You can’t keep the peace, if you don’t have the peace.
—LIEUTENANT COLONEL LARRY GERLACH
May 3, 1993
Marines continued to conduct jeep and foot patrols as June rolled into July. To improve security, Geraghty initiated joint foot patrols with the Lebanese Armed Forces, who provided one fire team to each of the three squad-sized Marine patrols.
The harassment of troops in the Shiite slum of Hooterville escalated. The daily reports showed that residents at times threw rocks, glass, and clothespins at the Marines. Others made derogatory gestures. One youth tried to ram a jeep with his bicycle, while another time a young man punched a Marine in the chest and then walked away.
“I hate Marines,” one teenager yelled. “Me and my brother going to kill Marines.”
“Americans no good,” another hollered. “Marines go home.”
Despite the harassment, Geraghty attempted to tamp down the concerns of his superiors, highlighting the positive interactions between his Marines and the locals. “Incidents of children throwing rocks and young men making derisive gestures are few and far between,” he wrote in one of his weekly reports. “More typical are hundreds of unreported contacts which build good will and create an atmosphere of helpfulness and cooperation.”
Beyond patrols, the Marines looked for positive ways to help the Lebanese and engender goodwill. Doctors Bigelow and Ware performed dental exams for children at a local orphanage. Other times villagers brought those in need of help to checkpoints, where hospital corpsmen assisted them. In early July, troops installed a playground in the Shiite village of Burj al Barajinah, just north of the airport. The Lebanese government donated the land. Villagers cleared the trash, built a fence, and installed lights. The Marines then erected the red-white-and-blue set, which included two swing sets, a merry-go-round, seesaw, and a monkey bar. “I loved doing this,” said Corporal Maurice Colbert, the main welder on the project. “I love all the kids, so it was for a worthwhile cause. The result today was worth all the effort.”
“I just wish we could put a playground at every corner,” added Sergeant Kim McKinney.
Such moments of happiness served as an important counterbalance to the extreme deprivation the Marines experienced in the slums. A trash run to the dump would haunt Lance Corporal Michael Petit. Before the truck even stopped, a dozen children swarmed the trailer, picking through the garbage for scraps of food. “I felt sorry for the children,” he wrote. “They were filthy. Ulcerated sores oozing pus dotted the legs of one boy who couldn’t have been more than eight. Another was missing a hand. His bright eyes gleamed as he salvaged an unopened package of cocoa powder from the heap.” In a column in the Root Scoop, First Lieutenant Miles Burdine encouraged any Marine who felt sorry for himself to visit Hooterville. “Look at the faces of the children and realize the death, destruction, and poverty many have experienced,” he urged. “For some, it is all they know and possibly all they will ever know.” Corporal William Gaines Jr. captured a similar sentiment in a letter. “Many people don’t realize that these are people like you and me,” he wrote. “They have families, husbands, wives, children. They feel fear, happiness, joy, and sadness. They are real—no better but no worse than us.”
Geraghty continued to emphasize training, including inserting Marines by air for patrols, so as to practice helicopter operations. Troops conducted additional parachute jumps and cross-trained on weapons with other multinational forces. The French practiced amphibious operations on Green Beach in front of the airport, while the Italians welcomed the leathernecks on mobile patrol to drive through their live-fire range to simulate ambushes. “The men dismounted, returned fire at the dummy attackers, recovered a simulated casualty, and withdrew while maintaining covering fire,” the monthly Command Chronology observed. “It is a realistic event and has provided the Marines with a good confidence building exercise.”
Troops continued to help Lebanese soldiers with basic infantry skills and air assault techniques. Lebanese officer candidates enjoyed a tour of the Battalion Landing Team headquarters and the Iwo Jima. Geraghty presented certificates to the top thirty graduating soldiers out of a class of 280. Many of the Marines, however, privately scoffed at the poor skills of the Lebanese recruits. “If things got tough,” Petit said, “we’d be on our own.”
“Like the blind leading the blind,” added John Dalziel.
The colonel liaised with fellow commanders of the other multinational forces to swap information. His July 9 meeting with Italian brigadier general Franco Angioni proved particularly instructive. Angioni, who had been in Beirut longer than any other multinational leader, oversaw one of Beirut’s most volatile areas, home to Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila. The typical Lebanese response, he noted, to any disturbance was brute force. Troops would descend upon an area, conduct mass arrests, and haul off scores of individuals with no concern for legal rights. Interrogations proved equally as harsh. “Rifle butts to the face were common, as were two or three policemen beating a suspect into unconsciousness,” Geraghty recalled. “This was conducted on women and children as well as men.”
Angioni convinced the Lebanese to dial back such tactics, which earned the respect of locals and was vital to the safety of his forces. “He feels that this balance has been maintained due to the high degree of neutrality evidenced by his soldiers,” Geraghty said. “He feels that, should this trust be lost, his men will become targets in the inter-factional fighting.”
Beyond meetings and training, the colonel sent Marines off on liberty trips to Turkey and Sicily. News reporters accompanied troops on patrols while Geraghty sat for media interviews. At the same time the colonel juggled the continual parade of American military and congressional leaders, including Secretary of State George Shultz and later in the month Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General John Vessey. “Too many VIPs!” Major George Converse complained in a letter. “All are going in a dozen different directions, seeing a dozen different things. All have to be briefed, protected, transported, and coddled too.”
The lawmakers, who often donned brand-new starched fatigues, sparked private jeers from many of the Marines. “The congressmen loved to parade around the compound in their new uniforms,” Petit recalled. “It was their chance to play Marine for a day.” Officers rounded up Marines from each lawmaker’s district to sit for a half-hour chat. “I wonder,” Dolphin asked, “how many millions of dollars were spent on travel and per diem on something that a twenty-dollar telephone call could have accomplished just as well.”
When not on duty, troops often filled sandbags or exercised, which was never easy in the brutal Middle Eastern summer. “It is hot as shit in Beirut,” Bill Stelpflug complained in a letter to his family. “I mean at 7:30 in the morning you are sweating just standing still.”
“You can lose as much as 5 or 10 pounds a day like this,” added a fellow leatherneck. “But like they say, it is better to sweat in war than it is to bleed.”
Despite the heat and humidity, American and French forces duked it out in volleyball while Marines and the sailors pummeled one another in a boxing match on deck of the Austin, with the leathernecks winning twenty-one of thirty-one bouts. On June 26, the Marines hosted a 5K and 10K race around the airport’s perimeter road. More than three hundred Marines, sailors, French infantry, and Foreign Legionnaires competed. “Contestants,” wrote the Root Scoop, “battled through the midmorning heat and humidity over a trail thick with dust.” Corporal Charles Register charged across the 5K finish line with a time of seventeen minutes and thirty seconds, beating 133 challengers. First Lieutenant Ronald Baczkowski snatched victory over 174 others in the 10K with a time of thirty-three minutes and forty-four seconds. The Naval Academy graduate feared the SEALs would beat him, but he led the race at the halfway point. “I felt real good about a Marine finishing first, because the day before the French killed us in volleyball,” he said. “But when they won, they were gracious winners and didn’t rub it in.”
That competition was followed on July 4 by the “Independence Day Run for Peace Marathon,” an event created by the Battalion Landing Team’s Weapons Company. Thirty-six Marines running in pairs logged 1.5 miles each, waving American and Lebanese flags, which represented the two countries working together. “In the end, it was not one marathon, but two, a total of 54 miles,” the Root Scoop reported. “But the mileage wasn’t important.”
Corporal Dan Joy, who helped organize the run, said he wanted to show that the United States stood behind Lebanon. “We have a great opportunity here,” Joy said of the mission. “We see it in the faces of the little kids when we drive through town.”
Others celebrated the national holiday with a barbecue at the Beirut Hilton that featured hamburgers, hot dogs, cold melon, and cake. The Navy hosted its own celebration aboard the Iwo Jima for five hundred visitors, including American diplomats and fellow members of the multinational force who feasted on spareribs and beer and enjoyed a performance by Lebanese folk dancers. “Barbecues replaced helicopters on launch pads,” one reporter wrote, “American flags hung from rails and seamen tested their skills in a regatta of cutters and landing craft.”
Early one July morning amid the hustle of base activity, a staff sergeant sought out Captain Michael Ohler as he finished up breakfast, alerting him that Lieutenant Colonel Gerlach wanted to see him. The twenty-eight-year-old Naval Academy graduate feared he might be in some sort of trouble, a worry that was reinforced when he bumped into Gerlach’s executive officer, who urged him to hurry up and go see the battalion commander.
Ohler knocked on Gerlach’s office door.
The commander summoned him inside. Gerlach then held up a message and began to read aloud. “On June 29th,” the lieutenant colonel began, “Captain Ohler’s wife gave birth to a boy, Benjamin David. Both the baby and mother are doing well.”
“I was dumbfounded. I didn’t know what to say. It was such a shock,” Ohler wrote in a letter that day to his wife, Gail. “All I could do was smile.”
Gerlach congratulated Ohler, shook his hand, and told him he expected a cigar. Ohler ducked out of his office, excited to share the news with his friends. His newborn son would join his two-year-old daughter, Sarah. “God has blessed us beyond my comprehension. I’ve got a daughter and a son. I’m so happy,” he wrote. “What a family we have.”
On July 6, Hudson caught a flight out to the Iwo Jima to talk to the doctors. He could not get a helicopter back until that afternoon, so he went to the wardroom for lunch, which proved a bad idea since the pudgy physician was trying to shed a few pounds.
“How do you want your steak?” the cook asked.
“I couldn’t believe it!” Hudson wrote. “I had an air-conditioned environment, tablecloth, silverware, no flies, decent company, and a delicious meal. I had a sirloin steak—tender and well done, broccoli! Fried rice, homemade bread, tea, real Coke, butter. I blew my diet and went back for seconds. I have not had that good a meal since I left the States.”
Geraghty enjoyed his own escape one afternoon when he visited Lebanese troops learning to operate the 155mm howitzer. The training site was up in the mountains east of Beirut, an area under Christian control that boasted cooler temperatures and reminded him of southern France. While at the site, the colonel spotted what appeared to be a fortress perched atop a towering mountain peak. His Lebanese escort explained that it was a thirteenth-century abbey, one whose roots stretched back to the era of the Crusades. He offered to take the colonel on a visit, which Geraghty welcomed. The abbey’s strategic location offered Geraghty a view east of the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley. To the west, he could see the blue of the Mediterranean. “The majestic scenery,” the colonel recalled, “was breathtaking.”
The abbot offered him a tour of the monastery. “I felt,” Geraghty said, “like a student in a graduate course of the history of the Middle Ages taught by a scholar.” The colonel soaked it up. He saw the stone beds covered with hay mattresses that the monks called home as well as the library filled with ancient texts in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew. “On the return trip to Beirut,” Geraghty wrote, “I had a strange feeling that I had spent part of the day in a Middle Eastern time capsule reflecting the beauty, turmoil, and tragedy of Lebanon today.”
The colonel was not the only one to break away.
The Marines and sailors at times visited the destroyed former embassy along the corniche, including Hudson, who stopped by with dentists Jim Ware and Gil Bigelow. He mailed his wife a slide photo of him in front of the ruins. “It is unbelievable,” he wrote, “how much destruction occurred in the building.” Those brave enough ventured inside the battered building, climbing the dark and rubble-strewn staircases where terrified and bloodied diplomats had fled amid the smoke and tear gas. Troops peeked inside offices with toppled furniture or stared out through the gaping holes at the sea. First Lieutenant Neal Morris paused before a table still covered with food from lunch that day. Several noted the rust-colored stains that dotted the floor and walls, which resembled dried blood. First Lieutenant Mark Singleton swiped a stack of stationery with the logo of the United States Embassy. Others grabbed coffee cups and dishware emblazoned with the diplomatic logo. Lance Corporal Tim McCoskey used a sledgehammer to pound for half an hour on a safe he found, only to crack it open and discover it was empty. Lance Corporal Emanuel Simmons and several other Marines loaded up a truck with tables, chairs, and even a file cabinet to decorate their room. The experience, as many of them would later recall, was haunting. “It smelled,” Simmons said, “like death.”
At night, the troops watched the factional fighting that lit up the mountains as tracers painted the heavens. Singleton chowed down on hot dogs and Coke as one such battle unfolded. “It was,” he remembered, “like watching the Super Bowl.” The Marines sat on the sidelines of someone else’s war, a fact highlighted by the volleyball games and footraces that took place behind the safety of the wire while car bombs and artillery duels thundered around them. Many tried to capture the experience. “The other night the fighting was incredible,” Bill Stelpflug wrote. “Boom boom rat-tat-tat-tat-rat boom ker ker boom. Get the idea?” Jim Ware actually recorded sounds of the fighting. So, too, did Corporal Blaine Cosgro. Others climbed to the roof of the Battalion Landing Team headquarters for a better view. “We watch nightly fire fights then see the destruction in the daytime,” Grant McIntosh, a special agent with Naval Investigative Services, wrote his family. “They put on one hell of a light show but you have to stop and remember that there are people on the receiving end of those tracer rounds.”
As the weeks crawled past, homesickness infected some of the troops. Those who did not go on patrols felt like prisoners trapped behind the airport gates. The men worked six days a week only to escape into reruns of Mork & Mindy and Hee Haw. For many, mail served as the only tangible connection to home and the lives and loved ones left behind. Chaplain Danny Wheeler noticed the struggle his young flock faced. “My parish in Beirut was in flux,” he said. “The men were having all the usual problems of growing up. They were unsure.”
Wheeler spent his days driving around in a jeep to visit the rifle companies dug in along the airport perimeter. “How are you doing?” he would ask.
“We’re making it,” was a common refrain.
“Watch out for each other,” the chaplain reminded them.
Hudson likewise struggled to assimilate. The battalion surgeon was a decade older than many of the Marines and had little in common with them. Unlike other officers, he had no interest in a professional military career. Beirut was a pit stop on his road home to Milledgeville, nestled along the winding Oconee River, where he planned to sew stitches, set broken arms, and treat colds as a country doctor. “This place is such a strain on people,” he wrote his wife. “No wonder Marines are so weird.” More than anything, however, Hudson missed his wife, Lisa, and infant son, Will, whose photos he stared at daily. “I cannot believe how adorable and precious he is,” Hudson wrote of his son. “I love to look at his pictures and see all the joy he has.” Lisa mailed him cassette tapes with recordings of Will cooing and giggling. Hearing their voices, he felt, was almost like being home. At the same time, Hudson felt guilty for leaving Lisa alone during the difficult first few months of nursing an infant. “I pray you are tolerating this situation graciously,” he wrote in one letter. “I’m sorry that I ever got myself into this situation,” he added in another. “Please don’t hold it against me.” In the top right-hand corner of each letter, Hudson kept a tally of how many days he had been on the beach versus how many he had left. “I love you and Will so much,” he wrote. “We’ll be a family again someday.”
The repetitive nature of the work exacerbated the struggle. “Some people at night,” Lance Corporal John Allman wrote his mother, “go off behind the trees and shout out all their feelings to keep from going crazy.” Other Marines, like Lance Corporal Davin Green, tried to find the positive in the experience. “The Sea is pretty. We watch the sun come up and go down. We see whales and sharks. It seems like the Sea never ends,” he wrote his sister, Sheria. “But I still miss home, I miss you too, Sis. I sure wish you were here with me, but I’m all right.”
Private Henry Linkkila’s letters revealed an eighteen-year-old who straddled the line between adolescence and adulthood, an experience made all the more difficult by being in Beirut. “I may be your ‘kid,’ ” he protested in one letter, “but I’m also a goddamn man.” Other letters, however, showed the hard-charging Connecticut youth, who liked to drink and fight, still missed the warmth of family. “As you can probably tell, I am depressed and thinking about home a lot!” he confessed. “I would give anything to be back home with you right now.”
Linkkila’s homesickness, like so many others, manifested itself in a disdain for the dust, the heat, and the boredom of Beirut. “I hate this place!” he wrote in one letter.
“This place really sucks!” Linkkila added in another.
“I wanna go home,” he scrawled in big letters across an entire page.
The young Marines wrestled with distance not only from parents, but also from girlfriends and wives. To help, Wheeler and Father George Pucciarelli started a pre-marriage counseling class that would run Thursday nights for a month, beginning at 7:30 p.m. in the Peacekeeping Chapel. But that did little to ease the suffering of those who feared an unfaithful spouse. “Thank God I’m not married,” Bill Stelpflug wrote home. “There are some pretty little 18/19-year-old wives in Jacksonville causing their own hate and discontent in Beirut. Some don’t write and some write the wrong things. The N.C. Center for Abused Women may have some business.”
Such concerns faded on the morning of July 22.
Marines manned checkpoints around the airport that Friday. The public affairs team passed out the latest issue of the Root Scoop, which included a rundown on promotions and courts-martial as well as a feature story on parachute practice and advice from the chaplains reminding troops not to worry too much. “Keep looking forward in hope,” the faith leaders urged. Up in his fourth-floor clinic, Dr. Hudson prepared to put a cast on the broken arm of an enlisted man while over in the Marine Amphibious Unit headquarters, Lieutenant Glenn Dolphin listened as a boom box blared Molly Hatchet’s “Flirtin’ with Disaster.”
At 10:30 a.m., the first 122mm Katyusha rocket hit.
Up in his clinic, Hudson froze, wondering if the Lebanese might be undergoing explosives training. “When the second round hit,” he wrote, “everyone knew we were being bombed. It was a very humbling experience.” The doctor forgot about the cast, scooped up his helmet and flak jacket, and headed for the basement, which housed both a shelter and the enlisted men’s club. “It sported several wooden picnic tables and a real bar with stools,” Petit recalled. “There were even a couple of archaic video games in one corner.”
Dolphin likewise grabbed his gear and rushed to the Combat Operations Center, where Geraghty and his senior aides hovered over the radio operators. More rounds rained down on the airport, a mix of Katyusha rockets and 120mm mortars. “The ground shook, and a hard shock wave passed upward through everything and everyone,” Dolphin recalled. “The wave could be felt through the soles of your feet, up through the core of your body and into your head. I especially felt the vibrations from the shock wave in my chest and lungs.”
“We’re being shelled!” people hollered. “Get in the holes.”
Hudson galloped down the five flights of stairs to the basement, where he encountered the first casualty, Lance Corporal Morris Dorsey Jr., who was headed up to the clinic to find him. Dorsey had been outside by the mess tent washing cookware when a half-dollar-sized piece of metal dug into the skin above his left shoulder blade. Hudson treated him right on the stairs. “I pulled the shrapnel out with my bare hands,” he wrote. “The piece of metal was still hot and had also caused a burn on the Marine.” The duo then headed down to the basement shelter, where Dorsey confided in the doctor that he was scared. “He wanted me to reassure him that he was okay, which he was,” Hudson said. “I didn’t even want to put a Band-Aid on.”
After fifteen minutes, the attack ended.
The all-clear signal came forty-five minutes later. Marines emerged from foxholes, bunkers, and shelters. Eleven 122mm rockets and 120mm mortar shells had hit the airport. The attack killed one Lebanese civilian and wounded seven others along with three Lebanese soldiers. In addition to Dorsey, Lance Corporal Donald Locke and Petty Officer First Class Kenneth Densmore suffered minor shrapnel wounds. Hudson treated the two leathernecks. “Both of these Marines,” he said, “now have a new viewpoint on life.” The doctor then headed back to the fourth floor to finish the cast, only this time he wore his helmet and flak jacket. “I definitely did not get depressed today,” he later wrote his wife. “I was too scared.”
The Marines determined that the attack came from an area controlled by Walid Jumblatt’s Druze militia, which occupied the nearby Chouf Mountains. The mustachioed warlord, who was supported by Syria, despised President Amin Gemayel. The Druze, the Marines therefore assumed, had likely overshot a nearby Lebanese Armed Forces training camp and hit the airport. “Despite the close impacts and that it was well known that Walid Jumblatt hated our guts, the Druze were going to get the benefit of the doubt,” Dolphin said. “Marines did not return fire.” The attack reinforced for Geraghty the daily threats and challenges his force faced. “Caught between a multitude of factions and long-standing conflicts,” the colonel wrote in his weekly situation report, “the Marines must maintain a fine balance.”