thedrifter
12-24-08, 09:17 AM
"They Came In Peace" – Christmas In Beirut
07:54 AM CST on Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Brian Lukas / WWLTV Chief News Photographer
It’s the Christmas season, and every time about this year my eyes turn to a specific art rendering positioned just above my desk. There is an inscription I wrote below the art. It reads:
"Pieces of shredded uniforms littered the branches of the trees; the top of an ammunition can wedged tightly in the bark. A crater in the earth became the resting place for the cinder blocks that once housed the 241 marines. They died here.
'They Came In Peace'. They were the sons of mothers and fathers, husbands of wives and dads to their little girls and boys. My wife my son, my daughter were home this Christmas day. Jeffrey and Jessica, you were not aware of my assignment, but Mom knew and she cried. Love, Dad."
25 years ago Marines were spending Christmas away from their families and loved ones. It was a lonely time -- a time that our military personnel are experiencing today, away from family and friends in a distant place and in distant conflicts.
But this is Beirut in 1983, another time, another place of conflict. Civil war had erupted in Lebanon in 1975, the result of clashes between Christian and Muslim and the various political groups of the regions. In 1983, the United Nations dispatched a multinational peacekeeping force, including U.S. Marines, to Beirut.
On October 23,1983, a truck loaded with explosives crashed into the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit Headquarters compound, killing 241 Marines. They seem to have gotten lost in the history books.
In December 1982 myself, Angela Hill, Garland Robinette and editorialist Phil Johnson traveled to Beirut in late 1983 to cover Louisiana Marines stationed there at Christmas time.
Christmas 1983 was just a few weeks away. It was a time before portable satellite uplinks and the Internet, so we carried videotaped messages from the Marines’ families back in the United States. Our ambitious itinerary also included production of a documentary about this war-torn area. But as fighting between the various factions escalated, that idea was abandoned. Armed militias set up roadblocks in various sections of Beirut. The Islamic Jihad decided to add another element to its arsenal of terror and brutality: kidnapping Westerners.
I kept journal entries of the tense times there, excerpted here:
At the same time that I arrived in Beirut, the French Embassy was hit by a car bomb, with 20 people killed. Later that night, a bomb-laden truck blasted a French military base. 10 French soldiers were killed and 23 were hurt. The explosion lit up the whole area.
Terror – it is sheer terror. I can see it on the faces of the residents who walk cautiously on the streets. Here in Beirut, teenagers carry assault rifles, mainly M-16s. On the streets, women cradle their children tightly in their arms, begging any Westerners for help.
The city smells like death. There is a stench of rotting corpses and smoldering trash strewn about from buildings destroyed by the fighting in the streets. To realize the inhumanity of war, you have to look deep in the faces of the civilian population. Then, if you dare, look deep into their eyes. There you will find the horror of war absorbed deep within the soul.
I look into many eyes here in Beirut. In the eyes of the young Marines, I can see the uneasy and uncomfortable situation they are in. The U.S. Marines’ position at the Beirut International Airport keeps them under daily sniper and artillery attack.
I remember when I was in Washington D.C. for a White House press function, when many of these same Marines from the 22nd Marine Amphibious Unit invaded Grenada, a tiny island in the Caribbean. Now, I am here in hell with them.
The Marines, politically, are not invaders but are so-called “welcome guests,” strategically placed in Lebanon on a peacekeeping mission with the French and Italians as part of a multinational force. Our Marine contact Capt. Dennis Brooks, the Marine public-information officer on the base, always “spring-loaded to say yes.” He remarked that the various militias near the Marine positions use their tanks like small arms fire: They quickly maneuver the tanks in firing position, release a shell and maneuver back quickly, then repeat the operation.
Maximum destruction, I thought to myself.
Total destruction was evident when we passed the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps – hundreds, perhaps thousands of Palestinians were killed here: men, women, and children. Our driver remarked, solemnly, that they were executed.
The refugee camps are leveled, nothing remains, and where the victims of this civil war sought relief from the terror of war, only the bare reddish-brown earth remains visible from the nearby dusty road. Their graves are not even marked. It is as if they were never born.
http://www.wwltv.com/topstories/stories/L_IMAGE.11e637c2fd3.93.88.fa.d0.1d9e4cf.jpg
Brian Lukas / WWLTV Chief News Photographer
Marine Cpl. Greg Nelson from Slidell listens to the rockets firing in the Kalda Mountain Range over the Marine Base in Beirut.
Ellie
07:54 AM CST on Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Brian Lukas / WWLTV Chief News Photographer
It’s the Christmas season, and every time about this year my eyes turn to a specific art rendering positioned just above my desk. There is an inscription I wrote below the art. It reads:
"Pieces of shredded uniforms littered the branches of the trees; the top of an ammunition can wedged tightly in the bark. A crater in the earth became the resting place for the cinder blocks that once housed the 241 marines. They died here.
'They Came In Peace'. They were the sons of mothers and fathers, husbands of wives and dads to their little girls and boys. My wife my son, my daughter were home this Christmas day. Jeffrey and Jessica, you were not aware of my assignment, but Mom knew and she cried. Love, Dad."
25 years ago Marines were spending Christmas away from their families and loved ones. It was a lonely time -- a time that our military personnel are experiencing today, away from family and friends in a distant place and in distant conflicts.
But this is Beirut in 1983, another time, another place of conflict. Civil war had erupted in Lebanon in 1975, the result of clashes between Christian and Muslim and the various political groups of the regions. In 1983, the United Nations dispatched a multinational peacekeeping force, including U.S. Marines, to Beirut.
On October 23,1983, a truck loaded with explosives crashed into the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit Headquarters compound, killing 241 Marines. They seem to have gotten lost in the history books.
In December 1982 myself, Angela Hill, Garland Robinette and editorialist Phil Johnson traveled to Beirut in late 1983 to cover Louisiana Marines stationed there at Christmas time.
Christmas 1983 was just a few weeks away. It was a time before portable satellite uplinks and the Internet, so we carried videotaped messages from the Marines’ families back in the United States. Our ambitious itinerary also included production of a documentary about this war-torn area. But as fighting between the various factions escalated, that idea was abandoned. Armed militias set up roadblocks in various sections of Beirut. The Islamic Jihad decided to add another element to its arsenal of terror and brutality: kidnapping Westerners.
I kept journal entries of the tense times there, excerpted here:
At the same time that I arrived in Beirut, the French Embassy was hit by a car bomb, with 20 people killed. Later that night, a bomb-laden truck blasted a French military base. 10 French soldiers were killed and 23 were hurt. The explosion lit up the whole area.
Terror – it is sheer terror. I can see it on the faces of the residents who walk cautiously on the streets. Here in Beirut, teenagers carry assault rifles, mainly M-16s. On the streets, women cradle their children tightly in their arms, begging any Westerners for help.
The city smells like death. There is a stench of rotting corpses and smoldering trash strewn about from buildings destroyed by the fighting in the streets. To realize the inhumanity of war, you have to look deep in the faces of the civilian population. Then, if you dare, look deep into their eyes. There you will find the horror of war absorbed deep within the soul.
I look into many eyes here in Beirut. In the eyes of the young Marines, I can see the uneasy and uncomfortable situation they are in. The U.S. Marines’ position at the Beirut International Airport keeps them under daily sniper and artillery attack.
I remember when I was in Washington D.C. for a White House press function, when many of these same Marines from the 22nd Marine Amphibious Unit invaded Grenada, a tiny island in the Caribbean. Now, I am here in hell with them.
The Marines, politically, are not invaders but are so-called “welcome guests,” strategically placed in Lebanon on a peacekeeping mission with the French and Italians as part of a multinational force. Our Marine contact Capt. Dennis Brooks, the Marine public-information officer on the base, always “spring-loaded to say yes.” He remarked that the various militias near the Marine positions use their tanks like small arms fire: They quickly maneuver the tanks in firing position, release a shell and maneuver back quickly, then repeat the operation.
Maximum destruction, I thought to myself.
Total destruction was evident when we passed the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps – hundreds, perhaps thousands of Palestinians were killed here: men, women, and children. Our driver remarked, solemnly, that they were executed.
The refugee camps are leveled, nothing remains, and where the victims of this civil war sought relief from the terror of war, only the bare reddish-brown earth remains visible from the nearby dusty road. Their graves are not even marked. It is as if they were never born.
http://www.wwltv.com/topstories/stories/L_IMAGE.11e637c2fd3.93.88.fa.d0.1d9e4cf.jpg
Brian Lukas / WWLTV Chief News Photographer
Marine Cpl. Greg Nelson from Slidell listens to the rockets firing in the Kalda Mountain Range over the Marine Base in Beirut.
Ellie