Marine Corps Base Quantico -- It’s been exactly 31 years since 12,000 pounds of gas-enhanced, military explosives shattered the serenity of that fateful morning in Beirut, killing 241 unsuspecting U.S. servicemen, including 220 Marines, as they slept in their barracks.
The Oct. 23, 1983 blast not only accounted for the largest loss of life in a single day for the Marine Corps since the fight for the Japanese Island of Iwo Jima at the end of World War II, but is now considered by many of the blast survivors to be the first shot in the global war on terror.
“That’s when the whole thing started,” said Dan Joy, a retired gunnery sergeant who was a corporal in Beirut that day serving with the First Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment. “Now I look back after 9/11 and everything, I can see that it all began there.”
The Marines, who had been sent to Beirut by President Ronald Reagan as part of a multinational peacekeeping force following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, were headquartered at the four-story, steel-reinforced concrete building located several hundred yards from Beirut International Airport.
They had consistently been under fire since mid-August, but nothing had prepared them for what followed when a suicide bomber drove through a Marine checkpoint before barreling his explosive-laden truck into the Marine barracks. The resulting catastrophic explosion at 6:23 a.m. sent a giant mushroom cloud several hundred feet in the air.
Minutes later a second bomb killed 58 French paratroopers in their barracks in West Beirut.
“It’s something we didn’t expect,” said Joy, who now spends his retirement as a volunteer driver for the Disable Veterans of America.
The blast, which FBI investigators at the time called the largest non-nuclear one they had studied, leveled the building, raining tons of concrete and rubble atop the sleeping Marines. Many of those who were fortunate enough to not be in the building at the time of the blast helped in the frantic search for survivors.
Craig Renshaw, then a young lance corporal with Bravo Company, had just hit the rack at the airport when the blast went off. The former M-60 machine gunner was among the many Marines who lost a number of friends that day.
He lamented the politically driven decision to later withdraw the Marines to ships ashore in the bombing’s aftermath.
“It was a heavy blow to myself,” said Renshaw, the former president of the Beirut Veterans of America. “It didn’t feel right. We wanted payback. You don’t lose family without wanting somebody to pay for it.”
Like Joy, Renshaw, now a firefighter with the Glynn County (Georgia) Fire Department, said the bombing of the Marine barracks was a harbinger of things to come.
“It was the start of the war,” he said. “There’s definitely a connection there – I have no doubt in my mind. They were just testing the U.S. that day. [The terrorists] learned from it and that’s exactly what they’re using now.”
There will be a memorial service in Jacksonville, North Carolina today to honor those who lost their lives in the attack. The 1/8 Marines in Beirut were based at nearby Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune.
“I’ll never have closure because it’s something you remember every day,” Joy said. “There’s always going to be that spot that you can never fill. It was my Pearl Harbor.”
Writer: jhollis@quanticosentryonline.com