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thedrifter
02-07-08, 09:04 AM
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January-February 2008, page 64

Waging Peace
Beirut Veterans of America

http://www.wrmea.com/images/Jan-Feb_2008/WP8.jpg

Beirut Veterans of America gather every Oct. 23 at Arlington Cemetery to remember victims of terrorist attacks (Staff photo D. Hanley)

ON OCT. 23, veterans and families in Jacksonville, NC and Arlington, VA remembered fallen heroes in Beirut, Lebanon, 24 years after a truck bomb exploded in a Beirut barracks, killing 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three soldiers, and injuring many others.

Lebanon had been wracked by a brutal civil war for seven years when, in June 1982, Israel invaded in order to destroy the Palestinian Liberation Organization. President Ronald Reagan sent in the Marines to help evacuate civilians and later to help escort Yasser Arafat and the PLO to Tunisia. Most of those Marines had left by mid-September 1982, when Israeli troops allowed Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia to butcher residents of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, plunging Lebanon into total chaos.

On April 18, 1983 a delivery van pulled up to the front door of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and detonated a bomb, killing 46 people (including 16 Americans) and wounding over a hundred others.

In total, 270 service members lost their lives while serving in the U.S. peacekeeping mission to Lebanon from 1982 to 1984. Beirut Veterans of America is a veteran’s group formed in 1992 to remember those servicemen. Every year on Oct. 23, they gather at the Beirut memorial in Jacksonville, which includes a wall listing the servicemen’s names, and around a marker near a cedar of Lebanon tree in Section 59 of Arlington Cemetery.

Ellie