Marine barracks bombing 20 years ago left global legacy

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- A truck bomb ripped through the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut 20 years ago this week, marking the first major assault in a two-decade terrorist war that culminated on Sept. 11, 2001.

The shocking attack killed 241 U.S. servicemen in a single strike. Most of the Marines were stationed at Camp Lejeune. The names of those who died are inscribed on a memorial at the Onslow County base.

About 2,000 Beirut veterans and family members will gather Thursday at Camp Lejeune to mourn fallen comrades and remember a doomed mission.

The bombing on Oct. 23, 1983, drove the military from its peacekeeping mission in Lebanon and provided a blueprint for attacking Americans. The retreat of U.S. forces sent an unintended message to terrorists that enough body bags would prompt Western withdrawal, said John Lehman, then-secretary of the Navy, who today is a member of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.

"There's no question it was a major cause of 9-11," he said. "We told the world that terrorism succeeds."

Their mission was to provide stability in a country wracked by civil war. It proved futile.

Within weeks, some Marines said they had seen and heard so many clashes they could pick out which factions were fighting and the weapons being fired by the sound and color of the flashes.

At dawn that October morning, Sgt. Steve Russell supervised guards at the main entrance to the Beirut barracks as most Marines slept.

No one worried about the familiar-looking yellow Mercedes truck circling the parking lot of the Marine base. The troops didn't know the terrorist group Hezbollah had replaced the real water-delivery truck with one the FBI later said carried the largest non-nuclear explosive device ever created.

The truck circled the parking lot at 6:22 a.m. and crashed through the barbed wire.

Guards struggled to get off a shot. Russell told others and later testified that he heard the noise, turned and ran as the truck gunned for his guard shack. It smashed through a sandbag barrier and rammed into the lobby. Russell ran through the building atrium and out the other side.

The explosion ripped the steel door from Maj. Bob Jordan's quarters 100 yards away. He walked through smoke and dust. The smell of burnt flesh mixed with the stench of propane and powder from the explosives.

Jordan was struck by the eerie silence; other Marines heard their trapped comrades moaning.

Lance Cpl. Mike Toma, a 20-year-old from Pittsburgh who joined the Marines right out of high school, was laying on a slab of concrete when he struggled into consciousness. Rubble had collapsed on him and his best friend.

Toma could barely breathe. Dust filled his collapsed lung. He felt pain in his hip, where he later learned a piece of bone had chipped off. He couldn't hear anything but ringing. One of his eardrums had ruptured.

Rescuers remember lifting concrete chunks larger than coffee tables, searching for bodies. Toma was one of the first Marines found alive.

When they pulled him out, he couldn't understand why he could see bright, blue sky instead of the barracks that normally towered above him. Someone had to explain days later that it wasn't just Toma and his bunkmates who had been hit.

One of the dead was Lance Cpl. Johnny Copeland, who had sent his last letters home to Alamance County just days before.

Copeland might have risen at dawn to work out, as he usually did. His friends aren't sure. His parents in Burlington received his last five letters the day after the bombing, not yet knowing his fate.

Copeland had written that he was scared and frustrated by the constant shellings and the search for car bombs. "Mom and Dad," he wrote, "sometimes I think I'm going to lose it."

A legacy alright...of sucking up to Saudis
townhall.com

Palestinian terrorism, American blood
Jeff Jacoby

October 20, 2003

Three Americans -- John Branchizio, Mark Parson, and John Martin Linde
-- were murdered last Wednesday when terrorists in
Gaza bombed the diplomatic convoy they were riding in. News accounts
immediately described the attack as a first -- ''an
unprecedented deadly attack on a US target in the Palestinian
territories,'' to quote the Associated Press. But Branchizio,
Parson, and Linde were not the first Americans to be murdered by
Palestinian terrorists. They were the 49th, 50th, and 51st in
the past 10 years alone.

A few hours after their deaths, the White House condemned ''the vicious
act of terrorism'' that killed them, extended ''heartfelt
condolences to the families,'' and promised ''to bring the terrorists
to justice.'' The families of the many previous US victims of
Palestinian terror might reasonably wonder why there was no such
presidential concern when their loved ones were
massacred.

The president did not vow to see justice done, for example, when Dr.
David Applebaum and his daughter Nava died, on the eve
of what was to be Nava's wedding day, in the bombing of Jerusalem's
Cafe Hillel last month. Or when Cleveland native Alan
Beer was killed in a Palestinian bus bombing in June. Or when four
Americans -- Marla Bennett of California, David Gritz of
Massachusetts, Benjamin Blutstein of Pennsylvania, and Janis Coulter of
New York -- lost their lives in the bombing of the
Hebrew University cafeteria last year. Or when Shoshana Greenbaum, a
New Jersey tourist, was slaughtered in the horrific
Sbarro pizzeria attack of August 2001. Or when, three months earlier,
14-year-old Kobe Mandell of Silver Spring, Md., was one
of two boys stoned to death in the cave where Palestinian terrorists
found them hiking. Or in April 1995, when Brandeis
University student Alisa Flatow was murdered in a Gaza terror attack.

Americans have been dying at the hands of Palestinian terrorists for
decades, yet the US government and media rarely if ever
portray Yasser Arafat and his lieutenants as avowed enemies of the
United States. The State Department does not demand the
extradition of Palestinian killers of Americans, not even when the
killers' identities and whereabouts are known. President Bush
has never given the Palestinian Authority the same ultimatum he gave
the Taliban in Afghanistan: Hand over the terrorists or be
destroyed.

Instead he issues incoherent declarations like the one he made on
Wednesday -- blasting the Palestinian Authority for refusing
''to fight terror in all its forms,'' while assuring Americans that the
United States is ''working closely with the appropriate officials''
-- i.e., the selfsame Palestinian Authority -- to find and prosecute
those responsible. As if it isn't those very officials who have
been aiding and abetting such butchery all along.

To hear Bush tell it, the deeper tragedy of terrorist acts like
Wednesday's is that they are ''an obstacle to achieving the
Palestinian people's dream of statehood.'' What kind of state does Bush
imagine would be created by the people who danced
for joy on Sept. 11? How long is he going to keep up the pretense that
terrorism represents a failure, rather than an core
element, of Palestinian governance?

Arafat and the Palestinian Authority were quick to distance themselves
from the murder of the three Americans. But violence
against Americans is routinely celebrated by the PA. ''During the war
in Iraq,'' notes Itamar Marcus, the director of Palestinian
Media Watch, ''the PA actively endorsed the killing of Americans, and
even produced a music video celebrating the deaths of
US soldiers that was broadcast repeatedly on official PA TV.'' (An
extensive compendium of anti-American hatred in the
Palestinian media is posted at www.pmw.org.il.)

For years, sermons preached in Palestinian mosques and aired on
Palestinian radio and television have rhapsodized about
inflicting pain on the United States. ''Oh, Allah, destroy America, for
she is ruled by Zionist Jews,'' proclaimed Sheik Ikrima Sabri,
the Arafat-appointed mufti of Jerusalem, in one such sermon. ''O God,
destroy the Jews and their supporters . . . destroy the
United States and its allies,'' implored Sheik Ibrahim al-Mudayris in
another. And from a third, Sheik Ahmed Abu Halabiya: ''Have
no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. . . .
Wherever you are, kill those Jews and those Americans who
are like them.''

A few months ago, Palestinian officials renamed the central square in
Jenin after Ali Jafar al-Na'amani, the Iraqi suicide bomber
who killed four US Marines at a checkpoint in Najaf on March 29. That
is what Arafat and the Palestinian Authority think of
spilled American blood.

There is only one rational response to the murder of Branchizio,
Parson, and Linde last week: the destruction of the Palestinian
Authority, a network of killers posing as a government. If that doesn't
happen, this much is sure: the 49th, 50th, and 51st
Americans to lose their lives to Palestinian terror will not be the
last.

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