This year marked the 41st anniversary of the devastating terrorist attack of the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, Lebanon. The tragedy of that day marked not only the biggest single-day loss of Marines since the Battle of Iwo Jima, it also marked the opening barrage of a new kind of war for America: the war on terrorism.
Front Row Perspective
“Targeted: Beirut” is the most comprehensive account of the worst terrorist attack targeting Americans prior to the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. The authors offer readers a front row seat. They describe how the destruction on Oct. 23, 1983 affected the United States militarily and politically, as well as the public reaction to the earth-shattering events. The authors also describe the impact of the bombing of the American Embassy on April 20, 1983.The authors begin their story on April 20, 1983. A terrorist bomber drove a black GMC truck into the front of the American Embassy’s center wing. The truck’s explosive payload killed 63, including 17 Americans. The blast blew out windows as far as a mile away. American sailors aboard the Guadalcanal five miles offshore felt vibrations from the explosion. The attack was the bloodiest assault on an American embassy ever. The authors note this was the opening salvo in America’s four-decades-long war on terrorism.
The story of the embassy bombing was a prelude to the even deadlier bombing of the Marines barracks six months later.
Chaotic Sights and Sounds
Mr. Carr’s talent as a novelist is evident in every chapter. He captures the sights and sounds of serving in the former cosmopolitan city ironically once known as “The Paris of the Middle East.” The tension inexorably builds, since readers know what’s coming on Oct. 23 at 6:21 a.m. They brace for one of the largest non-nuclear explosions on record.Readers may find themselves breathless following Carr’s vivid descriptions. Rescuers frantically dug through concrete and debris to find survivors moments after the explosion. Desperate cries for help coming from beneath gigantic slabs of concrete and rebar prompted many rescuers to forego shovels and equipment, bloodying their hands and arms while clawing through the rubble.
The personal stories of the survivors and their rescuers are compelling, poignant, and heart wrenching. Readers learn about two courageous men of faith and Navy chaplains: Rabbi Arnold Resnicoff and Father George Pucciarelli. The two were cited in a report to President Reagan for their rescue efforts and providing comfort to many Marines on that fateful day and for days afterwards. Father Pucciarelli tended to over 150 dead and wounded in a single day, including three he pulled from the rubble himself. A lieutenant commander, Father Pucciarelli also fashioned a makeshift yarmulke for Rabbi Resnicoff from the camouflage fabric of a helmet; the rabbi lost his while tending to an injured Marine. Both men were credited for rescuing Protestant Chaplain Danny Wheeler, the last man to be rescued alive.
Another moving passage is the authors’ description of a visiting four-star general. He met with a lance corporal from New York; the soldier had suffered a broken leg, crushed arm, two collapsed lungs, and a fractured skull that later required a steel plate in his head. “Semper fi,” the corporal wrote on a pad to the general: “Always faithful.”
“When I left the hospital, I realized I had met a great human being, and I took off those stars because at the time I felt they belonged more to him than to me,” the authors wrote of the general. Moved by the corporal’s devotion, one month later the general presented his four-stars to that corporal at Bethesda Naval Hospital on a framed metal plaque adorned with the Marine Corps motto.
A Rock and Hard Place
Adding to the mission’s challenge was the Marine Corps’s uncertainty about serving as peacekeepers and acting as a “presence” between warring religious factions. As quoted in the book: “'What is presence?’ Colonel James Mead, commander of the Marine force, asked at the time. ‘They don’t teach that at the War College.’”The book’s swift-moving narrative takes readers behind the scenes as Marines balanced monotony and homesickness between rocket attacks, artillery shelling, and sniper fire. The book tells of feuding Reagan foreign policy officials and a president stuck politically between allowing troops to fight back or bringing them home. There’s the duplicitous Middle East allies and adversaries, and a restless public demanding an answer after the loss of 220 Marines, 18 sailors, and three soldiers.
The authors include an impressive epilogue updating readers on the current status of the 1983 Marine barracks bombing survivors and the families who lost their loved ones. “'This was a tragedy of people, where each was unique, and each had a story,’ Rabbi Arnold Resnicoff so eloquently wrote afterwards. ‘Each had a past, and each had been cheated of a future,’” as stated in the book.
