The war is definitely escalating right in front of my eyes.
—DR. JOHN HUDSON, LETTER TO HIS WIFE
September 4, 1983
The Eisenhower carrier battle group steamed closer toward shore at the start of September, joined by the French flattop Foch and several Italian naval gunfire ships. The Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered an additional 2,000 leathernecks with the 31st Marine Amphibious Unit to redeploy from the Pacific to Lebanon, though the troops would not arrive until September 12 and would remain aboard ship unless needed. In the battered Lebanese capital, the embassy began organizing for the possible evacuation of American citizens. That included reviewing and updating emergency plans, examining evacuation sites, and establishing radio communications between the diplomatic missions in Beirut and Tel Aviv and all naval task force commanders. Despite a lull in fighting, the Marines suspended all patrols and hunkered down in flak vests and helmets. “An eerie silence settled over the city,” Geraghty recalled. “The fighting during this period had been the most explosive that had occurred since our arrival.”
News correspondents poured into the capital, lured by the recent fighting that had turned Lebanon into one of the world’s biggest stories. International reporters arrived from a diverse range of countries, including Turkey, Spain, Belgium, and Denmark. Local American television stations sent crews to do stories on hometown Marines while small-town papers requested phone interviews. Colonel Geraghty was in high demand for interviews ranging from the Baltimore Sun and Miami Herald to Tom Brokaw and Ted Koppel. The public affairs office escorted an average of thirty to forty reporters a day, overwhelming the staff of two officers and six enlisted men. “The Beirut press corps,” recalled Major Bob Jordan, head of public affairs, “had now swelled to more than 300 correspondents—about one for every four Marines on the line.”
Amid this increased media attention, the Joint Chiefs ordered Geraghty to resupply a Lebanese Armed Forces base north of Beirut with 500,000 rounds of ammunition from his force’s contingency stockpile. The colonel, whose troops accomplished the job with helicopters and landing craft, felt such a move jeopardized America’s precious neutrality. “The peacekeeping mission,” Geraghty wrote, “was indeed getting foggy.”
On September 2, the Marines held a memorial service for Lieutenant Losey and Staff Sergeant Ortega, whose deaths four days earlier still reverberated through the ranks. Two M60 tanks stood guard with barrels aimed toward the mountainous battlefields that rimmed the horizon. At the late-day service, as the sun eased down the western sky over the Mediterranean, Father Pucciarelli addressed his flock, his white vestments contrasted against his black combat boots. Behind him fluttered three flags, two American and one Lebanese, all at half-staff. “We come together this evening as the sun goes down to give honor to our two friends,” the Catholic priest said. “They died so as to give time and space to the Lebanese army to get themselves in shape so they can bring peace, honor and integrity here to Lebanon.”
The Marines read from the Twenty-Third Psalm, a passage often chosen for funerals for its reassuring message. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” Troops recited the Lord’s Prayer and sang “Amazing Grace.” Amid the somber ceremony, as Chaplain Danny Wheeler read a passage from the Bible, a single rifle shot echoed to the east.
Lieutenant Colonel Larry Gerlach, who commanded the Battalion Landing Team, eulogized Losey and Ortega. “Our country, our way of life can only survive as long as we have strong young men who are willing to pay the ultimate price if it is called for,” Gerlach reminded his Marines. “They died in a very difficult mission. They died in a mission of peace-keeping. It calls for dedication, it calls for discipline and it calls for restraint.”
Back in the United States, families and friends prepared to bury the fallen Marines. First Lieutenant Mark Singleton, who was wounded by shrapnel the same day Losey died, escorted his friend’s body home, a journey that had taken him from Beirut through Cyprus, Germany, Delaware, and Philadelphia before landing in North Carolina. Singleton had made the first leg of the trip with his helmet pulled low over his eyes so no one would see his emotions. The two Marines, both from small southern towns, had been close. “We were both brought up in the country so we hit it off right away,” he said. “We knew what it was like to go out in a tobacco patch. We knew about hunting and fishing. We could relate to the simple things.”
When Singleton reached Losey’s home, family members pulled him into a room.
“Tell us what happened?” Carol Losey asked.
Singleton walked the family through that day, describing the mortar attack that had killed the two young Marines inside the platoon command post.
“George said you have a family,” Losey continued.
Singleton confirmed, telling her that his wife and infant daughter were over at Camp Lejeune. To his surprise, Carol Losey insisted that he leave them and go home to Jacksonville and visit his family. After that, she said, Singleton could come back and help them with the funeral. “You haven’t seen your family,” she insisted. “You need to go see them.”
On September 4, more than three hundred people overflowed the wooden pews at New Friendship Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, spilling outside onto the lawn, all for a chance to say goodbye to George Losey. It was in this redbrick church, adorned with white columns and a matching steeple, that Losey was baptized nineteen years earlier. On May 1, the last Sunday before he shipped out to Beirut, the young lieutenant had asked his Sunday school class to pray for him. Losey now returned four months later in a flag-draped coffin that stood alone before the altar in the center of the sanctuary. In the audience with his mother and siblings that Sunday sat his fiancée, Gloria, who had flown in from Colombia. Carol Losey had asked his college advisor and friend, Ramiro Lagos, to phone her with the news of his death.
“Lord,” she had cried, “why did it have to be him?”
The Reverend Warren Kerr fought back tears as he eulogized Losey. “He made the greatest sacrifice,” Kerr told those gathered, “that of his own life for his country, for the people of Lebanon, and maybe that will say something to the people for the world.”
At the conclusion of the forty-minute service, six Marine pallbearers carried his remains down the front steps of the church to a white hearse as the organ played. “The precision of their pace,” one reporter observed, “made a dull, reverberating thud.” Six additional Marines escorted Losey’s family into matching white limousines. Officers on motorcycles led the procession to Oaklawn Memorial Gardens. Additional police blocked traffic at intersections, where officers stood with bowed heads and white helmets pressed against their hearts.
At the grave site, cooled by a late-summer breeze, Reverend Kerr read aloud from the Old Testament before turning the procession over to a Marine honor guard.
“Fire the volley,” a Marine cried out.
The seven assembled leathernecks each fired three rounds as part of a twenty-one-gun salute. A lone bugler played “Taps,” whose sad notes drifted across the cemetery. Losey’s bespectacled mother, who for most of the service sat with her hands clenched in her lap, wiped away tears and sobbed. Behind her stood Lieutenant Singleton, who had returned after visiting his family. He placed his arm around her shoulder as she wept.
Major General Alfred Gray, commander of the Second Marine Division, took the folded American flag that had covered his casket and offered it to Losey’s mother. The general presented a second flag, the one that had covered his remains when he arrived in the United States, to his grandfather. After the service, Gray reminded reporters that Losey had died protecting his men. “There is,” he said, “no higher calling than that.”
Ortega’s funeral followed two days later at St. Richard’s Roman Catholic Church in the tiny Pennsylvania community of Barnesville, near where his wife, Robin, was raised. Dozens of Marines, whom Ortega had worked with as a recruiter on Long Island, had boarded a bus at 4 a.m. that morning just to make the 10 a.m. service. Only four years earlier, in the same redbrick church nestled amid the rolling landscape where mourners now gathered, Ortega was married. “The Bible reminds us that you do not know what will happen tomorrow,” the Reverend Joseph Walen told those gathered. “We are here today to attest to that truth.”
Ortega’s burial followed at Sky-View Memorial Park, a lush cemetery filled with trees, flowers, and sun-faded flags where the young Marine had once enjoyed jogging. A green canopy shaded the family and the casket from the ninety-degree heat. Ortega’s fifteen-month-old daughter, Heather, who clutched a cloth doll, wriggled in the arms of a relative. Reporters noted that his wife sat stoically throughout the service, even as rifles roared and taps echoed. After the service, Ortega’s uncle James Knopp read a statement from the family. “Alex loved the Marines,” he said. “He died for what he’s always believed in—peace.”
Brigadier General James Joy, assistant commanding officer of the Second Marine Division, stood in for General Gray, who had departed for Beirut. Joy lauded Ortega’s sacrifice. “Staff Sergeant Ortega died a hero,” he said. “We’re very proud of him.”
News coverage of the funerals circulated among the troops in Beirut, where Hudson was heartbroken to learn Ortega’s widow was pregnant. An article he read on Losey made him weep. The unexpected deaths of the two Marines forced him to reflect on his own mortality. “Years ago I used to think about dying and the thought didn’t bother me much. In fact, I used to look forward to dying,” Hudson wrote to his wife, “but now I’m not ready for it and especially now that I have such a wonderful family. I so want to see Will grow up and spend my life with you. You have certainly made my life worth living. I just hope I get back home.”
The deaths likewise brought into sharper focus the rapidly deteriorating landscape in Lebanon. Even before the suspension of patrols, troops could sense that change in the slums around the base, where the Shiites had become more hostile toward the Marines. Young men carried AK-47 rifles. Others shouted Khomeini’s name. The rise in aggression, Glenn Dolphin feared, paralleled a decline in the perception of American neutrality. “It was getting harder and harder to imagine how we were going to be successful in our role as peacekeepers when no one in this country seemed to want peace,” Dolphin wrote. “None of the parties involved seemed to be the least bit interested in building a strong, self-supporting Lebanon. They were only interested in settling old scores and defending their own little fiefdoms.”
Political struggles between Congress and the White House over the War Powers Resolution, which the Marines followed in news reports, only exacerbated the frustration. Hudson, who had to pluck out shrapnel and stitch up wounds after each attack, was furious about the administration’s efforts to argue that the troops were not in combat. “The President is lying when he says Marines have not been the target,” he wrote to his wife. “The Marines have been fired on intentionally and they’ve been firing back—rifles, helos, artillery, and an aircraft carrier is waiting off the coast. This is what makes me so mad. I will never trust my government again! So much has happened here that has not been reported—it’s incredible.”
Dolphin feared that Democrats would use the recent Marine deaths to sabotage the president. In an effort to protect Reagan, Republican allies would spin the conflict into a story totally divorced from the reality of what the Marines actually faced, all of which would only confuse the American public. Frontline bureaucrats like McFarlane, Dolphin added, failed to inspire confidence. Compounding this challenge was the perpetual threat that the fragile Lebanese government would collapse and trigger a relapse of civil war.
Into this volatile mix, Israel lobbed a grenade.
The Jewish state announced the time had arrived to vacate the Chouf Mountains. The Israelis, who had spent a year pushing Gemayel for a peace deal, were done. “At this stage in time,” an Israeli spokesman told reporters in defense of the withdrawal, “we have no reason to believe that if we gave them any more time, that anything will change.”
Though American officials had known of Israel’s intent to withdraw, the announcement of when caught Washington off guard. The sudden departure likewise gave no time for the multinational force or Lebanese military to coordinate how to cover the 240-square-mile area Israel planned to surrender. American officials pleaded with Israel to delay the withdrawal. Reagan even phoned Prime Minister Begin, who put him in touch with Defense Minister Moshe Arens. At a minimum, he asked Israel to wait at least until the Lebanese Armed Forces could occupy those areas before leaving, but it was not to be. “No soap,” the president wrote in his diary on September 3. “It was too late—the Israelis are already on the move.”
Journalists and Marines anxiously awaited the fallout as Israel’s forces descended from the mountains. “In the Commodore Hotel,” reporter Robert Fisk wrote, “there was a dark mood among the television crews and correspondents. The scale and ferocity of the fighting frightened all of us.” A similar tension hung over the Marines. “That night,” Geraghty said, “all could hear the rumble of Israeli tanks, personnel carriers, and heavy vehicles heading south.”
The bull’s-eye, as history would show, would soon fall on the United States Marines.
Israel’s departure triggered an immediate outbreak in fighting between the Christian and Druze militias, as the nearby mountains once again lit up with gunfire. “For the entire day and into the evening,” Richard Bernstein wrote in the New York Times, “the dull thud of artillery resounded throughout the greater Beirut area.” At the Marine compound, troops slipped on helmets and flak jackets. Hudson watched from his fourth-floor balcony as artillery shells chewed up the mountainside. “Being here is such an unusual experience,” he wrote to his wife. “I’m afraid before this day is over, we’ll be involved in direct fire again, and I’ll be confined to the life of a mole down in the basement.” The physician had recently acquired a room in the basement, which he converted into a battle dressing station. That morning, as machine guns rattled in the distance and artillery thundered, he listened to John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” on the radio. “What irony,” Hudson remarked. “This place is crazy!”
This fire soon turned to Marine positions at the airport. That escalated on September 6. Eleven rockets came shortly before 1 a.m. “The time of flight,” the monthly Command Chronology reported, “was only two to three seconds.” More rockets started again at 3:45 a.m. Over the course of almost two hours, twenty-one rockets hit the airport. One such strike instantly killed Corporal Pedro J. Valle and mortally wounded Lance Corporal Randy Clark. Fellow platoon mate Lance Corporal Bradley McLaughlin, who saw the rocket explode in front of Valle, described the attack in a letter to his wife. “Babe it was real bad,” he wrote. “It tore his legs and arms off his body. We ran up to help them. Clark had two broken legs and a broken arm and half his face was gone. He was still alive but we knew he was dying.”
The howitzer battery fired 155mm illumination rounds while Cobras launched at dawn to find rocket-launcher locations. “The massive amount of launcher positions and impacts in the hills through the previous night,” one report stated, “made it impossible to determine which position was firing on the airport.” The attacks continued throughout the day, with more than 120 rounds landing around the airport by 4 p.m. The fire finally died down that evening, leaving Geraghty once again to tally his casualties. “Stakes are being raised weekly,” he wrote. “Our contribution to peace in Lebanon since 22 July stands at 4 killed and 28 wounded.”