Aftermath in Bloody Beirut

By James Kelly

Vows to stay, as the search for the missing goes on

Days after the slaughter, the scene remained so ghastly that the eye instinctively sought out relics of life among the debris. Here was a dog tag bent out of shape by the blast, there a shred of a letter or birthday card from home. Scattered everywhere were photographs: of uniformed sons between doting parents, of laughing girlfriends and smiling wives, of babies newly born. The personal effects made the rows of bodies laid out on the ground and covered with blankets even more poignant, for they were reminders that each Marine pulled out of the rubble had his own private existence, peopled by all those who knew and cared about him.

The loved ones back home needed no reminders. As rescue workers clawed through the smoking ruins last week of what had once been the Battalion Landing Team Headquarters of the U.S. Marines, and the toll grew bleaker, relatives and friends kept vigil across the country, awaiting word. For most, the news came only after several wrenching days of uncertainty. All of a sudden, the dreaded figure in uniform would appear and say, "The Secretary of the Navy has asked that I inform you..."

At week's end the count stood at 229 dead and 81 wounded. It was the highest number of American casualties in a single day since Jan. 13, 1968, when 246 servicemen were killed throughout Viet Nam at the start of the Tet offensive. In the heart of West Beirut, about two miles from the airport, searchers hunted through the remains of a nine-story building housing French paratroopers that had been hit minutes after the airport bombing; the French toll was 56 dead, with two missing and 15 injured.

The double act of horror left a tangle of questions. Both truck drivers blew themselves to smithereens when they swerved madly into their targets and detonated their deadly cargoes. But who was behind the attacks? Why was security not more stringent, especially after a nearly identical attack hit the U.S. embassy in Beirut last April, killing 63 people? Can the safety of the Marines now be ensured?

One goal of the attacks was clear: to drive out of Lebanon the troops of the U.S., France and the two other members of the Multi-National Force, Italy and Britain. In words and deeds, the four nations reaffirmed their intention to stay. French President Francois Mitterrand flew into Beirut on Monday to underscore his nation's commitment. He was followed two days later by Vice President George Bush, who visited the site of the carnage wearing a helmet and flak jacket. On Thursday, Secretary of State George Shultz conferred with his French, Italian and British counterparts in the Paris suburb La Celle-Saint-Cloud. After a five-hour meeting under unusually tight security, at a secluded 17th century chateau, French Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson reiterated "the support of our governments for the Multi-National Force." In his nationwide address on television Thursday evening, President Ronald Reagan made the most forceful pitch for a continuation of the U.S. presence in Lebanon. Said he: "We cannot and will not dishonor them now, and the sacrifices they made, by failing to remain as faithful to the cause of freedom and the pursuit of peace as they have been."

Throughout the week, the site of those sacrifices was slowly, even tenderly, pulled apart in the search for bodies. As bulldozers grumbled back and forth, cranes hoisted away slabs of concrete, their steel rods bent crazily and stuck with bits of uniforms. The Marines were aided in their grim task not only by Navy Seabees from ships of the U.S. Sixth Fleet off the Lebanese coast, but by Italian, Norwegian and Lebanese rescuers, most of them volunteers. The searchers clambered over the ruins with picks and shovels, but just as often they would fall to their knees and scoop out debris with their hands. Orders, screamed out in any of several languages, often went unheard. At night the wreckage looked especially eerie as workers kept digging under the harsh glare of floodlights.

Efforts quickly were concentrated on separating the four floors of the building, once some 50 feet high but now crunched into about ten feet of rubble. Once a chunk of floor had been lifted away, a team of workers would sift the debris for corpses and personal effects. Some bodies were sandwiched between floors and ceilings and could be retrieved only by cutting off an arm or a leg. Rescuers emerged carrying blood-soaked buckets filled with limbs and tattered flesh. The Marines kept insisting that several comrades might still be found alive in the basement, but such hopes seemed futile. By the end of the first day, the searchers had donned masks' to ward off the stench of death.

Every so often, sniper fire from the neighboring Shi'ite Muslim slums would ring out, sending the searchers scurrying for shelter. Then, two days after the blast, came terrifying news. A rumor spread that three vehicles reportedly laden with high explosives were cruising the neighborhood. The Marines were immediately placed on "Condition One," the highest state of alert. Huge amphibious personnel carriers blocked off the roads leading to the base, while the highway curving past the airport was barricaded with boulders of concrete. Several hours later, without explanation, the alert was downgraded.

That same day, the Marine Commandant, General Paul X. Kelley, flew from Washington to inspect the damage. Accompanied by Colonel Timothy Geraghty, commander of the Marines in Beirut, Kelley watched silently as two more bodies were dragged out of the ruins. The next day, under a tight cloak of secrecy, Bush flew on Air Force Two from Washington to Cyprus, where he boarded a helicopter for the Iwo Jima. His arrival in Beirut was delayed for more than an hour when Marine positions east of the airport came under mortar attack from a Druze stronghold in the hills above. The Marines returned the fire, and the shelling died.

After his helicopter had landed, Bush sloshed through the mud to watch the rescue operations. Flanked by dozens of Marines and nine Secret Service men, he watched as workers jackhammered what was the remains of the building's second floor. He awarded the Purple Heart to two survivors, and met with President Amin Gemayel at his palace overlooking the city. Later he told TIME how his three hours in Beirut had moved him. "One is never prepared for the magnitude of what happened," he said softly. "You're standing there in a crater looking at one-inch reinforcing rods twisted like spaghetti. On the more positive side, I asked a Marine to whom I had just given a Purple Heart what he looked forward to. 'Well,' he said, 'I'll see my family soon. I also want to be with my outfit, to be back on my base in Beirut.' "

Many of the dead Marines were naked or dressed only in jogging shorts, without their dog tags, making identification difficult. Worse yet, most of the battalion's personnel records and dental charts were destroyed in the blast. To ease the worry of families back home, the Marines were later permitted free five-minute telephone calls home.

Across town, the same fevered search was going on at the French paratroopers' building. One dead officer was found bent over his bootlaces, as if he had been tying them. On Thursday evening, a memorial service was held at the French Ambassador's residence. Two rows of 28 coffins, each draped with the French Tricolor, were lined up in the courtyard. Under a glow cast by Jeep headlights, the military trumpets sounded as the French chaplain sprinkled each coffin with holy water. At the end, the remaining soldiers sang La Chanson du Para, a favorite paratrooper hymn, whose melancholy lines floated slowly into the evening air.

As the search went on, many Marines, stunned and angry, swapped memories about those killed. One Navy corpsman had just married a Lebanese woman. He had returned from his honeymoon a day early, on Sunday, just in time for a rendezvous with death. Some recalled the Marine staff sergeant who a few days before the attack was proudly showing a videotape of his newborn son, whom he had never seen and now never will. Few could avoid pointing out that the tour of duty for most of those killed had almost ended, that they were scheduled to leave Beirut in a few weeks for the States.

The most haunting tale belonged to Lance Corporal Robert Calhoun, who was stationed on the roof of the building when the truck came hurtling across the parking lot. "The explosion hit, and everything started falling," Calhoun recalled. "I thought, 'This is how I am going to die.' " Afterward, Calhoun said, he talked with the sentry who had manned the entry gate bypassed by the truck. Said Calhoun: "He says just as the man went by, he'll always remember, the guy was smiling."

Other Marines spoke of their frustrated desire for revenge. "I think we ought to start shooting first," said one. Pointing across to the nearby slum Hayes Sullum, the source of sniper fire that had killed two Marines a fortnight earlier, he added, "You see guys running around there with AK-47 rifles and grenades. We should hit them." Yet others realized that punishment should be meted out only to those directly responsible for the attacks and that finding them would be impossible. "We just want to hit back, but hit back at whom?" asked another Marine. "We can't behave like them, and we won't."

Although some of the wounded were helicoptered to the Iwo Jima off the coast of Lebanon and treated in the ship's operating rooms, most were flown directly to U.S. military hospitals in West Germany and Italy or to a British Royal Air Force hospital on Cyprus.* The most seriously injured were sent to West Germany. When word of the explosion was flashed to the U.S. Air Force Hospital at Wiesbaden, where the U.S. hostages in Iran were first treated after their release in 1981, a trio of American doctors immediately flew to Beirut to accompany the victims back on the five-hour flight.

As soon as the planes landed in Frankfurt, their passengers were hustled into Black Hawk helicopters and dispatched to Wiesbaden and two other U.S. military hospitals. Of the 61 injured who were eventually flown to West Germany, about a dozen required major surgery, while others needed broken bones set or dirt and shards of glass cleaned out of hastily bandaged wounds. By Friday, most were in fair condition, and eight felt well enough to fly home to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington.

Others were not so fortunate. About 20 of them suffered severe burns or were missing arms or legs. Two victims were so badly burned that they were flown on to Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. One Marine, with burns over 95% of his body, died in West Germany, while another died en route. At the U.S. Army Medical Center at Landstuhl, southwest of Frankfurt, where the most badly wounded were taken, the patients said nothing or spoke in monosyllables. As the shock wore off, according to Colonel Richard Swengel, the hospital's chief of neurosurgery, "a lot of their fears and anxieties started coming out." How many were hurt? What had happened to their buddies? When would they get out of the hospital?

The most poignant moment occurred at Wiesbaden, when General Kelley, on his way to Beirut, stopped by to award the Purple Heart to the survivors. As Kelley later recounted the incident at a press conference, he was pinning the medals to the blue hospital gowns of the wounded when he came to a Marine "with more tubes going in and out of his body than I have ever seen in one body." Lance Corporal Jeffrey Nashton of Jacksonville, N.C., reached up and grabbed Kelley's four stars to make sure he was who he said he was. In response to Nashton's signals, a pad of paper was put in his hand. He wrote, "Semper Fi,"short for the Marine motto Semper Fidelis (Always Faithful). Reagan was so moved by the account that he repeated Kelley's words verbatim during his televised speech last week. Added Reagan: "It says more than any of us could ever hope to say about the gallantry and heroism of these young men."

As the week went on, the wounded spoke about the tragic night, about miraculous escapes and comrades suddenly gone. Although the Marines appeared alert and energetic, their shaking hands betrayed their emotions. Lance Corporal Mike Balcolm, 20, of Vernon, N.Y., was lying awake on his bed on the fourth floor when the bomb went off. He blacked out; when he revived, he found himself pinned under a jumble of concrete. After his cries for help went unheeded, he grabbed a wire and painfully pulled himself through a crack in the rubble. While Balcolm was being treated at a makeshift hospital, however, his dog tags were found in the wreckage. He was declared dead, and his relatives were notified. Balcolm did not learn about the mix-up until he called his brother the next day. Said Balcolm: "My mother thought a miracle had occurred."

At the U.S. naval hospital at Agnano, near Naples, Lance Corporal Wayne Harris, 22, of Richmond, recounted how he was trapped for four hours. "First I was screaming a lot, but then I got worried about losing my air. Finally I just passed out and came to in the back of a truck." Ways of escape could be serendipitous as well as terrifying. Lance Corporal Adam Webb, 20, of Jacobsburg, Ohio, one of four guards on the roof, glimpsed the speeding truck as it disappeared below him. Webb felt the roof crack, then rode it down the four stories to the ground. Sliding off the concrete slab just before it crashed, the stunned Marine wound up sitting upright in a Jeep parked near by.

Corporal James Hines, 22, of Forest City, Iowa, was not even in the building but was sleeping in a tent about 20 yds. away. "I heard somebody yell to stop the truck, then I saw a flash of light." Entangled in debris, with dirt raining down, Hines squirmed his legs free and began kicking wildly. Rescuers spotted the legs and pulled him out before he suffocated. Did he feel lucky? "I think the chaplain put that rather well," Hines said quietly. "He called us 'the chosen.' "

The forlorn return of the unchosen began last Saturday, when the first 15 bodies arrived at Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware. As weeping family members stood by the coffins in a cavernous aircraft hangar, General Kelley spoke a few words of praise. Then the familiar strain of the Marine hymn filled the makeshift chapel.

As memorial services for the fallen were held across the country, the Administration mulled over a tactical redeployment to make its forces in Lebanon less vulnerable. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger hinted last week that more of the U.S.'s 1,600 men might be stationed offshore. Another option calls for moving the Marines to higher ground east of the airport, but the hills above Beirut are so crisscrossed with rivalries that the men might be at greater risk there.

Reports circulated in Washington last week that shortly before the bombing, U.S. intelligence officials passed word to Marine officers in Beirut that a terrorist attack was imminent. In addition, the French investigative weekly Le Canard Enchaine reported that dissident Iranian military officers had informed French intelligence services several weeks ago that a commando squad of six terrorists had left Tehran for Beirut. The purpose: to attack French targets. Officials beefed up security at the French embassy, but apparently no one thought the paratrooper building would fall victim to a suicide mission. According to the paper, French authorities told the Americans about the Iranian threat. Though he did not comment on these specific reports, Marine Spokesman Major Robert Jordan pointed out that the Marines in Beirut received a steady stream of threats. Said Jordan: "Each time, we have taken every measure we thought prudent."

That still leaves the question of who was behind the bloody Sunday. The Lebanese government appointed an eleven-member commission to investigate the disaster, while Washington and Paris pursued their own inquiries. Though the question may never be answered to everyone's satisfaction, a good case can be made that a group of fanatical Lebanese Shi'ite Muslims, backed by elements of the Iranian regime of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, and perhaps sanctioned by the Syrian government of President Hafez Assad, was responsible. Reagan, for his part, has few doubts. At a meeting of Jewish supporters in the White House last week, the President reportedly said that "the evidence I have is sufficient that this last horrendous act involved Iranian terrorists."

The drivers of the two bomb-laden trucks are believed to have been Lebanese, if only because it would have been more difficult for others to get through the nearby Lebanese Army checkpoints. The dead drivers and their co-conspirators were thought to be members of two offshoots of the main Shi'ite organization, Amal. Both splinter groups, Hizballah (Party of God) and Islamic Amal, are based in the ancient Lebanese city of Baalbek, which lies in the eastern Bekaa Valley in an area occupied by Syria. They are protected by the Syrian army and by a group of some 800 Iranian Revolutionary Guards whom Khomeini sent to Lebanon last year to fight the invading Israelis and to establish an "Islamic republic" in eastern Lebanon.

Hussein Musawi, a Lebanese who leads Islamic Amal, held a press conference in Baalbek last week to deny that his followers had taken part in the attacks. But he added, "I salute this good act, and I bow to the spirits of the martyrs." Hizballah is one of the prime suspects in the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut last April in which 63 people, including 17 Americans, were killed.

The Iranian connection to the Beirut conspiracy is quite plausible. Khomeini still refers to the U.S. as the "great Satan." His government is also furious at the French for selling five Super Etendard fighter-bombers to Iraq, with which Iran is at war. President Sayed Ali Khamene'i and Prime Minister Mir Hussein Moussavi have vowed "retribution" against the U.S. and France. The Iranian newspaper Ettela'at published a cartoon depicting Uncle Sam and French President Mitterrand being crushed to death by a huge hand bearing the legend "Lebanese Muslims."

The Syrians knew the structure and layouts of the Marine and French headquarters that were destroyed because they had previously occupied both buildings. The Syrians, in addition, control the region of eastern Lebanon where the Shi'ite fanatics are based. Recalling that the truck that destroyed the U.S. Marine headquarters carried some 2,000 Ibs. of high explosives, former director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Richard Helms notes, "You can't go down to the corner drugstore and buy a ton of TNT. Syrian assistance was probably a factor."

Besides sharing Iran's hatred of Iraq, Syrian President Assad has received something from Khomeini that is exceedingly precious to him: recognition of the religious legitimacy of the minority Alawite Muslim sect, to which the Syrian President and his loyalist adherents belong. It is altogether possible, Helms believes, that the Syrians are helping the pro-Iranian terrorists in Lebanon as a way of repaying the Ayatullah for giving the Alawites his seal of approval. Both Syria and Iran denied any role in the bombings, though newspapers in the two countries called the attack justified.

Ultimately, it is the Lebanese who will have to find the solution to their fractured country's problems. In reiterating their intention to stand by their commitments, the foreign ministers of the countries participating in the Multi-National Force stressed that they expected the Lebanese to stop their chronic warring. Said Shultz: "The leaders of Lebanon owe the people of Lebanon and the international community a real effort to pull themselves together."

A major test comes this week, when Lebanon's multiple factions are due to begin their long-awaited national reconciliation talks in Geneva. President Gemayel, a scion of the Christian Phalange, has repeatedly pledged to give more power to the Muslim majority, but he remains dangerously squeezed between Muslim expectations and the reluctance of his own supporters to accept a smaller slice of national authority. Syria, as ever, remains the spoiler, poised to wreck any agreement that is not to its liking.

The signs last week were mixed. Gemayel telephoned Syrian President Assad and invited him to send a delegate to the conference; it was the first formal contact between the two countries since last spring, when Gemayel earned Assad's enmity by signing a troop withdrawal accord with Israel. On the other hand, the Progressive Socialist Party, led by Druze Chieftain Walid Jumblatt, issued a fresh set of conditions for the talks, including a complete halt to cease-fire violations and a lifting of the nightly curfew in Beirut. Jumblatt himself hinted that the talks might break up over a dispute as picky as the seating. Before leaving for Switzerland, Jumblatt and his fellow leaders in the antigovernment National Salvation Front met with Assad for six hours in Damascus to devise their strategy for the conference.

On the eve of the talks, the mood in Beirut was not so much sad as fearful. The strike at the Marine compound, like the mortal attack against the U.S. embassy last April, demonstrated that not even a superpower is safe from violence in Lebanon. A former Lebanese Cabinet official argued that such tragedies give the U.S. greater leverage in the country's affairs. "The Americans have over 200 dead. That earns you the right to speak up," he said. "The U.S. has paid the price of admission." If the ticket costs this much, Washington--and the American people--may eventually decide that attendance is not worth it.

--By James Kelly.

Reported by Barry Hillenbrand and William Stewart/Beirut

* Israel offered to treat the wounded at Rambam Hospital in Haifa, which has long experience in handling war injuries and is about 30 minutes away from Beirut by helicopter, but the help was turned down. U.S. military officials decided, correctly as it turned out, that their own facilities, including medical evacuation planes, were sufficient. Washington may also have felt that acceptance of Israeli aid, if it was not crucial, would needlessly anger the Arab world. The U.S. Marines did accept body bags from the Israelis.

With reporting by Barry Hillenbrand, William Stewart/Beirut This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.