War is hell and so is Beirut.
—DR. JOHN HUDSON, POSTCARD TO HIS IN-LAWS
September 1, 1983
The only bright spot in this otherwise dark time was the marriage of Hospital Corpsman Bryan Earle to Lebanese local Micheline Abi Ghanem. The twenty-one-year-old Ohioan had served on a previous deployment in Beirut, where he often conducted patrols through Hooterville, helping treat and care for the locals. During that time, he befriended Micheline, a teenager whom he recruited to serve as a volunteer medical translator.
“It was,” she recalled, “love at first sight.”
The two could not have come from more different worlds. With bright blue eyes and sandy brown hair, Earle had grown up in the tiny town of Painesville, where he had played football and wrestled at Harvey High School. Micheline, in contrast, sported curly dark hair and matching eyes. Raised Christian in a largely Shiite area, she knew little of life without war. “I never really had a childhood,” she said. “You grow up so fast.”
Day after day, as Earle made his rounds through Hooterville, the two grew closer. “They fell in love,” one newspaper reporter observed, “amid the kind of tragedy and conflict of which Hemingway novels are made.” Earle met Micheline’s mother and befriended her brothers, often enjoying home-cooked meals with her family. Locals he treated at times left dried fruit and other goodies for Earle and his fellow Marines at her home. “The days together with Earle were everything in my life,” Micheline said, “everything I lived for.”
With his first deployment winding down, he asked her to marry him on February 13, 1983. Micheline encouraged him to return home and visit his family, friends, and even his high school girlfriend—to make certain he wanted to marry her.
No sooner had he left in February than letters started arriving from him. Earle volunteered to return in May with the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit. “I found somebody,” he told his fellow Marines, “who I want to spend the rest of my life with.”
Earle taped sixteen pictures of her above his rack on the fourth floor of the Battalion Landing Team headquarters. “He was infatuated with her,” recalled friend and fellow hospital corpsman Darius Eichler. “His main goal was to get her out of Lebanon.”
Arranging a marriage in the war-torn capital proved difficult, but the American Embassy helped facilitate it and the Navy allowed him leave. The couple, meanwhile, attended the chaplain’s pre-marriage counseling course and had bloodwork drawn in the base clinic while his colleagues took up a collection, presenting them with a gift of fifty dollars and a bottle of wine.
The sniper attacks, coupled with the wealth of roadblocks and checkpoints, mandated a small wedding ceremony in a Catholic church on Hamra Street in West Beirut. About twenty people attended, mostly Micheline’s family members as well as a Navy chaplain. “Our hearts were full of happiness to be getting married and be united for life!” she remembered. “Being at the church that day felt as if it was almost a dream. We were like two old souls who found each other and nothing was going to separate us from that day forward!”
The embassy had arranged for the couple to honeymoon in a nearby hotel. On the afternoon of October 16—less than six hours before a sniper would kill Michael Ohler—Micheline watched her sister and mother walk through the church. Though excited to start her new life with Earle, she knew it meant leaving behind her country and family, which was a lot for a teenager to process. As though he could sense her thoughts, Earle whispered in her ear. “You’ll be visiting them once a year,” he said. “I promise.”
She looked up at him.
“I love you today and always,” he declared. “Now let’s go and get married.”