The only thing these people understand is responding muzzle flashes and barking iron. Poor Lebanon.
—LANCE CORPORAL BILL STELPFLUG, LETTER TO HIS FAMILY
September 18, 1983
Hours after a rocket killed two Marines—and on the same day Alexander Ortega was buried in the rolling hills of rural Pennsylvania—Reagan again prepared to call bereaved parents. Earlier that morning, casualty notification teams had visited the families of Pedro Valle in Puerto Rico and Randy Clark in Wisconsin to deliver the tragic news.
Amelia Ramos had spotted the two Marines in dress uniforms that Tuesday morning walking down her street in Old San Juan. The olive skin and mustache of one made her think it was her son, back home in Puerto Rico for a surprise visit. She let out a laugh as her heart raced with excitement. “When the Marines didn’t smile,” her sister Emma Quinones told a reporter that day, “she knew it wasn’t her son. She knew something was wrong.”
The Marines next visited the home of his father, Santos Valle, who though divorced lived just a few blocks away from his ex-wife along the cobblestone streets. The retired Army sergeant, who had served for twenty-eight years, including tours in Korea and Vietnam, cried at the news. The twenty-five-year-old Valle, one of three sons, had followed his father into the military, joining the Marines right out of high school and serving for seven years. On the walls of Santos Valle’s home, mixed in with his own framed military decorations, dangled a photo of his son’s platoon. Pedro stood at the front, a bazooka clutched in his hands. “Ever since he was a boy,” his father recalled, “he wanted to be in the Marines.”
At 5:49 p.m. on September 6, Reagan spoke for a few minutes with Santos, the first of two calls he would make that evening from the White House to Puerto Rico. The president offered him his condolences. “Be calm,” he assured him. “Be strong.”
Santos Valle, a military man, understood. “Pedro sacrificed his life for the ideals of his country,” he said. “I am proud because he was defending democracy.”
A similar story unfolded in the tiny Wisconsin village of Minong, nearly two thousand miles north. Unlike Valle, who was an older career Marine, nineteen-year-old Clark had served barely a year. The six-foot-two Clark had been a high school superstar, a football lineman who helped lead his team to an undefeated season and conference title his senior year. Upon graduation in May 1982, he enlisted in the Marines. There were no jobs in his hometown of 557 residents. His father, James, a construction superintendent, had been out of work for a year. His mother, Norma, supported the family laboring in a jacket factory. In letters from Beirut, Clark wrote that he was scared, but he assured his family he would be fine. “Don’t worry about me,” he wrote in his final letter. “I’ll be all right, and I’ll come home in one piece.”
Reagan reached the family at 5:58 p.m. Unlike Santos Valle, who was proud of his son’s sacrifice, James Clark was mad at the wasted life of his son. When the first Marines died, he said, America should have pulled out. The situation had devolved into a fiasco with Marines functioning as police officers, getting picked off two or three at a time.
“Why,” he asked throughout the day, “do we have our boys over there?”
Clark shared that view—and much more—with the president, including a stern warning if things didn’t change. “I’m sure as hell,” he said, “not going to vote for you next year.”
The ten-minute conversation upset Reagan, who wrote about it that night in his diary. The calls that Tuesday evening—coupled with the ones he had made eight days earlier to the parents of Losey and Ortega—served as a reminder of the danger men faced because of his orders. These painful conversations were the gritty by-product of decisions made around a conference room table, far removed from the thunder of artillery and rockets, the flying shrapnel, and the terror that hung over the Marines. “I called the parents of the 2 Marines—not easy,” he wrote. “One father asked if they were in Lebanon for anything that was worth his son’s life.”
In Beirut, the deaths of Valle and Clark rattled the troops.
“The reality has hit,” said Private First Class Tom McCaleb. “Now we know there is a definite chance we could be killed at any time. We do a lot of praying.”
Alpha Company commander Captain Paul Roy, who had lost four men in the span of barely a week, struggled to adjust to this violent reality. “We didn’t expect this kind of action. Things will never be the same,” Roy said. “You don’t know when the next shell is coming in. It could be quiet now, but in five seconds one could land right here.”
Efforts to memorialize Valle and Clark had to be delayed twice because of continued attacks on the airport. Finally on September 13, Father George Pucciarelli and Chaplain Danny Wheeler organized a service at the Battalion Landing Team headquarters. The priest, dressed in his white vestments, stood behind a waist-high altar, where two candles flanked a cross mounted in the center. Behind him stood the American and Marine Corps flags.
Two hundred tired Marines in dusty fatigues and helmets crowded around. Others stared down from the torched mezzanine above. Artillery grumbled in the distance throughout the twenty-minute service, which included the singing of “Amazing Grace” followed by a twenty-one-gun salute. “Both were highly motivated,” recalled Lieutenant Colonel Gerlach, commander of the Battalion Landing Team, “hard-charging Marines.”
Roy memorialized his men. The thirty-four-year-old captain, who grew up in the small town of Winslow, Maine, tried to remain positive. In a recent letter to his parents, he focused on his company’s successes. “The Marines are defending themselves and fighting back,” he wrote. “The Marines are great. I’m real proud of the company and how it is performing.” But fellow officers could see the toll the losses had taken on him, including Glenn Dolphin. “The strain he was under was beginning to show. He looked exhausted,” Dolphin recalled. “The skipper’s face was drawn, and flecks of gray were just beginning to show in his dark hair.”
Roy pushed his own stress aside as he remembered his men. He knew Valle particularly well, since the youth had once served as his driver. “It was evident from my conversations with both of them in times past, they cared deeply for their families and loved ones back home and that they themselves came from loving homes,” Roy said. “It showed in their performance and attitude. I am confident they are beside us now, giving us courage to march on.”
The assembled Marines listened.
“By their ultimate sacrifice,” the company commander continued, “they have given this land a chance to find its own destiny.”
But had they?
That question and others would be asked the following day six thousand miles to the west in Clark’s tiny hometown of Minong. In the gymnasium at Northwood High School, workers set up one thousand folding chairs in anticipation that the beloved teenager’s funeral would double the town’s population for the day. The high school announced plans to start a scholarship in Clark’s honor as well as retire his No. 74 football jersey, which his younger brother Kelly had worn the previous Friday night in a 20–6 victory over rival Prairie Farm. Before the game, players from the opposing team had presented a check for the new scholarship.
During the service, Pastor Arvid Sundet of Calvary Lutheran Church echoed many of the concerns raised by the Clark family. “We are confused and hurt,” he said. “We don’t even know if his death has served a purpose.” The parishioners nodded. “And so we ask questions,” he continued. “We question our national policies. We question our president, and we join the Clark family in asking why. What for? Peacekeeping is not a satisfactory answer.”
James Clark spoke again with reporters following his son’s burial at Greenwood Cemetery, where his high school classmates served as his pallbearers. He wished the president would come to Minong without any of his advisors and just walk the field with him where his son once played. Then he could ask him the questions on his mind, questions that no doubt many Americans would be hard-pressed to understand, given the complicated sectarian and political rivalries that dominated Lebanon. “Who are we defending?” Clark would ask. “Who are the Druze? Who are the Christians? Who are the good people? I would like for him to answer me that question.”