One Deadly Morning in Beirut
By CHUCK PFARRER - NYTimes.com
Published: October 23, 2003
RAVERSE 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."