country. Although tension began to rise by September, Roy said, he never would have thought that a terrorist would drive an estimated 2,000 pounds of explosives deliberately into the barracks.

"You never imagine that something that devastating would happen," the 59-year-old said. "When I was first told the barracks was down, I envisioned the worst. I had a lot of close friends there. I knew their wives, their children. We had all come out of Camp Lejeune together."

While Roy was stationed on land that infamous day 25 years ago, John Kerr was stationed offshore on the USS Iwo Jima. The Marine helicopter pilot said everything was quiet aboard the ship until 6:30 a.m., when the phone rang. Because it was Sunday and their day off, Kerr said he immediately knew something was wrong.

"The initial word was that a car bomb went off and some were wounded. We didn't know the extent until the first helicopter came back and said we needed everyone," the 54-year-old Woodbridge resident said. The first pilot "said, 'It's gone, it's no longer there.' That's exactly the words he used. 'The barracks is gone.' "

Kerr said the crews had to reconfigure their helicopters to hold stretchers instead of able-bodied passengers. The pilots would bring the wounded back to the ship, make sure they were stabilized and then return them to shore so they could be taken to Germany for further treatment.

"It is unbelievable the injuries people had," said Kerr, now chief of physical training with the FBI. "Each surgeon was working on two bodies at a time."

Kerr said the mission that day was not only to save all they could but also to make sure the wounded were never left alone. The sailors on the ship held the hands of the wounded and talked to them, doing what they could, Kerr said, to ease the pain.

Kerr said he heads to Camp Lejeune, N.C., each year on the anniversary of the attack. The Marine Corps base has a monument that memorializes the sacrifices made in Beirut.

"I'll always remember that day, and it's nice to see it remembered at the museum," Kerr said. "The memorial at Camp Lejeune is usually only visited by Marines, but this brings it back into the public."

Ellie

thedrifter
10-19-08, 08:08 AM
Remembering the Beirut Marine barracks bombing

By Michael Pocalyko
Sunday, October 19, 2008


Twenty-five years ago, at sunrise on Oct. 23, 1983, at 6:22 a.m., a yellow Mercedes truck with a driver and a passenger circled the parking lot adjacent to the headquarters of the Multi-National Force in Lebanon, a four-story reinforced concrete building at the Beirut International Airport.

The truck suddenly turned, accelerated through a barbed-wire fence, ran the sentry post and then crashed through the gate and drove into the lobby of the building. The suicide bombers detonated an explosion that was equivalent to 12,000 pounds of TNT, which the FBI later concluded was the largest non-nuclear blast it had ever seen.

The bombing killed 241 Americans, most of them Marines, the largest one-day death toll the corps had suffered since the invasion of Iwo Jima in 1945. Minutes later, another suicide bomber killed 58 French paratroopers in West Beirut.

President Ronald Reagan branded the attack "despicable." Addressing Congress five days after the bombing, he asked: "If we were to leave Lebanon now, what message would that send to those who foment instability and terrorism?"

He pledged renewed American resolve, saying of the Marines, "We must not strip every ounce of meaning and purpose from their courageous sacrifice. We are a nation with global responsibilities. We're not somewhere else in the world protecting someone else's interest. We're there protecting our own."

On Feb. 7, 1984, 102 days after the bombing, Reagan ordered the Marines withdrawn from Beirut and "redeployed" to Navy amphibious ships off the Lebanese coast. The entire American, British, French and Italian Multi-National Force was gone by April.

The message that was received in the Middle East, in contrast to the one transmitted in Washington, was clear to the most radical elements in Lebanon, Syria and Iran:

Bomb Americans, kill Americans and the Americans will go away.

The radical Shiite group Hezbollah (the Party of God), which found growing support among Lebanese Shiites then and enjoys widespread support now, formally announced its existence in February 1985 in a manifesto by Sayyid Ibrahim al-Amin. The first principle in that document was "to expel Americans."

We're still living with the consequences today and they reverberate far beyond Lebanon.

The Beirut bombing 25 years ago was the beginning of a pattern of internal political conflict and international discontent with America that now includes our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The questions first raised in Beirut persist today:

How much is enough?

When can we withdraw?

What will be the consequences if we leave now?

If we stay?

If we escalate (now called "surging")?

In Beirut, we first saw how suicide bombing could exact a heavy price on rich and powerful nations at little cost to a small organization. The four nations of the Multi-National Force paid the economic cost. France and America lost sons, husbands, fathers.

Lebanon was destroyed again by sectarian strife.

Any member of the Beirut Veterans of America could have predicted the pandemic of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, dysthymia and suicide among returning Iraq veterans.

Like a catalyst in a chemical reaction, the insertion of foreign forces into Lebanon, first Syrian, then Israeli and finally American, British, French and Italian, and for good measure some Iranian Revolutionary Guards, ignited the country's volatile religious and sectarian hatreds.

Twenty-five years later, they're still burning.

Although the date means nothing to most Americans today, and many others would prefer to forget it, Oct. 23, 1983, was a day of enormous importance.

Our first duty is to remember the Marines of October. Our greater duty, however, will commence 12 days later, when we choose who next will steer us in the powerful currents that we first felt in Lebanon.

They are deep waters, and they are strong.

Michael Pocalyko is the CEO of Monticello Capital in Reston, Va. When the sunrise broke over Beirut on Oct. 23, 1983, he was the pilot in command of the only Navy helicopter that was airborne at that hour.

Ellie