In their own words: They were there
It was Sunday morning on October 23, 1983. Most Marines were sleeping in their tents and the headquarters building.
Many of the Marines treated Sundays like a holiday. They could sleep in a bit and go to the chow hall for a leisurely hot breakfast. Quite a few Marines had a most difficult time deciding whether to stay in bed or eat.
Master Gunnery Sgt. John Nash has said:
"We really looked forward to that Sunday morning, and the terrorists knew it."
Pfc. Gerald "Jerry" Wilkes might have been among the first few to see the truck approaching. He was in a tent about 50 yards from the explosion,
"I got up early, around 6:15 a.m., to go to the latrine outside the tent. On my way back, I saw this delivery truck driving down the road about 75 feet away. The driver was a local from the Middle East. He waved to me, and I waved back."
Just a short time later, as he was crawling into his sleeping bag on his cot, he heard automatic gunfire and then a huge explosion. His tent collapsed. They did an accounting of the Marines in their area, and then ran to the scene,
"It was overwhelming. I had never seen death like that. The moans and the cries of the wounded and the dying were all around us. It sticks with you."
It wasn't until later that he realized the truck driver he waved to was the guy. He broke down and wept. An Iranian photographer was there and snapped a flick, and that photo later appeared in Time magazine. In this photo, he is holding that picture.
I have seen several memoirs that say they heard automatic gunfire before the explosion. Some of them have suggested that Sgt. Russell, at one of the guard posts, managed to click off a few.
Sgt. Stephen Russell, a Marine standing guard at one of the sentry posts, was among the very first to see that this was no ordinary truck approaching. The truck was coming right at him, and drove right between the two guard posts. As instructed, his weapons were not loaded. He grabbed his .45 caliber pistol and stepped in front of the booth. He said he looked squarely into the eyes of the truck driver as he passed. The truck driver had a smile on his face. Russell has said he will never forget how the guy was smiling.
The truck drove through Russell's guard post, splattering sand from the sandbags all over the lobby. Russell ran through the lobby, hollering, "Hit the deck. Hit the deck," and then he ran out the back of the building, just about as the truck blew.
Russell recalls a wave of intense heat, and then would later wake up under a cloud of gray ash. The building was down.
Cpl. Robert Calhoun was on the roof. He said he saw Russell fighting with his weapon, trying to pull out his magazine, trying to pull the bolt, and by the time he got everything in place to fire, it was too late. The roof buckled. Calhoun was on the roof and slid down the building on one slab to the ground and managed to walk away, with just some damage to his ears from the explosion. He would say,
"The explosion hit, and everything started falling. I thought, 'This is how I am going to die.'"
LCpl Adam Webb was up on the roof with Calhoun and also slid down the folding building. He ended up sitting upright in a jeep.
Cpl James Hines was in a tent about 20 yards away,
"I heard somebody yell to stop the truck, then I saw a flash of light."
Hines was submerged in the debris, and dirt was falling all around him. He managed to free his legs, kicked around, and the rescuers spotted his legs and pulled him out. He could have suffocated.
Colonel Timothy Geraghty, the MAU commander, was up and shaving. The explosion blew the windows out of his billet, forced the doors off the hinges, and threw him to the floor. He ran outside and suddenly realized the BLT was gone. After the explosion, he said this to reporters on the scene, documented in an NBC video,
"It (the truck) went through two barricades, around another, and ended up in the lobby of the main complex that houses the headquarters of the battalion landing team."
He would say this in other forums,
"I ran outside and couldn't see because of a dense fog of gray ash. As I staggered around to the rear of my headquarters, I thought we had taken a direct hit from a Scud missile. My logistics officer was right next to me, and as the fog started to lift, he said, 'My God, the BLT building is gone.' That's the battalion landing team headquarters that was a hundred meters from my headquarters. And that was the main building where we had to put our people because of the heavy artillery and rocket fire that we had throughout the summer. And it literally was leveled."
Lt. Col. Howard Gerlach was thrown through the window of his room and out of the building, landing next to a fence. He was badly wounded, with a large piece of concrete implanted in his head, so badly hurt that he could not be medevac'd to a ship offshore, but instead was taken to a local hospital. He was in a coma for three days. He suffered a broken neck, damaged spinal cord, shattered cheek, and blurred vision.
He survived, though he became an "incomplete quadriplegic" with partial paralysis in all four limbs. He had multiple surgeries on one arm and hand, ears, face, and a plate was installed beneath his left eye.
He's tough, though --- he could drive a car! As an aside, he had been wounded in the abdomen in Vietnam as well.
Marines and their Navy comrades in a neighboring building were thrown out of their cots. When they managed to get outside, they looked at the BLT HQ and said it had collapsed into rubble, with dust-filled air all about. For many Marines, the dust was blinding.
Lee Haynes would later comment, "It's an old expression, but I felt like someone walked over my grave. It's something you never forget."
Major Bob Jordan said, "It was the loudest explosion I had ever heard. It imploded all our doors and windows ... It's all still very vivid."
After the building stopped its tremors, Jordan put on his battle dress, not fully aware of what had happened. As he walked outside, he could see. He saw parts of his comrades strewn about by the explosion, many oozing blood. He watched a corporal digging through the rubble, almost in a daze. The stairway was filled with debris and pulverized cement. He saw that Marines' hands digging through for survivors were already raw.
Retired Marine Lt. Col Paul Roy remembered this, sitting over at Lebanese University, about two miles away.
He said the ground shook: "I looked up, and I saw this huge mushroom cloud develop, a black cloud. It was just rising and rising and rising. And I said, 'We got hit hard.'" He called the BLT on this radio --- there was no answer.
Master Gunnery Sgt. John Nash said, "It blew us out of our racks. The men lay on the ground for 30 or 40 minutes, afraid to move." He was on the first floor. He had been buried alive. He and the other corporal dug themselves out. He suffered a concussion and shoulder injuries.
Nash went back and forth to sick call, taking injured Marines to the corpsmen who were left. He saw wounded Marines who tried to get there themselves, but didn't make it. He found a bulldozer and a truck driver, and together they organized a party to search, loading survivors on a truck.
He has also said,
“I was awake lying in my cot. I was a corporal, at the time, talking to the corporal next to me. We were discussing whether we should get up and go get some chow or just lie there. Had we gotten up for chow, we would have died. We were the only two survivors in the area ... There was so much black smoke you couldn’t see and all you could hear was screaming ... There was so much confusion we really didn’t know what was going on.
"We called the trail from the building to the medical center ‘the path of death’ ... We called it that because a lot of the Marines who were wounded were trying to make it to medical. They were crawling missing arms and legs just trying to make it. The path was covered in bodies of those who didn’t make it. We were just looking for guys who were still alive and take them to medical.”
Cpl. Danny Joy, Corporal of the Guard with Weapons Co., 1-8 Marines, was on the outer perimeter. He was coming off duty and went to check on his men. At the time of the explosion, he was climbing a ladder and was blown off it. He got up, looked through his binoculars, and saw only dust where the building had been. He thought his eyes were messed up. Having had little sleep over the previous days, he said,
“I was thinking, ‘My eyes are playing tricks on me. Everything was in slow motion and another explosion happened, then two or three minutes later a huge explosion. I called on the radio up to Alpha company headquarters and there was no answer. I kept looking toward the BLT and couldn’t see the building. I kept trying to reach (Marine Service Support Group) or somebody. At first there was nothing, then it seemed like everybody was screaming into the radios. … It was chaos, utter chaos. I finally got through and told them the BLT was gone. Their response was ‘say again, your last,’ so I repeated the message and they said ‘what are you talking about; are you sure?’”
Shock was in the air. Capt. Ronald Keene, a pilot with Medium Helicopter Squadron 162, had just relieved another duty officer as the Operations Duty Officer. He received the messages of the explosion and informed his unit offshore. He gave his first casualty report of about 30, then received information that the number might be more like 50. He admonished the Marine reporting to him, asking him why he couldn't get the number right. In response, the Marine said, Sir, you don't seem to understand, they hit the barracks ... it's just gone."
Tony Sutton was in a bunker about a half-mile away. He was tasked to collect bodies and look for survivors. He said that while in his bunker, they were receiving artillery shelling "pretty heavily, and rockets came in, which were louder than freight trains. I went to sleep in my bunker, fully clothed and with my rifle, and I felt very uneasy." He then went on to say,
"It knocked me off my cot. And radios got blown across the bunker ... We heard over the radio, 'It's gone.' And it literally was. The four-story tall building had just pan caked into a 15- to 20-foot-tall pile of cement ... There was a guy about 100 yards away that had just been blown out the windows of the BLT building. There was a sergeant who had been in the service for over 25 years and was due to retire; I found him in the middle of the night. I saw many things that can't be unseen.”
Pvt. John Hlywiak had been complaining that the Marines weren't seeing enough action until the explosion threw him up in the air. An engineer, he went outside, grabbed a forklift, and drove through the smoke and flames to help dig out, one of the first pieces of rescue equipment to get there.
For starters, he pulled out a dead Marine. Then he uncovered another who had crushed legs but would survive. He has commented, "All day long I was picking up arms and legs and bone and pieces of skin. It seemed like it would never end." He complained that Lebanese looters were all over the place, stealing rings and watches from the dead Marines. The sergeants had to stop the younger Marines from shooting them. But Hylwiak would say, "But we did get to put some boots in their asses."
Lt. Chuck Pfarrer, USN, a Navy SEAL assigned to the MNF, was at Green Beach, about 500 yards away from the explosion. He and a SEAL squad had just completed a reconnaissance mission into the foothills above Beirut and came under some artillery fire on their exit from the area, so they were tired and decided to go to sleep. He has written this:
"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 Sidron, 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."
LCpl. John L'Heureux was on the roof as a forward observer. His job was to spot the shells coming from offshore US ships and report where they struck. He rode the crashing roof down when the explosion struck. He broke his pelvis and his foot, and debris rammed into his rectum. He would later need liver surgery and a colostomy. The docs sewed his left ear back on.
First Lt. Glenn Dolphin commented that "all our bunkers around the perimeter of our building just collapsed. The blast was so devastating, it blew birds out of the sky --- just killed them dead." Dolphin would go on to write a book, 24 MAU, 1983: A Marine looks back at the peacekeeping mission to Beirut, Lebanon.
Dolphin was sleeping over at the MAU HQ. He recalls:
"I was sleeping next to a door – a steel door – which was a supply closet. Behind it were filters for gas masks, hoses and tubing – stuff that used to be for the fire-fighters at the airport. The blast blew the steel door through the doorjamb, hitting me in the back, on the left side. Everything in our building went airborne. The glass came out the skylight, concrete and plaster off the interior – anything that wasn’t nailed down just took off. And then, just like magic, and all of a sudden because of the vacuum, it all came back again.
"I looked down the street towards the BLT, and it was all smoky, and there was a lot of wreckage laying about. And then I saw these Marines, and they were walking around aimlessly, some completely naked – their clothes blown off … three Marines I saw, one with his eye hanging on his cheek, who were being taken to an aid station were all torn up. They looked like they had been sandblasted … another Marine was on the ground. His arm was broken and it was just hanging there. I tried to get a hold of him, but my back was killing me, and I said ‘listen kid, you’re going to have to walk’. And I watched as he walked barefoot through all the glass.”
Major Gregory Balzer (Ret.) had gone over to the presidential palace the day before the attack. It was about a mile away. He recalls, "I woke up to the loudest noise you ever heard. Then I heard a second explosion (probably at the French barracks) ... Utter destruction; you just can't believe the force of the blast."
SSgt Randy Gaddo, a photojournalist at the time, and now a retired Chief Warrant Officer 4, got up early as he needed to process some film. He walked over to a tent about 250 yards away from the building when the bomb blew. He said it threw him back six feet,
"It was a quiet morning, quieter than usual. The birds were singing, there was no gunfire in the hills around us. I was halfway into the one-minute walk to the barracks when I decided it was too nice a morning to start working before I had a cup of coffee.
"The BLT was about a minute's walk from my (sleeping quarters) ... I heard M-16 (service rifle) fire inside our compound ... As I got ready to leave my tent ... before I could comprehend why ... I heard and felt this thud followed by an explosion, which picked me up threw me back like I was a rag doll ... I heard the loudest explosion I’d ever heard in my life. A second later I felt a rush of warm air on my face ... It felt like someone had hit me in the chest with a baseball bat … I thought we’d been hit by a rocket or artillery, so after I got up I ran outside to check it out, and expected to find a large crater. But as I looked over towards the barracks, I saw this big mushroom cloud rising up…and then as I looked down, I saw human remains, and that’s when I knew that something really bad had happened.
"It was an amazing concussion. It was like somebody hit me with a two-by-four. I could feel my face being pushed back as the shock wave approached ... What had normally been a four-story building was down to a story and a half of rubble. The dust was all still rising and it started to all become clear ... There was a lot of chaos. We were all in shock. You go through a whole range of emotions. We lost a lot of Marines that day.
"I stepped out of the tent and saw a giant mushroom cloud rising several hundred feet in the air in the direction of the barracks. I was still dazed but ran in that direction and noticed that the leaves on all the trees and bushes were on the ground.
"The dust and smoke was still rising but gray dust suspended in the air gave the scene almost a dreamlike appearance. Things seemed to go into slow motion. Where I should have seen the barracks I could see the air terminal of the Beirut International Airport. Then I focused closer and realized that the barracks was gone. A four story concrete and rebar reinforced building was simply gone and a 20-foot pile of smoldering rubble was left in its place.
"I saw a boot on the ground nearby. Everything was covered with thick gray concrete powder. I went to the boot and realized there was a leg in it. As I tried to uncover the leg, I found that it was connected to a torso, and nothing else.”
First Lieutenant Claude Davis III was the adjutant for the 24th MAU and was catching up on paperwork at the MAU HQ, about 100 meters from the BLT building. He heard and felt the explosion, walked outside, and saw these things:,
“As I walked outside and went to investigate the explosion, I was a little shocked. It was pretty chaotic, people were screaming and yelling, and I really still didn’t know what had happened. As I walked along, I continued to hear screams and sirens and I could see a lot of smoke. I walked on and came to this divide. There were magnificent olive trees that separated the road between my building and the BLT. I noticed the sun was beaming on me and I had to take a second glance to make sure I was in the right spot. Normally at this time the sun was blocked. I passed through the trees and saw the mass hysteria. The building was in flames and much of it was rock and smoke on the ground. Papers were floating around in the air. As I looked around, I realized there were Marines still in their sleeping bags up in the trees I had just walked through. Walking along, I could smell the explosives and bodies.”
CPO Joe Ciokon, a Navy broadcaster, was in his sleeping quarters about 50 yards away from the BLT, walked out, and choked in the dust. He recalls,
"We thought we'd been hit by an artillery shell. I had been asleep – it was nearly 6:30 am, and as it was a Sunday I had decided to have a lie-in – and the next I knew, the wall bulged out and hit me. That's when the bomb went off. I caught a lot of the blast and literally flew across the room, but on my way down to the floor I had the presence of mind to grab my helmet and flak-jacket, which I put on before ducking under a table. My lieutenant came out of the smoke – his nose was bleeding, his ears were bleeding – and he had obviously been concussed pretty bad. When I got outside, and into the fog, I realized that it was the dust from the BLT, and what we were looking at was the building flattened. We could now see the airport and the (air traffic control) tower. Before that we couldn't, because BLT blocked it. That was a big shock.
"My team and I were back on (the radio airwaves) within two hours, though television took two or three days to get back on air. I didn't realize how important (our broadcasting was) until a few days later, when some of the Marines said that when we came back on air, it was like a beacon of hope."
Sgt John Selbe was supposed to stand guard duty that morning at the front of the BLT building, at 8 am. He woke up at 6 am, and would later comment,
"I was sitting there smoking a cigarette, and I heard this bang. I leaned for my gear at the base of my cot and I heard a voice say, 'John, lay back down.' When I did, I fell through the floor."
He lay there for some four hours, paralyzed on his left side from the waist up. His arm was wrapped around his head, and he didn't even know it. He said, "Something told me to curl up in a ball." Others finally dug him out. He had glass in his ear and to this day still has concrete in his back and a scar on his head. He served out 21 years and retired.
LCpl Terence J. Valore, Selbe's friend, was burned over 95 percent of his body and is 100 percent disabled. Selbe found him in the burn unit and fed him because he could not do it himself. Valore was above the guard shack when the truck hit. He has said, "I was talking to a friend, and I turned away from the parade deck. Then I heard someone say, 'car bomb' and I covered my face. That's why I am here today. Every scar I have on my body came from Beirut, Lebanon."
First Lieutenant Chuck Dallachie was sleeping and woke up once the bomb exploded. The first thing he noticed was not the sound of the explosion, but the white smoke, so thick was the dust he could barely breathe. He was caught between his metal bed, which was contorted, with a slab of concrete resting across his chest, one arm pinned under his head. He could not move. Then he felt the building moving about, shifting, and his feet were pushed over his head.
The Marines got to him and got him out. He was flown over to the Iwo Jima. He arose on board. A chaplain came by to administer him the last rites. His lung was collapsed, his gall bladder damaged, with gashes over his body, a hole through one arm, and his feet were burned. They got him medevac'd out by a USAF C-9 "Nightingale." During the flight, the medics prepared him for abdominal surgery, and his gall bladder and spleen were removed in Germany the night of the bombing. He survived, rose to the rank of colonel, and now commands the Marine base at Quantico.
Bryan Westrick was in a building at the airport about 150 yards away. He recalls this,
"I was trying to get those last 2-3 minutes of sleep ... It blew me 10 feet off my cot ... I thought we took a direct hit - we've been receiving small arms fire every day. Coming around the corner, that building stood tall, and now it wasn't there."
Emanuel Simmons was sleeping on the second floor of the BLT building. First, the explosion, and then he was buried in the rubble. One arm pinned, he tried to find the other one, and he found his hand, happy knowing the docs would sew it back on. They got him out, but when he woke up in the hospital, he was temporarily paralyzed, suffered severe burns, had one lung collapsed, and had other injuries. He would end up serving the Marines for 26 years, rising to the rank of Master Sergeant (E-8).
LCpl Mike Toma was sleeping on the first floor about 100 ft. from the explosion. Lying under the debris, he could see a narrow line of light, but he could not hear, as his eardrum was shattered. He felt dust falling on his face and figured someone was coming to get him. He was one of the first Marines found and rescued alive. His injuries included a collapsed lung, the loss of an eardrum and perforation of the other, a hip injury, and cuts and abrasions. He was vomiting blood and had blood in his urine. He later recalled,
"We had been getting hit with artillery and I thought it just hit our side of the building. They pulled me out and I saw the sky. At that point I realized the building was gone."
Bernard Manly was also sleeping. He woke up upside down between two slabs of concrete. He said he could see trucks driving through a hole in the wreckage, and then he could see Marines digging for him,
"I didn't know what had happened. One Marine looked down and said to me, ‘You're one lucky son of a bitch!'"
Cpl. Michael Corrigan was a radio operator and was aboard the Iwo Jima for some rest (R&R) when the bomb hit. He spent the first day helping the corpsmen deal with the wounded being brought back to the ship. He called them the "walking wounded." Some were on stretchers, others on cots, and some were walking around trying to deal with what just happened. Then, he was sent to shore to help with the search, rescue, and recovery efforts. He said, "It was overwhelming. I was numb. We all were."
PO3 Steve Brown, a corpsman on the scene, said he ran out of bandages within minutes. Danny Joy would say,
“The docs...the only docs left, were these young kids. But without those Corpsmen, we would have lost so many more.”
Cpl. Neale Bolen was under the debris:
“I thought maybe an RPG had hit. Then I guess people began to come to because I could hear them beneath the rubble. I knew I was trapped ... I was buried underneath there for awhile, and I started to panic. But then I heard the Marines up top. I knew they wouldn’t leave me. I told myself, ‘They’re Marines, they’ll get me.’”
They did. But first, they had to punch holes through the concrete. They then attached chains to a crane to separate the concrete. The Lebanese worked side-by-side with the Marines, and they pulled him out. He said later,
“Oh, I was pretty messed up ... I was crispy looking,”
Michael Pocalyko, a Navy pilot, was aloft on a reconnaissance mission about 25 miles north of Beirut at the time of the attack. He was the only Navy helicopter in the air. He recovered aboard the ship and learned of the bombing then. He said his journal noted the following,
"My journal that day talks about the dead. So many dead at this time, so many dead at this time, and the numbers just kept going up. It was outside of anyone's expectations that a suicide bombing would occur."
All was quiet for air crews aboard the USS Iwo Jima offshore. It was a Sunday and their day off. Then the call came in. They knew this was not good. A helicopter launched and returned, reporting that the BLT HQ was "gone, it's no longer there."
One Marine would say that the Marines of HMM-162 went from "zero to hell." The crews jumped out of bed and into action. They had to reconfigure their CH-46 helicopters to hold stretchers. They launched two search and rescue helicopters, sitting on alert right away. Six more helicopters were prepared to get the wounded, and then the killed, and those who remained aboard were prepared to receive the injured. Sailors aboard the ships cared for the wounded, many just staying with each Marine, holding his hand, making sure no one was left alone.
Chaplain Danny Weaver woke up after the blast, felt dust on his lips, and he could not move, trapped by a collapsed wall. His arms were free, but his legs were pinned. He could not sit up all the way and cut his head on the support rods. He yelled to God for help, then sang "Amazing Grace" to calm down. He would not close his eyes. He could barely breathe under the rubble. Fortunately for him, another chaplain spotted Weaver's purple religious scarf. This chaplain hollered down into the debris. Weaver's voice was by this time gone, so he tapped on a box of meals lying there as much as he could. The chaplain pulled him out, and other Marines carried him away for treatment.
I believe he was the last to be rescued alive and survive.
Sgt. John Snyder was with HMM-162, the CH-53E Super Stallions. He would write this about the bombing, a day on which he was aboard the USS Iwo Jima amphibious assault ship anchored offshore,
"As it was announced that there had been an attack on the Marine barracks, none of us had any idea of the extent of the damage, the lives that had been lost, or the fact that the growing cloud of dark smoke on the shoreline was what was left of where we had, only weeks before, eaten chow every day.
"Wave after wave of our squadron's helicopters flew ashore, each time returning with bodies which quickly stacked up on the hanger deck below decks. Many of us were tasked with carrying the dead and wounded, and helping out as best we could; holding a hand here and there and trying to calm those who could not be calmed.
"I remember watching one Marine, a victim who had a small sliver penetrate his temple, with swollen purple eyelids that for some reason gave me the impression of a frog. As I held his hand, he slipped into unconsciousness. I later learned that he had died.
"It was a very sad, busy, and chaotic time. As the extent of the disaster ashore was realized, the squadron called for a working party to go ashore. I jumped at the opportunity to get off the Iwo Jima, and volunteered. If I had known what the working party would entail I would never have volunteered.
"A handful of us, maybe 10 or so, flew by CH-46 helicopter back out to the airport to an area known LS (Landing Site) Brown. I didn't really have any idea at that point the amount of damage that had been done. I didn't really know what to expect. All I knew was some Marines had been hurt and Top was looking for some volunteers.
"LS Brown, like Rockbase, was situated on the edge of the tarmac at the Beirut International Airport. Nothing more than a small, run down, empty hanger. LS Brown was only a few hundred yards from the blast site, and the staging point for all the bodies that were recovered from what was left of the Marine barracks. A small road ran along the left side of the hanger which went up to the still-smoking ruins, which only hours before had housed fellow Marines.
"Our working party worked out of, and around, the small, empty Lebanese hanger, and trucks would bring the bodies of the dead from the blast site, down the road and to the hanger. My job was to unload and stack the bodies as they were brought down the road from the blast site. We would then, with great care, stack the bodies -- some in body bags, some not -- into aluminum shipping containers which we would eventually load on aircraft for their final flight home.
"I recall the sadness and anger we felt that day, but moreover, I recall the care that we took with our fallen brothers. Each body was treated with great care. Despite the fact that most had come from other units and were, for the most part, strangers, each body was treated with great dignity and with the respect and love normally reserved for the dearest fallen family member. No orders had to be given, no one had to take charge, in fact, to my knowledge it was never even spoken of."
The goal aboard the Iwo Jima was to receive, triage, treat, stabilize, and evacuate, then prepare for the next batch to come in. Once medevac aircraft arrived at Beirut, the wounded were flown by helicopter to meet those aircraft.
The total number of wounded was 112, of whom seven would die. Of these, 62 were brought to the Iwo Jima. The doctors aboard her did perform some surgeries. The USAF C-9 launched from Incirlik, Turkey, and used Beirut airport. The RAF also provided a C-130, a Navy C-9 came from Italy, and a USAF C-141 was the last to get there. The injured were taken to the RAF Hospital, Akrotiri, Cyprus, USN Hospital, Naples, Landstuhl Army Hospital, and Wiesbaden Air Force Hospital, Germany. The RAF hospital proved to be especially useful; it was closer than the others, and it was included in the Navy's evacuation plans.
Lt. David Hough was there, 2/B/1-8 Marines, positioned in the southeast perimeter of the airport. He recalls looking out at the scene, watching at least 16 different factions fighting each other and everyone else in the hills. In 2003, he was a colonel.
He commented at the time that says a whole bunch about the US Marine Corps and our military in general,
"There's nothing more amazing than a lance corporal. They're the guys that get it done, and their level of professionalism and loyalty is unsurpassed. They take their job very, very seriously."
A lance corporal is pay grade E-3. Next time you see a man or woman in uniform with that chevron on, go over and thank them for their service.
By the way, the US Supreme Court held that Iran’s Central Bank was obliged to pay $2 billion to the victims. Later judgements held that the Islamic Republic of Iran was liable to pay claims under the state-sponsored terrorism exception in the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act,
In short, Iran did it.
