25 years after Beirut - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

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.

Along the way, she wonders about the life her son might have lived: A wife, possibly children and maybe a full career in the Corps he loved to serve.

“He loved jumping out of airplanes and rappelling down buildings, but I have no idea what he would have done,” she said. “Who knows? He was only 22.”

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.

The memorials mark 25 years since a truck bomb inflicted the greatest loss of Marine life since the battle of Iwo Jima and, for many, ushered in the dawn of the modern terrorist era. It left 109 children without fathers, and scores of families with a lifetime of mourning.

The anniversary will provide many not directly impacted by the bombing with an opportunity to reflect on a tragedy some say was too quickly forgotten.

“It was forgotten two weeks after it happened,” Young said. “No one really knows or understands what happened in Beirut anymore.”

But not everyone has forgotten.

The alleged mastermind of the attack was recently assassinated. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the Republican candidate for president, voiced his opposition to the Beirut mission during a recent debate, and two lawyers are fighting to retrieve billions of dollars for the victim’s families.

The world has changed tremendously since that Sunday morning, but discussions with those who remember still shed light on the lessons many assert the nation can’t afford to forget.

‘The Can’t Shoot Back Saloon’

President Ronald Reagan dispatched 2,400 Lejeune-based Marines to Lebanon in September 1982 to support a four-nation international peacekeeping force. French, Italian, British and American forces deployed troops to calm a nation ravaged by violence following the Lebanese civil war and the Israeli invasion months earlier.

Missteps began before the Marines departed North Carolina.

Virginia Sen. Jim Webb said the first error was sending too few troops.

Webb, awarded the Navy Cross for his service in Vietnam, was in Beirut shortly before the bombing, working as a journalist for the Public Broadcasting Service. His time there led to anEmmy-winning broadcast about Beirut for PBS.

Unlike the successful Beirut peacekeeping mission in 1958, when 12,000 troops were sent to Lebanon, the 1982 mission included a fraction of the number.

Retired Maj. Robert Jordan, who served as the chief military spokesman in Lebanon during the mission, said the number of troops placed the Marines in an unenviable position. The British, by comparison, sent 150 troops, Jordan said.

“It was too few to be a force and too many to be a presence,” said Jordan, who founded the 1,000-member Beirut Veterans of America organization.

The forced staging at Beirut International Airport created further vulnerabilities. Shuttered to the public due to the raging hostilities, the Marines were pinned down from the beginning.

“They took away our one great strategy and that is our maneuverability,” Jordan said. “The Israelis insisted we be placed near the airport. They felt our presence there would keep the airport open. What it did was put us in a static position … with the ocean to our back and the mountains to our front.”

The rules of engagement further complicated the mission.

“Totally ridiculous,” Webb said. “We had rules of engagement in Vietnam, but nothing like this. They had to receive fire and then they could return fire only with the same kind of weapon that was shooting at them.”

Dakota Wood, a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and former Marine Corps officer, said political considerations trumped force protection requirements.

“There was a strong political imperative to avoid looking too hostile or aggressive, so Marines on guard duty were prohibited from having their weapons in a ready-to-fire condition,” Wood said.

The Marines frustration is captured in a series of black-and-white photos displayed at the new Beirut exhibit at the National Museum of the Marine Corps near Quantico, Va. Images of a mess tent at the Marines’ compound show its name evolving from “The Can’t Shoot Back Saloon” to “The Can Shoot Back Saloon” and finally to “The Did Shoot Back Saloon.”

Washington’s failure to appreciate the situation may have led to what Webb characterized as one of the more serious strategic blunders of the mission: the decision to provide naval gunfire support to the Lebanese armed forces. With that move, the Marines lost their neutral peacekeeping status.

“That allowed people who really wanted to go after us to say that [we took sides],” Webb said.

‘A major ground war’

Six months before the attack, a suicide bomber struck the U.S. embassy, killing 63 people. Four U.S. service members, including one Marine, were among the dead.

By late summer, Marines were being targeted by sniper and mortar fire. On Aug. 30, the Marine peacekeepers suffered their first fatalities, when 2nd Lt. Donald G. Losey and Staff Sgt. Alexander M. Ortega died after an enemy rocket struck the supply tent they were in, Jordan said.

By September, Marines regularly came under heavy fire, driven by the decision to support the Lebanese armed forces.

“What a lot of people don’t realize is that there was a major ground war going on,” said Master Chief Hospital Corpsman Mark Hacala, a reserve sailor who was in Beirut at the time of the bombing. “It was within that context that the bombing occurred.”

To shore up security against the increasing barrage of hostile fire, the Marines moved from tents into barracks at the safety building.

“The four-story, three-foot-thick, reinforced concrete walls had absorbed rocket, mortar and artillery barrages with little damage and was thus considered more secure,” Jordan said.

Bob Coulman said witnessing the fighting had a profound effect on his son, Staff Sgt. Kevin Coulman, who died in the blast.

“He wanted to be a Secret Service man. Then when all the shooting and killing started, he let us know through a letter that he wanted nothing to do with guns,” said Coulman, who said his son began talking about retreating to the family’s land in upstate New York.

“He said he would just go up there and even if he had to put a tent up he would just stay there until things quieted down,” Coulman said.

Despite the increase in hostilities toward the Marines, Webb said commanders were not prepared to defend against a vehicle bomb.

“That a truck bomb, that sort of thing, would hit a building, that was not in anyone’s consciousness,” Webb said.

Even the embassy bombing failed to prompt Marines to erect the kind of barriers that could have prevented the carnage, Wood said.

‘We never intended to stay’

Only minutes after the bomb rocked the Marine barracks, a separate bomb struck the French peacekeepers’ barracks, killing 58. The simultaneous attacks ushered a new era of terrorism.

Bill Kibler, a Beirut veteran working on a campaign to have the U.S. Postal Service issue a Beirut remembrance stamp, said the anniversary is an opportunity to correct popular misconceptions about terrorism.

“It’s imperative that the public realize, the war on terror did not start on Sept. 11, but it started on Oct. 23,” he said. “A lot of Marine veterans feel like that.”

Less than six months after the bombing, American forces left Lebanon. Debate continues over whether pulling out was the best move.

Some, like Kibler and Jordan, contend it gavecredibility to the terrorist view that America lacked the political will to sustain casualties, inviting attacks against the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the USS Cole in Yemen and ultimately the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks at home in the U.S.

“We were dedicated to a noble but naïve mission, but we weren’t allowed to complete it,” Jordan said. “We now see our children and grandchildren fighting what we would have liked to have finished.”

Webb, however, asserts the mission had run its course and departing in February 1984 was the wise move.

“It’s too easy to get your blood up and say, ‘By God, we are not leaving,’” the first-term Democrat said. “Deciding to withdraw the Americans from Lebanon was not a bad decision. We never intended to stay there for a long time or do nation building.”

The Feb. 12 death of Imad Mughniyeh , who many cite as the architect of the attacks, has provided some solace to victims’ families. But many say they achieved greater peace through the successful lawsuit filed by roughly 1,000 family members of the dead.

Attorneys Thomas Fortune Fay and Steven Perles successfully sued Iran for its role in the attack and were granted a $2.65 billion settlement last year. Iran did not defend itself in the suit, and the attorneys are now fighting to recover those funds from Iran.

“When the verdict came down, it was worth everything,” Young said. “We had proved Iran responsible.”

The settlement will translate to widows receiving $8 million each, children and parents being awarded $5 million each, while siblings of the deceased are slated to receive $2.5 million each.

Debby Horner, who lost her husband, Sgt. Richard Blankenship, in the bombing, said the legacy of the Marines who perished that day lives on in her son, Eric.

“He’s the spitting image of his father and has been presented all of his father’s medals,” she said. “He knows all about what he did for his country.”

Young hopes the 25th anniversary will provide an opportunity for America to reflect on the Marines lost that day.

“Everybody remembers 9/11, but so many have forgotten about Oct. 23, 1983,” Young said. “Just because they were there as peacekeepers doesn’t mean they need to be forgotten.”