In a week where Israel killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, Lebanon — and launched a ground offensive in the southern region of the country — a new book revisits the 1983 terrorist bombing in the city that resulted in the biggest single-day loss of life suffered by the US Marine Corps since the 1945 Battle of Iwo Jima.
And as Jack Carr and James M Scott, reveal in “Targeted: Beirut: The 1983 Marine Barracks Bombing and the Untold Origin Story of the War on Terror” (Atria), it is a terrorist attack that “continues to influence US foreign policy and haunts the Marine Corps to this day.”
Based on interviews, military records, personal letters and diaries, “Targeted” is the story of one of the most shocking acts of violence ever perpetrated on the United States military and how America’s failure to mount a robust response merely served to embolden terrorist networks across the Middle East in the years that followed.
Early on a Sunday morning on Oct. 23, 1983, a truck packed with 12,000 pounds of explosives was driven into a building in Beirut, Lebanon, housing troops of the 1st Battalion 8th Marines (Battalion Landing Team) of the 2nd Marine Division, destroying the barracks and killing 241 servicemen.
The strike came six months after a suicide bombing at the US Embassy in West Beirut that killed 63 people.
“That attack would prove to be not only the bloodiest assault on an American Embassy but the opening salvo in the nation’s four-decade war on terrorism,” writes Carr.
As the Lebanese Civil War raged, the US Marines arrived as part of an international peacekeeping force but as Carr notes, it was “a mission of peace that would prove anything but peaceful.”
The Battalion Landing Team took over a four-story concrete building that once housed Lebanon’s Aviation Administrative Bureau but had also been used by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and as an Israeli field hospital.
Battle-scarred with few windows intact, the “BLT” was home to 350 Marines who immediately made it their own, erecting a sign outside the sandbagged entrance that read:
‘Welcome to the Beirut Hilton. Military Discounts Available.’
But as tensions escalated in the region, so did the attacks on them.
A week before the barracks’ bombing, Capt. Michael Ohler was killed by a sniper shot to the head, just days after he had submitted his resignation letter.
Ohler left behind a wife and two small children, including a son he never met.
Four days before the blast, meanwhile, a bomb hidden in a blue Mercedes detonated alongside a convoy returning from the American embassy, wounding five Marines.
“Lance Corporal Michael Toma was in one of the vehicles,” writes Carr. “ ‘S–t, man,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I almost bought the farm today.’ ”
The BLT attack was coordinated by Hussein al-Musawi, founder of the Islamic Amal group and a Hezbollah leader, alongside Abu Haydar Musawi, commander of a martyrdom faction, the Husayni Suicide Forces.
It was aimed at the very heart of the US military. “A strike against the Marines, if successful, would prove even more extraordinary than an attack on the embassy,” writes Carr.
“The Marines were, after all, a symbol of American might.”
On Oct. 19, Musawi’s team loaded two trucks with around with around 12,000 pounds of explosives. One was heading for BLT with the other destined to kill 58 French military personnel three miles away in West Beirut.
But when to attack?
“Al-Musawi needed a day in which the Marines would be relaxed, their guard down,” adds Carr.
“For that, there was only one option. Sunday.”
On Sunday, Oct. 23, the troops were granted an extra hour in bed, with a 6.30 a.m. reveille.
It promised to be a fun day.
The Navy Broadcasting Service was showing the Los Angeles Raiders vs. the Washington Redskins NFL game, there were burgers and hot dogs being served, and some troops were watching the classic western film “The Magnificent Seven,” too.
Shortly after 6.15 a.m., a truck that had been spotted nearby suddenly picked up speed and ripped through the barracks’ wire fencing.
Traveling at more than 35 miles per hour, it destroyed a guard’s shack before bulldozing into the building’s atrium.
Then, at 6:21 a.m., and with most of the 350 men sleeping, the bomb detonated.
“It was,” as one survivor recalled, “like every atom in the universe blew apart.”
The explosion was six times as powerful as that at the US embassy.
In a Pentagon report, the FBI Forensic Laboratory described it as “the largest conventional blast ever seen by the explosive experts’ community.”
Like an accordion, the fourth floor collapsed upon the third, followed by floors below.
“The explosion had not only pulverized the structure but obliterated human bodies, littering the wreckage with arms and legs as well as torsos and heads,” writes Carr.
Lance Corporal Burnham Matthews had his septum ripped out and was thrown through a window but, miraculously, landed on his feet three stories below.
“I turned around and looked,” he says, “and the building was gone.”
Sergeant Pablo Arroyo emerged from the rubble naked apart from his military-issued watch on his wrist.
He suffered ruptured eardrums and a broken jaw and when he opened his mouth, thirteen of his teeth spilled out.
Arroyo also “had a hole about the size of a Liberty silver dollar in the left side of his head, which he didn’t realize had exposed his brain,” adds Carr.
The surviving medics were faced with unimaginable injuries to treat. Dr. Jim Ware, from Savannah, Ga., attended to one Marine with his torso ripped open.
“I could see his rib cage,” he tells Carr. “It was like an animal on the side of the road after being hit by a car.”
First Lieutenant Glenn Dolphin, meanwhile, left his post in the nearby Combat Operation Center and found an overturned jeep near the BLT.
“There was a leg,” he tells Carr, “complete with boot and sock, sticking out from under the vehicle.”
Hoping the Marine was alive, Dolphin grabbed the boot and pulled hard only to find the leg was already severed from the dead man’s body.
“It was as if I was having a nightmare,” he says. “This couldn’t be really happening.”
As work continued through Sunday in search of survivors, so the death tally rose, stopping, tragically, at 241.
While President Ronald Reagan called the attack “despicable,” he soon found himself under intense pressure for his response — or lack of one — to the incident.
From a lack of adequate protection for the Marines to chronic misjudgment about the danger and complexity of the situation in the Middle East, the bombing prompted a new strategic focus away from the region and back toward the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Finally, amid mounting criticism about a lack of any military response from the US, Reagan ordered the withdrawal of American forces in February 1984.
When they departed, an unnamed Marine left behind a poem, written on a doorframe in an underground bunker:
They sent us to Beirut, To be targets who could not shoot. Friends will die into an early grave, Was there any reason for what they gave?
