Shortly past daybreak on the morning of Oct. 23, 1983, a Mercedes truck tore through the concertina wire that surrounded the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon.
The truck was loaded with PETN explosive wrapped in compressed gas canisters.
Inside the four-story Battalion Landing Team headquarters and barracks — colorfully known as the “Beirut Hilton” — some 350 American troops still slumbered. It was Sunday — a day of rest.
American troops were in Lebanon to help stabilize a nation torn apart by eight years of civil war that had killed tens of thousands and devastated the once-beautiful capital of Beirut, formerly hailed as the “Paris of the Middle East.”
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The driver accelerated, covering the 450 feet that separated the concertina wire from the barracks in 10 seconds.
The Marines he passed at their guard posts had been prohibited from having a round in the chamber of their rifles.
The truck crashed through the sandbags stacked in front of the barracks and came to a stop 13 feet inside the lobby.
American Marines search for survivors and bodies in the rubble, all that was left of their barracks headquarters in Beirut, after a terrorist suicide car bomb was driven into the building and detonated on Oct. 23, 1983 — killing 241 U.S. servicemen; another 112 were wounded. The American military was in Beirut as part of a multinational peacekeeping force. The Islamic Jihad, later to become Hezbollah, a militant organization, claimed responsibility for the attack that coincided with the bombing of French military headquarters. (Peter Charlesworth/LightRocket via Getty Images)
The subsequent explosion — immortalized on a clock in the building’s basement at 6:21.26 a.m. — proved to be the largest nonnuclear explosion on record, one that equaled as much as 20,000 pounds of TNT.
The blast claimed the lives of 220 Marines, 18 sailors, and three soldiers.
Another 112 were wounded.
Not since the invasion of Iwo Jima in February 1945 had the Marines lost so many men in a single day. A near-simultaneous bombing a few miles north killed 58 French paratroopers.
Marines rushed into action, attacking the rubble pile with shovels, knives, and their bare hands, shredding fingernails as they dug through the crushed concrete and tangled rebar in search of friends.
What followed is one of the greatest rescue stories in modern history.
Tossed from their racks in nearby buildings and tents, Marines rushed into action, attacking the rubble pile with shovels, knives and their bare hands, shredding fingernails as they dug through the crushed concrete and tangled rebar in search of friends.
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With the medical department largely wiped out, dentists Drs. James Ware and Gilbert Bigelow took charge of the rescue efforts, stabilizing the wounded for medical evacuation to the USS Iwo Jima offshore. Fr. George Pucciarelli and Rabbi Arnold Resnicoff comforted the wounded and administered last rites to the dying.
Many others tunneled through rubble, hauled stretchers, guarded the perimeter and held the hands of injured friends.
Lebanese volunteer rescue workers carry the body of an American Marine from the rubble of the U.S. Marines barracks after it was attacked by a terrorist truck bomb on Oct. 23, 1983. The Islamic Jihad, later to become Hezbollah, a militant organization, claimed responsibility for the attack. (Peter Charlesworth/LightRocket via Getty Images)
American intelligence immediately zeroed in on the attackers, who were Iranian-backed Shiite terrorists, part of a new group that we know today as Hezbollah.
White House infighting blocked a proposed American retaliation, but French and Israeli planes attacked terrorist training camps in the Bekaa Valley.
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America’s response came in January 1984, when it designated Iran as a state-sponsor of terrorism.
The bombing was the opening salvo in a new war, one that American leaders were slow to recognize.
Then-President Ronald Reagan had vowed that America had no reverse gear, but the attack that morning spelled the end of U.S. involvement in Lebanon, though it would take a few more months before the president would order the Marines back aboard ships and bring them home.
The bombing was the opening salvo in a new war, one that American leaders were slow to recognize.
Outside Federal Court on Sept. 7, 2007, in Washington, D.C., Edwin Marian Johnston hold up a photo of her son, U.S. Marine CPL Edward Johnston, who died in the bombing of his Lebanon barracks in October 1983. (Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)
In the immediate aftermath, Marine Corps Commandant General Paul Kelley testified before Congress.
During a moment of frustration, as he grappled with myopic lawmakers, the general asked whether it would take a suicide bomber crashing an airplane for America to wake up to the reality of this new war.
On a September morning 18 years later, that prophetic question would be answered.
40th anniversary of the bombing
Today — Oct. 23 — marks the 40th anniversary of the bombing. Veterans, family and friends will gather in North Carolina near Camp Lejeune to remember, as they have done each year since the attack, those Marines, sailors and soldiers who gave their lives on a mission of peace.
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After he decided to pull the Marines out of Beirut, Reagan sat down with a pen and paper and recorded his thoughts.
His personal secretary later typed his notes and delivered them to White House speechwriters for possible inclusion in a future address, but the president’s private thoughts would never be uttered in public.
Those notes — which James Scott and I found among his personal files for our upcoming book on the attack — read like an anguished apology to the men he sent into harm’s way, men who had lived up to the finest traditions of the United States Marine Corps.
Wrote President Ronald Reagan, in part, after the Oct. 23, 1983, bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, “Yes, our Marines are coming home — but only because they did all that could be done. Semper Fi and God bless them.” Jack Carr and James Scott found these notes among his personal files for their upcoming nonfiction book on the attack, Carr shared with Fox News Digital. (Fox News)
“The goal we sought in that troubled place was worthy of their best and they gave their best. They were no part of our failure to achieve that goal. In the end, hatreds centuries old were too much for all of us,” the president concluded.
“Yes, our Marines are coming home — but only because they did all that could be done. Semper Fi and God bless them.”
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It is rumored that Hezbollah terrorist Imad Mughniyeh was watching his plan unfold in Beirut from a nearby hilltop that morning in late October 1983.
No intelligence service has ever confirmed involvement in the targeted assassination.
Almost 25 years later, on Feb. 12, 2008, in the Kfar Suseh neighborhood of Damascus, Syria, Mughniyeh departed a meeting without his security detail just after 10 p.m.
Not long after, the man responsible for the deaths of more American citizens than any other up until Sept. 11, 2001, approached his silver Mitsubishi Pajero SUV.
Jack Carr led special operations teams as a team leader, platoon commander, troop commander and task unit commander, spending over 20 years in naval special warfare. He is a No. 1 New York Times bestselling author, with a new nonfiction series related to terror events launching in 2024, as Fox News Digital exclusively reported in March 2023. The first in the new series, “Targeted: The 1983 Beirut Barracks Bombing,” is scheduled for a fall 2024 publish by Atria Books/Emily Bestler Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. (Jack Carr)
Reports vary as to exactly what happened next.
Some reports indicate that another vehicle pulled alongside and detonated a shaped charge.
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Others suggest that an intelligence service or proxy had replaced the spare tire on the back of the Pajero with one containing an explosive. Still others report that Mughniyeh slid into his seat behind the wheel and turned the key.
“And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”
An operative watching from the shadows or from afar on a video monitor pressed a button, detonating an improvised explosive device of RDX imbedded with nails and bolts inside the headrest.
No intelligence service has ever confirmed involvement in the targeted assassination, though the operation does bear the hallmarks of one service in particular, one whose former motto came from Proverbs 24:6: “For by wise guidance you can wage your war.”
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There has long been RUMINT — or rumor intelligence — that this service was assisted by another agency headquartered closer to the Beltway, one whose unofficial motto also comes from the Bible, John 8:32: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”
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