Do you remember when it happened? Where were you and what do you remember? Tell us below.
By: Brant
23 October 2012
Anniversary: Beirut
Beirut Memorial On Line
Do you remember when it happened? Where were you and what do you remember? Tell us below.
By: Brant
Do you remember when it happened? Where were you and what do you remember? Tell us below.
By: Brant
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4 comments:
Beirut Memorial outside Camp Lejuene, NC (Camp Johnson actually).
It was a Sunday morning, I was in high school at the time, and heard about it on on the radio on the way to church.
And to answer the question 1983
What I remember is this...
A few months before, Time Magazine did a cover story on the Marines serving in Lebanon. The cover photo feature a young guy, not that much older than me, standing above sandbag emplacement with the flag in the background...quite compelling stuff in the eyes of 17 year old. I remember looking at that picture and thinking "wow - what an adventure."
After the bombing, Time magazine printed a follow-up saying that the Marine featured on the cover was amongst the dead. IIRC, the issue also featured a "how did it happen" illustration. It seemed so very surreal, that someone in this day and age would want to die more than I wanted to live.
Semper fi,
Jack Nastyface
I was stationed at HQMC, "serving" in a cubicle, totally dedicated to the bureaucratic defense of an obscure line in the Marine Corps budget. I got the news, fragmented, late in the day Washington time, and spent most of the night in those pre-Internet days trying to piece together what had happened. The next day(10/24) was my 34nd birthday. As the enormity of what had occurred became more evident, I remember how useless, ineffective and out of touch I felt--totally detached from what was going on in the fleet. That was, as I recall, the consensus feeling amongst JOs at the headquarters. The next day, 25 October, was D-Day for Grenada; most of us focused on the progress of that battle as an anecdote to the nearly incomprehensible tragedy that was unfolding in Beirut. We wanted desperately to believe that Beirut was an abberation, and that conventional ops, like those that had occured in Panama and Grenada, and which followed years later in Kuwait, would be our metier. Little did we know that the barracks bombing was a harbringer, a foretaste of a new type of warfare that would dominate our warfighting efforts, our training, and our doctrine for decades to come.....29 years later, we have yet to untangle ourselves from Beirut.....
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