Beirut's Legacy
| Published May 7, 2014 |

By Earl H. Perkins
Thursday Review associate editor

More than three decades have passed since a suicide bomber drove a truck packed with 2000 pounds of high explosives into a four-story military barracks in Beirut, setting off the most horrific single attack ever on United States personnel overseas.

Last October Ed Ayers sat and wept while remembering his peacekeeping service before his unit was replaced by the troops who were attacked during US involvement in Lebanon's Civil War. The Marine from Scranton, Pennsylvania, was trying not to glance up, because in front of him was the granite wall inscribed with the words They Came in Peace, honoring 241 servicemen slaughtered in the Oct. 23, 1983, bombing. The final American death toll included 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three other soldiers, eclipsing World War II's Battle of Iwo Jima as the USMC's single-day record for mortality. The bombing was America's deadliest assault prior to the Sept. 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks.

"It's a shame," Ayers said. "I don't think we're the world's police. We should determine what our own values are."

James Amos, Marine Corps commandant general, gathered with hundreds of others at the memorial which borders Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina.

The jury is still out on whether the U.S. government reacted properly to the incident, but Amos said the attack helped define the start of America's war on terrorism.

"The nation was not expecting this—there was a new kind of warfare—the threat of radical extremists being able to target military and civilian personnel with weapons of mass destruction for political, religious and personal gains," he said. "We will never forgive nor will we ever forget."

Three decades have passed, and many people just don't think about things that don't specifically affect them right now. It's almost like swimmers and shark attacks in South Africa and Australia. Shark eats man, and five minutes later people are diving back in the ocean. It seems that attack, along with a truck bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut six months earlier, have faded from almost everyone's memory, according to Michelle Lucas. She was 15 when her brother, Lance Cpl. Richard Morrow, died in the barracks bombing.

"I don't know why it's not taught in schools," the Philadelphia-area woman said, her eyes red from crying. "It's not on the news like 9/11. Nine-eleven had several, several memorial television programs to it that air every year on 9/11. But there's nothing on Beirut."

The attack's anniversary is observed annually because many of those killed were members of Camp Lejeune's 24th Marine Amphibious Unit.

Award-winning author Christopher Dickey, Middle East regional editor for The Daily Beast and Newsweek magazine at the time, recently reflected on the bombing with former Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

"Beirut for me was always about those hard lessons of the Middle East,” Crocker said. “Be careful what you get into and beware the laws of unintended consequences. We thought an Israeli campaign to get rid of the PLO would be a good thing. What we got instead was a Syria-Iran strategic partnership that still endures, and a far more lethal enemy: Hezbollah.

"We got the PLO out of Beirut, but we got Bashir (Gemayel, a Christian warlord and Israeli ally) elected (president), not understanding we had crossed a Syrian red line. He is assassinated, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) invades West Beirut, the LF (Lebanese Forces) carries out the Shatila massacre and we are guilty. So we send the Marines back on a mission of presence. No strategy, no goal. Just be there. The rest, as they say, is history.”

Dickey concluded that many Americans learned nothing about intervening in the region's conflicts since then. Many U.S. hawks maintain Reagan should have kept troops in Beirut instead of withdrawing them in the wake of the bombing. U.S. forces were not the only ones who faced deadly assaults that day. There were also 58 French paratroopers killed in a separate but nearly simultaneous bombing at their barracks in West Beirut.

American, French, British and Italian troops were sent to the region in an attempt to stabilize Lebanon's civil war between Muslims and Christians allied with Israel. The bombing was eventually blamed on the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, which had received substantial financial backing from Iran. After years of legal wrangling, a U.S. District Court judge in 2003 ordered Iran to pay more than $7 billion to the families of victims, but money will almost certainly never change hands in the that case.

The American government blamed lax security for the bombing and called for improved security measures near buildings. But some Marine officers who testified before Congress countered that the location, which was in a flat, exposed and busy area of the Beirut Airport, was impossible to effectively secure.  There was a decade or more of intense political debate over the role that Marines should play in such conflicts.

President Ronald Reagan retaliated against Lebanese militias by having the battleship USS New Jersey bombard the hills near Beirut from its position off the country’s coast. Marines were ordered out of Lebanon within a few months.

“We just packed our stuff and went home,” Rick Von Bergen, 50, of Seneca Falls, N.Y., said bitterly. “We didn’t do anything. Nothing. Nothing.”

Von Bergen was a Marine payroll clerk sleeping in another building when he was awakened by the barracks blast. He and the other Marines tended to the injured, wrapping wounds with shipping plastic, wet towels and anything else they found handy. He is now homeless and living on a disability check because of post-traumatic stress, but he can still hear screaming in his dreams.

“It is very tough to talk about,” he said.

John L’Heureux, a Marine lance corporal at the time, was atop the barracks roof on lookout when the structure lurched upward with the force of the blast.

“I don’t know how many feet it went up, and then it just collapsed,” said the 49-year-old from Randolph, Mass. A cinder block was dropped on his head while he was being dug from the debris, leaving a whitish L-shaped scar on the right side of his scalp. He can now lift his shirt to reveal puckered and jagged scars on his side, back and stomach, showing where he was impaled on a chair. And he longed to retaliate.

“I would have liked to have seen them wiped off the face of the Earth,” he said. He is also upset about how history has ignored this important event that happened just three short decades ago.

“I remember last year I picked up the paper on Oct. 23, and there wasn’t one thing in the paper, there wasn’t one thing on the radio,” he said. “They say, ‘Will people always remember 9/11?’ And everybody’s saying, ‘Yes. Yes.’ But they won’t. As time goes by, they’re going to forget. Unless you were personally hurt or a loved one hurt and something like that, you’re going to forget.”