Local veteran recalls Beirut bombing

By Liz King
Staff writer

November 04, 2008 12:15 am

WEST NEWBURY — As a 21-year-old Marine stationed in Beirut, Lebanon, Tony Sutton was shaken out of his cot in the early-morning hours of Oct. 23, 1983.

A truck loaded with explosives had crashed through the security perimeter of the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, and the driver detonated explosives that crumbled the four-story Marine Headquarters building, crushing service members to death while they were sleeping.

"That is one of those 'defining moments' in life," said Sutton, now of West Newbury. "After that day, everything changed."

Now 25 years later, and in the wake of 9/11, few recall the Beirut bombing, which killed 241 Americans, including 220 Marines, the deadliest day for the USMC since the Iwo Jima invasion in 1945 and remains the single deadliest attack on American servicemen overseas.

Sutton and his wife, Dionne, remembered the 25th anniversary of the bombings with about 5,000 other military members, veterans and families at a memorial service last month.

For Sutton, who had the unenviable task of collecting bodies while looking for survivors, it's an impossible day to forget.

Sutton had enlisted in the Marines after high school and begun working as an intelligence specialist. The Marines were stationed at Beirut International Airport as part of a peacekeeping effort during the Lebanese Civil War.

"We had been getting shelled and fighting hard every day up until the bombings. The night before, we got shelled pretty heavily, and rockets came in, which are louder than freight trains," Sutton said. "I went to sleep in my bunker, fully clothed and with my rifle, and I felt very uneasy."

At 6:20 a.m., a truck crashed through a barbed-wire fence, two sentry posts and a gate at the Beirut International Airport before driving into the lobby of the Marine headquarters, where the suicide bomber detonated his explosives, enough to create the largest-ever, non-nuclear explosion at the time.

Sutton, about a half-mile away at the south end of the airport, remembers feeling, but not seeing, the initial blast.

"It knocked me off my cot," Sutton said. "And radios got blown across the bunker."

Sutton ran outside to where a man who shared the bunker with him was, and the two witnessed the aftermath — a massive, bright orange mushroom cloud. The blast leveled the Battalion Landing Team (BLT) headquarters.

"We heard over the radio 'It's gone,' and it literally was," Sutton said. "The four-story-tall building had just pancaked into a 15- to 20-foot-tall pile of cement."

A few minutes later, a similar truck bomb went off at a nearby French barracks, killing 58. Military personnel from each site went to help. Sutton arrived at the site 20 minutes after the explosion and spent the rest of the day looking for survivors, but said he didn't see one live body taken out.

"There was a guy about 100 yards away that had just been blown out the windows of the BLT building. There was a sergeant who had been in the service for over 25 years and was due to retire; I found him in the middle of the night," Sutton said. "I saw many things that can't be unseen."

At the memorial service, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James T. Conway delivered the Beirut memorial address at the Camp Lejeune Memorial Gardens in Jacksonville, N.C., which was followed by a wreath-laying and a private candlelight service, where "the mood was very somber," according to Sutton.

In total, 241 were killed and 80 seriously wounded. Sutton notes that at least 20 Marines died in the nearly 60-day combat before the war, and nearly two dozen died afterwards. In a case of self-proclaimed "black luck," Sutton wasn't close friends with anyone from the unit housed in the massive building, only some of the "grunts."

"One of the toughest things about the remembrance was that I didn't really know some of the guys when they were alive," Sutton said. "But I remember their names after, from dog tags or body bags."

At the service, Sutton met a fellow veteran who was the only one of a 15-man unit to have survived the blast. The building collapsed around the pitch-black cellar he was in, but he was able to wait hours until being rescued.

"I can't imagine how it would have felt to lose all of my buddies," Sutton said. "There isn't a day that goes by where I don't think of it, but I've adjusted. Some people couldn't let it go. I feel for those guys."

Sutton notes that in some minds, those rules might have been a mistake. He said the doctrine today is 'security first' and the change might be a direct descendent of the Beirut attacks.

"From that point on, it was no holds barred," Sutton said. "Prior to the bombings, the Rules of Engagement were strict. After that, if we thought we were in trouble, we just lit things up."

A group called Islamic Jihad took responsibility for the Beirut bombings, but most scholars believe Hezbollah, backed with help from Iran, was behind the blasts.

"I always thought of that day in different terms - the first couple years, the event defined me. But afterwards, it motivated me, and others, to get on with our lives."

Sutton received the Combat Action Ribbon, which is a much sought after and distinctive award. After his service, Sutton went to college in New Jersey, pursued a graduate degree from MIT and now works at Putnam Investments in Boston.

"The people that died aren't 'victims,'" Sutton said. "They gave their life for a noble deed that didn't work out in the end."

The attack was the deadliest single-day death toll in Marine Corps history since the Battle of Iwo Jima and the deadliest single attack on Americans overseas since World War II. As newly appointed treasurer of the Beirut Veterans of America, Sutton hopes people don't forget the noble cause that the Marines went in with and is planning to write a book detailing his experiences.

"We were there to help people," Sutton said. "We went in with a noble mind-set and left with a body count."

Ellie