Forty one years ago, terrorists drove two trucks laden with explosives into buildings housing a multinational peacekeeping force. One building served as the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut. That Sunday morning on October 23rd, 1983, 241 U.S. service members and 58 French military and civilian personnel were killed in massive explosions. It marked a watershed moment in the strategic, tactical, and political doctrines that informed America’s response to modern terrorism, and the regimes that support it. In an instant of unimaginable violence, the Marine Corps suffered the worst day in its storied history since the carnage of the battle for Iwo Jima.
The Beirut bombing marks the beginning of modern, state sponsored terrorism.
As important as the Beirut bombing of the Marine Corps barracks was, there has never been a full recounting of the human toll taken, an assessment of its paradigm shifting policy implications, or its place in the history of America’s involvement in the Jihadist movement to organize and export wanton acts of naked aggression on a global scale.
Carr told Townhall he selected the Beirut bombing because “it was such a turning point. Its shadow still looms large over U.S. foreign policy…it wasn’t significant just for us…but for the enemy…Iran set the rules on October 23, 1983. Rules we are still playing by today. Rules Israel is still playing by today…that’s why I wanted to start with it. That’s why I think it’s the opening salvo on the war on terror.”
In "Targeted: Beirut," New York Times bestselling authors Jack Carr and James M. Scott have created the seminal work on the genesis of modern terrorism. It’s Carr’s first, sure to be highly successful, foray into the world of non-fiction, and yet another must read addition to Pulitzer Prize finalist Scott’s highly acclaimed body of work.
This is a dream team combination for any military history enthusiast, or fan of legendary thriller writer Tom Clancy’s non-fiction series.
Jack Carr told Townhall that from “a fan perspective, as a kid…I was enjoying all the Tom Clancy novels…so he starts in 1984 with Hunt for Red October…then in the early nineties he diversifies with his first non-fiction [book] called Submarine…so he diversified…I took that as a lesson…I was part of that journey from the fan perspective…so it was very natural. I knew from the start that I’d diversify into non-fiction, and focus on terrorism because it’s been such a big part of my life.”
Carr and Scott created a work that reads like a pulse pounding thriller, but with the weight and gravitas of a historical treatise. It is an easily approachable book, filled with poignancy delivered by perfectly interwoven letters, notes, and interviews with the Marines who were there, many who never made it home, and with the policy makers who anguished over the Beirut gordian knot.
"Targeted: Beirut" opens with the embassy bombing, which occurred in April of that same year. You get to know Marine Corps guards through their personal correspondence, embassy employees through the eyes of their coworkers, and you’ll derive a sense of kinship through the touching details woven throughout the seemingly random threads of time and place.
Then, in a flash of light and searing heat, immovable concrete is transformed into flying debris or pulverized into choking dust. The stores of teargas in the embassy basement are ripped to shreds, filling the air with it’s cloying scent and strangling effect. Disoriented and struggling for escape, employees open familiar office doors to views of cavernous plummet, and broad vistas of blue ocean where coworkers only moments before busied themselves about government business. Classified documents flutter obtusely like deranged doves, settling to the cragged and smoking crater below. Out in the street, people stumble over body parts. These horrors were merely a prelude to the massacre to come in the fall.
History has demonstrated the folly of tasking combat forces with peace-keeping missions. It has trumpeted the futility of committing troops to combat actions that have no stated endgame. Both of these time tested axioms were ignored when policy makers committed young Marines in the 1980’s to the most dangerous city in the world.
Jack Carr told Townhall he had the opportunity to access President Reagan’s diary, and got “a sense of how big a heart he had. That was the thing that stands out to me the most. I know this personally affected him. I talked to Michael Reagan about it and he said it haunted his dad until the day he died…You get a sense of what the executive branch and the advisors must deal with on almost a daily basis when it comes to differing opinions and how you sift through [them] in order to make a decision.”
Hundreds of pages of personal letters, and hours of taped recordings sent back home, create an intimacy with real stories of personal trial and the horror of asymmetrical warfare. Carr and Scott feel deeply about the book being a tribute, that it should honor those who sacrificed so much in the dust and heat of Lebanon — caught in a vortex of Islamic, nominally Christian, and Druse factions. Stirred by Syrian, Israeli, and Iranian machinations.
"Targeted: Beirut" is something special. It accomplishes its author’s goals of memorializing the heroism of our armed forces, confronted with an impossibly amorphous mission. It is written to engage the heart and soul, expertly telling a story which cannot be ignored because it is rendered in living color.
This book should be on the shelf of every policy maker in Washington, D.C. Those bureaucrats who neglect these vivid cautionary stories will face the ignominious fate reserved for those who stupidly blunder past some of history’s most important jewels. "Targeted: Beirut" is a keystone to understanding the destabilized and complex world that confronts us. It’s on sale today at your favorite bookseller. See my complete podcast interview with Jack Carr here.