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Phantom Blooper
10-26-03, 09:16 PM
One Deadly Morning in Beirut

October 23, 2003
By CHUCK PFARRER





TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. - With the allied occupation of Iraq
dominating the news, few Americans are likely to remember
that 20 years ago today the United States suffered its most
humiliating military defeat since Pearl Harbor. Early in
the morning of Oct. 23, 1983, a truck loaded with six tons
of explosives smashed into the Marine headquarters at

Beirut International Airport. Two hundred and forty-one
Americans were killed. I helped dig their bodies out of the
rubble.

I was then a 26-year-old Navy lieutenant, executive officer
of a SEAL platoon assigned to the multinational
peacekeeping force in Lebanon. My platoon and 1,500 marines
had been deployed to Lebanon, along with French Foreign
Legionnaires and battalions of British and Italian
soldiers, to provide stability in a country ravaged by
civil war and a Syrian invasion. To the Arab world,
however, the intervention was seen as a prop to the
continued Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. This
difference of perception would prove deadly.

It was by the smallest and most ignoble bit of luck that I
was not killed. I was 500 yards away at a site called Green
Beach, sound asleep in an underground bunker. The night
before, I'd led my SEAL squad into the foothills above
Beirut on a reconnaissance mission. As we withdrew, we came

under artillery fire. We didn't get back to our position
until nearly 5 a.m. In what was nearly a lethal bit of
morale boosting, I came close to ordering my men into a
truck, arming them with mess kits and making them eat
Sunday breakfast up at the Marine headquarters. I knew that
a hot meal would do my guys good. But then, lazily, I
thought that a couple of hours of sleep would do them
better.

So a few minutes before sunrise, we fell into our cots -
then a thudding shock wave tore through our bunker. The
detonation had nearly vaporized the four-story headquarters
building. The explosion could be heard in the city of
Sidon, 30 miles south. In the minutes after, chaos reigned.
No one had any idea if the truck bomb was a precursor to a
move by the Syrian Army, or if the airport would soon come
under general attack. In one stroke, the 24th Marine
Amphibious Unit had lost almost a quarter of its men
ashore.

We worked all day to dig the wounded and dead from the

rubble as sniper rounds cracked and spattered the concrete
around us; militiamen in the slums surrounding the airport
fired on the rescuers at will. Late in the afternoon, I was
called back to the beach, and I walked across the runway to
catch a helicopter. On the tarmac the dead were laid out in
neat lines, wrapped in nylon poncho liners and the
shredded, gore-splattered sleeping bags in which they had
died.

In the days that followed it was almost impossible to feel
grief. The horror was so overwhelming that we became frozen
to it. The thinnest cordon of marines now held the airport.
The mountains above us bristled with artillery; we were
outnumbered by at least five to one. It was only the
resolve, tenacity and courage of individual marines that
stood between us and Alamo time. The survivors clung
together, every man aware that we were thousands of miles
away from help or mercy. We held out until reinforcements
from Camp Lejeune, N.C., arrived two days later, and were

home by Thanksgiving.

Next to 9/11, the attack on the Marine barracks was
arguably the most successful terrorist act of all time. The
peacekeepers were withdrawn and the Lebanese people were
abandoned to their fate. Lebanon, suffering under the
occupation of the Syrian Army, has spent two decades as a
lawless, basket case of a nation, a haven for Hezbollah
thugs and a farm club for suicide bombers.

Twenty years later, the Arab world looks at America's
presence in Iraq in much the same way it saw our mission in
Beirut. Since President Bush announced the end of
hostilities in May, more than 100 American soldiers have
become casualties - one or two a day have been killed in
ambushes, shot by snipers and blown to pieces by roadside
bombs. In military parlance, this is termed harassment, one
of the many small annoyances Clausewitz called the
"friction of war." High up the military food chain, these
attacks are seen as pinpricks - militarily insignificant.

Insignificant, that is, unless it happens to be you who
gets tagged by a rocket-propelled grenade.

The military's operations in Iraq show it learned from the
terrorists' success in Beirut. American soldiers are kept
in smaller groups, and the buildings in which they are
quartered are closely guarded and, whenever possible,
surrounded by berms and vehicle barricades. Still, every
soldier knows that it is almost impossible to defend
against an attacker who is willing to die.

In Baghdad, coalition troops are again finding that it is
easier to fight wars than to build nations. And in America,
more voices are saying the whole enterprise is too
expensive, in terms of money and lives, to see to
completion. If, like Lebanon, Iraq is forsaken, we may be
certain that some variety of tyranny will find its way into
the vacuum.

The marines' sacrifice was in vain because, in the end, we
gained nothing. We need not repeat that in Iraq. In that

sense, the tragedy of America's misadventure in Lebanon
need not be repeated. Having made the decision to intervene
in Iraq, the United States is now obliged to stand by the
Iraqi people as they struggle to rejoin the world.

Chuck Pfarrer, a screenwriter, is author of the forthcoming
memoir, "Warrior Soul."

Semper Fidelis

:marine:

thedrifter
08-23-04, 07:41 AM
Never Forgotten


Ellie