The 1983 Beirut Barracks Bombing and the Current U.S. Retreat from Syria
Robin WrightOctober 23, 2019
Thirty-six years ago, a yellow Mercedes truck loaded with twelve thousand pounds of explosives sped into the barracks of U.S. Marine peacekeepers in Beirut. It was 6:22 A.M. Lance Corporal Eddie DiFranco, on guard duty nearby, was the only one who saw the bomber. “He looked right at me, smiled,” DiFranco said later. “Soon as I saw the truck, I knew what was going to happen.” The truck set off the largest non-nuclear explosion on Earth since the Second World War. The four-story concrete building imploded; marines were crushed like paper dolls. The collapse set off a brown mushroom cloud over the Lebanese capital. The thundering explosion woke up everyone, including me, as I was slumbering on a balmy Sunday morning. Two hundred and forty-one marines, most of them asleep because reveille was still eight minutes away, were killed. It was the largest loss of U.S. military life in a single incident since Iwo Jima. A special memorial was established at Arlington Cemetery for the victims.
“The Marine bombing was the Pearl Harbor of the Middle East,” Fred Hof, a former U.S. Army attaché in Beirut who investigated the bombing as part of the Long Commission, reflected this week. The attack—the deadliest of three suicide bombings against the military and two U.S. Embassies in Beirut over sixteen months—marked a turning point for American engagement in the region. Four months later, the United States opted to withdraw abruptly from Beirut.