At 6:22 on the morning of Sunday, October 23, 1983, a yellow Mercedes stake-bed truck turned into the public parking lot at Beirut International Airport, picked up speed, and drove through the wire into the headquarters of Battalion Landing Team 1/8. About 350 Marines, sailors and soldiers were asleep inside. The building was four stories of reinforced concrete. Seconds later it was a pile of rubble. Two hundred forty-one Americans died: 220 Marines, 18 sailors and 3 soldiers. No single day had cost the Marine Corps that many since Iwo Jima.
Peacekeepers at the Airport
The Marines first went ashore in Beirut in August 1982 as part of a Multinational Force with French and Italian troops. Their job was to see the PLO fighters, Palestine Liberation Organization, the umbrella group for Palestinian armed factions, led at the time by Yasser Arafat, evacuated from the city. They pulled out in September, then came back weeks later after the assassination of Lebanon’s president-elect, Bashir Gemayel, and the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila camps. The British joined the force in early 1983.
The mission was presence. The Marines were to be seen, stay neutral and support the Lebanese government. By the summer of 1983 nobody in the hills above the airport saw them as neutral. On April 18 a car bomb had already gutted the U.S. Embassy in West Beirut, killing 63 people, 17 of them Americans. Through August and September the airport perimeter drew artillery, rocket and sniper fire, and Marines were killed in their positions.
The unit on the ground that fall was the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit, about 1,800 men out of Camp Lejeune under Col. Tim Geraghty. Its ground element was the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines. The battalion had its headquarters in a former aviation administration building on the airport grounds, and a large share of the BLT slept there. The sentries stood post under peacetime rules of engagement. Their weapons were not loaded.
Sunday Morning
Lance Cpl. Eddie DiFranco had the post on the driver’s side as the truck came past. He later said the driver “looked right at me…smiled, that’s it.” Sgt. Stephen Russell, the sergeant of the guard, saw it coming at the building’s entrance and ran, yelling “Hit the deck!” The truck reached the center of the building and the driver set off his load.
Investigators put the blast at the equivalent of about six tons of TNT. The FBI laboratory called it the largest conventional explosion it had examined. The building lifted off its foundation and came straight down. Maj. Bob Melton, the MAU’s logistics officer, went to find Col. Geraghty and told him the BLT building was gone.
About ten minutes later a second suicide driver hit the building in West Beirut that housed French paratroopers of the 1st Parachute Chasseur Regiment. Guards shot him, but the charge still went off. Fifty-eight French soldiers died.
The digging started right away. Marines and sailors went into the slabs with shovels, jacks and their bare hands, and British troops from the multinational force came over to help. They pulled survivors out for days, sometimes under sniper fire. More than a hundred men came out of that building wounded.
What Came After
Two days later, on October 25, the 22nd MAU went ashore on Grenada for Operation Urgent Fury. That unit had left North Carolina on October 18 bound for Lebanon to relieve the 24th MAU, and it was diverted to the Caribbean on the way. When Grenada was done it sailed on to Beirut and landed later in November.
The Defense Department’s commission, chaired by retired Adm. Robert L. J. Long, reported that December. It faulted the security around the compound, the decision to house roughly a quarter of the force in one structure, and the order that kept sentries from loading their weapons. On February 7, 1984, President Reagan ordered the Marines to begin leaving Lebanon, and most of the multinational force was gone by the end of that month.
The 22nd MAU relieved the 24th that November, and the 24th went home to Camp Lejeune. In 1988 the Marine Corps renamed its amphibious units Marine Expeditionary Units, and the 24th MEU carries Beirut in its history. So does the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines.
The phrase that stayed was “They Came in Peace.” Survivors put it on a makeshift memorial in Beirut. On October 23, 1986, it went onto the Beirut Memorial outside Camp Johnson in Jacksonville, North Carolina, along with 273 names. Every October 23 there is an observance there at Lejeune Memorial Gardens, and Beirut veterans come back for it.
Beirut Patches
If you or a loved one served in Lebanon with the Multinational Force, or with the MAUs that rotated through Beirut, Popular Patch has patches to remember that service. Check out patches like our Marine Corps Beirut Lebanon They Came In Peace Patch, Multinational Forces Beirut-Lebanon 1982-1983 Patch, 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit Patch, and much more by browsing our inventory.
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