Fallen Not Forgotten

[Phantom Blooper]

Article published Oct 19, 2003
Fallen, not forgotten
Remembering the lives lost in Beirut

The blast knocked Dan Cuddeback Jr. across the room while he was brushing his teeth in the early morning of Oct. 23, 1983.

"I think I bit my toothbrush in half," he said recently from his
Millteron, N.Y., home.

This is the first time in 20 years Mr. Cuddeback, a former Marine, has
spoken about the horror he endured following the terrorist attack that
killed 241 Marines and sailors in Beirut, Lebanon. He will join other
survivors and victims' families at a memorial service Thursday marking the 20th anniversary of the tragedy.
They came in peace.
Those words are inscribed in a stone wall in Jacksonville marked by the names of those who didn't return from what was dubbed a peacekeeping mission in Beirut. A bronze statue of a Marine overlooks the wall, almost like a sentry guarding his post.

In the early 1980s, Israeli forces invaded Lebanon in an attack on
anti-Israeli forces. Concerned about the region's stability,
then-President Ronald Reagan decided to send Marines and sailors to help restore stability and protect the Beirut airport.

Near the end of a six-month deployment in Beirut, the peacekeepers were attacked by a lone terrorist.

It happened in a flash. The Mercedes stake-bed truck barreled past the perimeter fence, pulled up to the Battalion Landing Team headquarters building at Beirut International Airport, and its driver detonated 12,000 pounds of TNT fixed to the truck.

The explosion obliterated the four-story building where many were sleeping or just waking for breakfast.

Mr. Cuddeback was in a building about 250 feet from the main barracks. He awoke early to be at the head of the chow line for a hot breakfast.

The bomb detonated at 6:22 a.m.

"My ears were ringing," Mr. Cuddeback said. "Chunks of concrete were coming down. We didn't know what to do exactly."

He started running toward the barracks and told Marines in his platoon to take cover in a nearby bunker.

"It was an ungodly, freaking mess. It was gone. There were guys walking around that were bad off. We found bodies everywhere," Mr. Cuddeback said.

For four sleepless days, he helped pull bodies and body parts from the wreckage.

"We worked solid. We tried to get a body count and it was virtually
impossible. Every time I found somebody I looked at their face, if they had one," he said.

He carried the bodies of friends and acquaintances to a makeshift morgue set up in a nearby hangar bay. He remembers digging in a hole 26 feet deep and finding the truck's axle.

Eighteen years later, Mr. Cuddeback, a retired police officer, volunteered to head to New York City to help fellow officers following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that toppled the Twin Towers. He couldn't stop crying that day, heeding the advice of a colleague who suggested he not go.

He will visit the Beirut Memorial for the first time this week. The thought scares him. He tried to visit the wall several years ago and couldn't convince himself to get out of the car.

"I've blocked this out long enough," Mr. Cuddeback said.
We left as victims
Master Sgt. John Nash has shared his story of survival and heartbreak with young Marines for years. He used to cry every time he spoke about the bombing. He doesn't anymore.

He was fresh out of boot camp when he was sent to Beirut. His plans were to stay in the Marine Corps for four years. Oct. 23, 1983, changed his future.

That morning he was lying in his cot, talking with another corporal about getting breakfast. Needless to say, he didn't get that chance.

"When the bomb exploded -- there are no words to explain how loud it was," Master Sgt. Nash said in his Jacksonville home. "Everybody was buried. Cement, wood, everything was laying on top of us."

He and the corporal he was talking with that morning were blown across the building. They lay motionless for more than 10 minutes, afraid to move or talk for fear that whoever launched the attack may have been waiting to shoot.

They heard a senior Marine call out for survivors. Master Sgt. Nash and the corporal began digging out of the rubble, calling to each other. They couldn't see through the thick, black smoke lingering over the crumbled building.

Less than an hour after the blast, they knew it was a terrorist attack.
Master Sgt. Nash began looking for other survivors.

"All the dead guys, you just leave them there. You couldn’t help
those," he said.

He found no more than 10 alive, but none survived more than a few minutes.

Those he found alive shared their last words with him. Many of them, he said, had a sense of humor.

He recalls one dying Marine who jokingly asked for a doughnut and coffee.

As rescuers began pulling debris off his body, he yelled in pain. Minutes later, the screaming stopped.

"You're thinking, 'Who are we going to find next? Who is still alive?
Why would anyone do something this devastating?' We went there as
peacekeepers. When we left, we left as victims," Master Sgt. Nash said.
Closer than brothers
When the Rev. Danny Wheeler opened his eyes following a good night's sleep, the dust was settling and his body was crouched under a mound of debris.

"I was buried alive," Rev. Wheeler said. "There was no way out. I was completely pinned. There was a heavy piece of concrete on my back."

Fighting panic, Rev. Wheeler, a former Navy chaplain who now pastors Milltown Lutheran Church in Wisconsin, prayed and sang Amazing Grace. As he called to God for help, he heard others buried, crying similar pleas.

"I prayed a prayer, 'Either kill me now or let me live,'" he said.

"I let go and felt a deep peace. I didn't feel abandoned. I felt that I was
going to be seeing God, face to face, very soon. I wasn't afraid anymore."

The purple advent stole Rev. Wheeler draped around his neck led to his rescue. The cloth, eventually spotted by another chaplain, clung to the mound of debris above him. The cloth was used as a pillow on Rev. Wheeler's stretcher when he was evacuated to a hospital in Naples, Italy. He was the last survivor of about 60 pulled from the debris.

He asked a nurse at the hospital, where he recovered from burns and soft-tissue damage, to read the names of those who died. He had baptized one of the dead the day before the bombing.

"I still grieve. I still hurt over the loss. Those wounds will never
heal. I still remember vividly that day. I will never forget, and that's the
most important thing. I'm still saddened," Rev. Wheeler said.

"I suffered such a loss that I was unable to do my job. Putting a uniform on was difficult initially. We were closer than brothers. They meant everything to me."

Every Oct. 23, Rev. Wheeler goes into seclusion. He prays for and talks to those friends, the brothers, he lost. It took him 15 years to get the courage to visit the memorial.

"They were the best part of me," he said. "I look forward to meeting
them again some day, too. I've got that faith, that hope."
It still hurts
Price Troche was at the end of the Beirut airport runway that morning,
listening to music through headphones.

"I looked down and it was a big ball of smoke," he said.

The Oakland, Calif., police officer was a 21-year-old corporal. He thought the compound had been hit by artillery fire. He was the squad leader of a gun crew. All five of his crewmembers were killed.

He was allowed to get to the building the next day.

"You go down there and you look and think, 'This can't be it.' The
smell of explosive sulfur -- it just made you sick to your stomach. It's been 20 years and I still get a little emotional about the whole thing. It still hurts."

Three thousand miles from the small town that has built a memorial to those killed, Mr. Troche feels isolated when he tries to talk about that day.

"Nobody remembers, and that really hurts," he said. "We really feel
that people just forgot about us. I know a lot of us have bitter feelings about the whole thing."

This will be the first time the Brentwood, Calif., resident will visit the
memorial wall.

"I need to pay my respects after 20 years," he said.
He did what he wanted to do
Lance Cpl. Edward Iacovino Jr. liked to fix cars. When he was told by a Marine recruiter he could be a mechanic in the Marine Corps, he told his parents they'd get a visit from the recruiter.

Elizabeth Iacovino and her husband, Edward Sr., had to sign for Eddie to join the military at the tender age of 17.

When he reported to Beirut less than three years later, he sent his parents a letter telling them he volunteered to be on a machine gun team.

"My heart dropped," Mrs. Iacovino said. "There was nothing he was
afraid of. He did what he wanted to do."

She awoke Oct. 23 to a radio broadcast about the bombing.

"I was so stunned I didn't know whether I was coming or going," Mrs.
Iacovino said.

A week later, the military confirmed her 20-year-old son was dead.

"You don't get over it. I felt like I had a hole in my heart and I was
empty inside," Mrs. Iacovino said.

She's convinced her husband's death several years ago was caused by a broken heart.

"Even in Iraq, when I hear that a boy's been killed, I just shake,"
she said. "I know how that mother must feel."
Life without a father
She thought her dad was invincible.

cont.

[Phantom Blooper]

First Sgt. David Battle survived three tours in Vietnam and was two years away from retirement.

Amy Battle Taylor was 11 when she said goodbye to her father the day he left for Lebanon.

She and her mother saw the flattened building on the television screen weeks before she expected her father home for Christmas.

"It was just instant denial," Mrs. Taylor said.

Family friends pointed out an injured Marine who looked like Mrs.
Taylor's father on television. She viewed the footage and knew it wasn't him.

When the casualty team pulled up in their driveway, the Taylors thought the men approaching the house were coming to tell them First Sgt. Battle was one of the injured.

"I heard my mother scream," Mrs. Taylor said.

It was then she remembered her father's parting words to take care of her mother. She did.

"I refused to eat or sleep. I didn't want to fall asleep in case my mom needed me," she said.

She talked to her pets; they would listen and not react sadly to what
had happened. And, she tore up Marine Corps memorabilia.

"I still get mad," she said. "I had letters from my dad that were
sent to me about how the Marines had asked for a tank in front of that building.

"They weren't allowed to protect themselves, she said.

She's accepted that her father will not be present at major life events.
He wasn't there for high school and college graduation. He was absent on her wedding day and for the birth of her daughter.
He's not there
Judy Gorchinski told herself her husband, Chief Michael Gorchinski was on the Naval battleship New Jersey when the bomb exploded. She went to church that Sunday morning in San Diego, Calif., where she was assured he was OK.

When three sailors in their white uniforms knocked on her door Monday night, she didn't open the door.

"I saw six white legs, and I kept going," Mrs. Gorchinski said.

The sailors let themselves into the house and told Mrs. Gorchinski her
husband was missing. He volunteered to leave the ship the day before the attack to help Marines fix radar equipment.

She endured a week of hell, clinging to the hope that her husband was alive. By the end of the week, she was told her husband of 12 years was dead.

Her life as a single mother of three began. Her son had to grow up without the teachings of his father. Her baby girl, only 10 months at the time, never knew him.

"In the beginning it was one foot in front of the other," Mrs.
Gorchinski said. "It gets a little easier and it never goes away. For many years the grieving had to be put on the back burner. I had three kids to raise."

She regrets not putting her children in contact with sailors who knew their father. At the time, she focused on going through the motions -- school, manners, a good home.

Mrs. Gorchinski was devastated when terrorists crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a barren field in Pennsylvania two years ago.

"I was reliving Beirut all over again," she said. "No one will ever
forget 9-11. But not Beirut. It happened far, far away. The families have each other. We all understand what we've gone through, and the rest of the country doesn't."

Mrs. Gorchinski is finally getting her chance to mourn and to heal.
She hopes for closure when she joins the memorial service for the first time Thursday.

"Mike was just one of 240 we lost on that day. In the end, the story is
the same," she said.

Trista Talton: 343-2070
trista.talton@starnewsonline.com


Semper Fidelis

[thedrifter]

Bumping

For the folks...that didn't see.....

Sempers,

Roger

[namgrunt]

I remember that Sunday morning. I almost re-enlisted in the Corps to go find the S.O.B.s that killed all those men. An uncle of mine, who I talked to that morning about the bombing, asked me why I was getting so agitated about it. He had served in the Air Force in the mid 50s. I faced him and hollered "Because they were MARINES!"

namgrunt

[wayne553]

namgrunt
That IS the only answer

wc