25 years after Beirut

[thedrifter]

25 years after Beirut

Every October, Judith Young makes a solemn trip from her home in southern New Jersey to Jacksonville, N.C., to honor her late son, Sgt. Jeffrey D. Young.
Young normally mourns alongside a close group of friends she's made honoring her son's memory, but this year there likely will be more attention on the memorials held at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and elsewhere for the 241 troops - all but 21 were Marines - killed in the Oct. 23, 1983, bombing of the Beirut barracks.

http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news...tintro_102308/

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Beirut blast still resounds

Suicide bomber killed 241 American troops 25 years ago in barracks
By Steve Liewer
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

October 23, 2008

In the green expanse of Arlington National Cemetery's Section 59, a Lebanese cedar tree grows near the final resting place of some of the first Americans to shed blood in the fight against Middle East terrorism.

Twenty-five years ago today, a suicide bomber steered a truck loaded with the equivalent of six tons of TNT down the airport road in Beirut, Lebanon. He plowed into the four-story barracks where more than 300 U.S. troops from a U.N. peacekeeping mission slept and detonated what the FBI called the largest non-nuclear bomb in history.

The explosion and fireball pulverized the concrete fortress, killing 241 U.S. service members, most of them Marines. A second blast minutes later at the compound of the French peacekeeping force killed 58 more Western troops. Three months later, President Ronald Reagan pulled the Americans out of Beirut.

A quarter-century and two wars with Iraq have dulled the public's memory of the Beirut attack. But the United States and its allies still feel the effects, said retired Marine Col. Tim Geraghty, who commanded U.S. forces in Lebanon at the time.

A splinter group of the Iranian-and Syrian-supported Hezbollah organization carried out the attack, which allegedly was planned by a man who later inspired Osama bin Laden. Then a tiny guerrilla outfit, Hezbollah has grown into a political and military force in Lebanon.

Geraghty sees a line from the Beirut bombing through the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 – and ultimately to the U.S. war dead from Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds of whom are buried in Arlington's Section 60, a few hundred feet from those killed in Beirut.

“Who would have thought, 25 years later, here we are (fighting) essentially the same crowd?” said Geraghty, who lives in Phoenix. “The enemy learned: Terrorism works.”

Joe Ciokon, now 69 and living in Poway, was a Navy senior chief at the time, the highest-ranking of 128 enlisted sailors who worked alongside the Marines in Beirut. A Navy journalist, he was in charge of the tiny television and radio detachment.

It still frustrates him that the two-year mission ended in death and failure.

“We invested all this time and money and sweat and blood, and then we just leave,” Ciokon said. “Why did we give these lives?”

The Beirut mission started out as an effort to stabilize a fragile peace in a war-torn country. Lebanon had been in turmoil since the Palestine Liberation Organization, having been expelled from Jordan, took refuge there in the 1970s. In 1975, a panoply of Christian and Muslim militias, some backed by neighboring powers such as Iran, Syria and Israel, turned what had been a Middle East oasis into a no-man's land of urban warfare.

Israel invaded in 1982, hoping to crush the PLO. In exchange for an Israeli withdrawal, the U.N. sent in a peacekeeping force made up of troops from Great Britain, France, Italy and the United States.

U.S. forces set up camp at Beirut International Airport, a spot difficult to defend because the airport remained open for business and because warring factions controlled strategic hillsides nearby.

“It was selected almost entirely for diplomatic and political reasons,” Geraghty said. “I was uneasy from Day One that we were in that position.”

He bunked most of his men, who were from the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit at Camp Lejeune, N.C., in a sturdy, four-story concrete building that had once been the PLO headquarters.

The situation fell apart quickly. Militia leaders began to view the United States and its allies as favoring the Christian-led forces of the Lebanese government. A car-bomb attack at the U.S. Embassy in April 1983 that killed 63 people emphasized the point.

“We walked into the middle of a family feud,” Ciokon said, “and they all turned their guns on us.”

Geraghty felt the growing danger in the weeks before the barracks bombing. Artillery shells fell on his compound. Snipers took potshots at his men. But Geraghty's Pentagon superiors spiked his requests for stronger defenses.

On Oct. 22, 1983, Ciokon had moved his broadcast detachment from tents next to the barracks to a neighboring building, the Marine Safety Headquarters. That night, about midnight, he climbed to the roof of the Marine barracks. He watched as the local militias lobbed shells at one another.

“It was so cool up there, I was kind of relaxing,” Ciokon recalled. “I was thinking about staying up there to sleep, but I went back to my room.”

Ciokon slept soundly – until the blast catapulted him out of his cot at 6:22 a.m. Oct. 23.

“I did a complete cartwheel,” he said. “In midair, I grabbed my helmet and my flak jacket.”

At first Ciokon thought an artillery shell had struck his building. He raced outside with his roommate, a newly minted Navy chief. The barracks next door had collapsed into rubble.

“It looked like a fog, but it was the dust from the building,” Ciokon said. “I noticed there were a bunch of Marines following me around, covered in dust, like zombies.”

Everyone in the compound scrambled to pull survivors out of the building.

Within an hour, though, Ciokon's superiors told him to organize his broadcast team and get the radio station back on the air. They traded their shovels for cameras and recorded the carnage.

Twenty-five years haven't erased the memories.

“You learn to live with it,” Ciokon said. “It never gets easier.”

The Marines' departure brought Beirut no peace. The civil war raged for seven more years until a settlement left Syria firmly in control of the country.

Experts believe Imad Mugniyah played a key role in the twin bombings and went on to mastermind the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and a series of kidnappings of Americans in Lebanon. He is believed to have met with bin Laden in Sudan in 1996 and was assassinated in a car bombing in Damascus, Syria, in February. No one has claimed responsibility.

Today Ciokon and Geraghty will join hundreds of other Beirut veterans for a candlelight vigil at Camp Lejeune, near a monument listing the names of all who died. A Marine stands perpetually at guard.

“The hurt and the sorrow hasn't lessened one iota over the years,” Geraghty said. “Every day I pray for them. Every day.”

Steve Liewer: (619) 498-6632; steve.liewer@uniontrib.com

Beirut bombing,
Oct. 23, 1983

Most of the 1,500-man Marine expeditionary force was bunked in a four-story concrete building.

241 died: 220 Marine Corps, 18 Navy, three Army.

It was the largest single-day loss of life for Marines since the World War II Battle of Iwo Jima.

A nearly simultaneous explosion nearby killed 58 French soldiers.

One of two alleged plotters, Imad Mugniyah, was killed by a car bomb in Syria on Feb. 12, 2008.

Online: For more information about the bombing of the Marine barracks, go to beirutveterans.org

Ellie