OCTOBER 23 1983: 241 DEAD

Marines search for bodies in the aftermath of the bombing

Today is the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut Lebanon. The morning of Sunday, October 23, 1983, a suicide bomber drove an explosives-laden truck onto the compound at Beirut International Airport that housed a barracks where hundreds of Marines were sleeping. Responsibility for the attack was claimed by a then-minor player in Arab militant politics, calling itself Islamic Jihad, which claimed responsibility for the bombing as it did for the deadly truck bomb attack on the French military barracks of the MNF the same morning. That unknown group was later determined to be what is now known as Hezbollah,.

The driver accelerated his yellow Mercedes truck toward the Marine facility; the only outer defensive perimeter was chest-high concertina barbed wire. The driver rammed right through it.

Marines at guard posts saw the truck breach the defenses and drive through an open gate, but their weapons were unloaded because of the peacekeeping rules of engagement. Even if the guards had managed to halt the truck on the roadway, the explosion still would have caused significant casualties.

The bomb created the largest non-nuclear blast in history, later estimated to be the equivalent of 12,000 pounds of TNT according to statements from FBI forensic experts at the time, initially lifting the barracks building off its foundations. Minutes later, another bomber drove a truck into a building housing French peacekeepers, part of the same multinational force as the Marines.

The bombs killed 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three soldiers who were killed in the blast or crushed to death in the rubble, as well as 58 French troops and six civilians. It is still the greatest number of marines killed in one day since D-Day on Iwo Jima, February 7, 1945.

David Madaras, a former Marine of C Battery, 1st Battalion, 10th Marines, recalled in a 2003 interview that he remembered the explosion being “ear shattering,” that his face was “seared” from the blast’s heat. After the initial explosion, he started looking for survivors. He saw two men carrying a stretcher. “Initially, my sight was drawn by the sun’s almost blinding reflection coming from a shiny belt buckle cinched around the waist of the stretcher’s cargo. What makes the image so unforgettable is that there was no body above the belt buckle.”

The Marines were from 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment. They were in Lebanon as part of the Multinational Peacekeeping Force (MNF), a peacekeeping mission that had first arrived in Beirut in August 1982 and included a combined French, Italian and British military contingent in addition to the Marines. The MNF was unsuccessful in keeping the warring parties from decimating parts of the city. By the time of the bombing, the civil war between the various Muslim and Christian factions had gone on for eight years.

Even before the devastating bombing of the barracks, the Marines had been under attack from grenades, shelling and small-arms fire. In April 1983, a terrorist bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut had killed 63 people, including one Marine security guard.

Lebanon’s Muslim population had come to view President Ronald Reagan’s White House as endorsers of a Christian-led Lebanese government pursuing US-Israeli interests. In September 1983, following the suicide bombing on the US embassy in April, American involvement became deeper still when the battleship USS New Jersey shelled Muslim positions in the Shouf Mountains, supporting Lebanese army operations.

The Marines in Beirut didn’t receive enough support in gathering intelligence or turning it into useful analysis, the Defense Department’s investigation later found.

On December 4, 1983, an artillery attack killed eight Marines. On February 4, 1984, the United States pulled the final Marines from the peacekeeping force out of Lebanon. After 18 months in the country, 238 Marines had died and 151 were wounded, according to the Marine Corps’ official history.

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