At 6:21 a.m. on October 23, 1983, a suicide truck bomber crashed into the U.S. Marine headquarters in Beirut. The explosion, the largest non-nuclear blast the FBI ever investigated, collapsed the building, killing 241 soldiers, sailors, and Marines.
Orchestrated by a fledgling terrorist group that today we know as Hezbollah, the attack proved to be the opening salvo of what became a four-decade war that saw American troops do battle in the mountains of Afghanistan and the streets of Iraq.
Similar violence once again dominates world headlines ever since Hamas terrorists killed nearly 1,200 Israelis last October 7. That conflict has grown to include Hezbollah as cross border clashes with Israel have killed hundreds and led to the displacement of thousands more.
The U.S. is now hustling to prevent this from spiraling into a larger regional war, a challenge that has grown more difficult in the wake of Israel’s attack using Hezbollah’s pagers and radios.
This most recent turmoil and the attack against American troops four decades earlier share a tragic commonality – Iran.
The seeds of this violence were planted in the early 1980s in the fertile soil of Lebanon, which was then torn by civil war and sectarian violence. Into that quagmire landed the U.S. Marines, sent in the fall of 1982 on a peacekeeping mission.
But American troops were not the only ones to arrive in Lebanon.
Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, the Shiite religious leader who rose to power in 1979, sent an army of 800 elite Revolutionary Guards into Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.
Those guardsmen fanned out through the impoverished Shiite communities in southern Lebanon, attending mosques, giving speeches, and recruiting disenfranchised young men to fight against American and Israeli forces.
These efforts helped produce two homegrown Shiite terror organizations, Islamic Amal and the Islamic Jihad Organization. These two Iranian-backed groups, however, would soon be known simply as Hezbollah or the Party of God.
Their first strike against America came on April 18, 1983, when a suicide car bomber crashed into the front of the American Embassy in Beirut. The blast collapsed the entire front of the building, killing 63 people including 17 Americans.
But that attack paled in comparison to the one that would follow 188 days later.
At dawn that Sunday morning, a bomber in a Mercedes truck crashed through security and penetrated the lobby of the four-story Battalion Landing Team headquarters. Inside, some 350 American soldiers, sailors, and Marines slumbered.
The blast, which investigators later determined exceeded 12,000 pounds of TNT, collapsed the building into a pile of broken concrete and twisted rebar. “It was,” as one survivor later recounted, “like every atom in the universe blew apart.”
The explosion had not only pulverized the structure but obliterated human bodies, littering the wreckage with arms and legs as well as torsos and heads. Flesh likewise dangled from the limbs of nearby trees, many denuded of foliage. Scattered amid the debris, rescuers discovered dead birds, killed in flight.
The abundance of human remains, blood, and entrails overwhelmed the senses. “You could smell guts,” recalled then Private David Madaras. “Bodies were lying all over,” added Gunnery Sergeant Herman Lange, another rescuer. “People were trapped under the concrete. I could hear them screaming.”
Those screams motivated Marines to launch one of the greatest rescue stories in modern memory, as troops attacked the rubble pile with shovels, Ka-Bar knives, and their bare hands. For those Marines trapped under ground, it was hell.
Some never heard the blast or even felt themselves falling. They had gone to sleep only to wake up trapped beneath cots, desks, and toppled walls that for the moment shielded them from the onerous weight of the wreckage.
Included among those was Chaplain Danny Wheeler, who had lived on the fourth floor of the building. The 35-year-old father of three woke up pinned in the rubble in an A-frame pocket created by two collapsed walls.
Wheeler yelled for help. As one hour turned to two and then three, his voice went hoarse. He distracted himself with the recollection of the plots of Louis L’Amour novels he had read. Then, in a moment of anguish, he argued with God.
“So this is what you plan to do?” he asked. “Kill me?”
If he died, Wheeler wondered, what would happen to his wife and three young children, ages 2, 5, and 7? Who would take care of them?
“It’s going to be all right,” he felt God assure him. A sense of calm washed over Wheeler. “I wasn’t angry anymore,” the chaplain recalled. “I was at peace.”
Not long after, rescuers above spotted his purple Advent stole, a cloth religious vestment similar to a scarf. Marines started digging down through the rubble. “The next thing I knew, I felt a hand on my hand,” Wheeler said. “I held it.”
Wheeler, who had spent more than five hours entombed in a concrete crypt, would be the last soul delivered alive from wreckage. He was miraculously unharmed.
All told, the bombing killed 220 Marines, 18 sailors, and three soldiers. Another 112 were wounded. Back in Washington, the attack horrified President Ronald Reagan, who initially resisted pressure to pull American forces out of Lebanon.
That changed in February 1984 when the last of the Lebanese national government and military collapsed. The United States pulled its peacekeeping force out, but never retaliated for the attacks on either the embassy or the Marines.
Iran learned a lesson from America’s handling of Lebanon. For the relatively inexpensive price of a truck, some explosives and a single life, it could derail a major superpower and suffer no consequences.
As a result, Hezbollah has grown to become the dominant political party in Lebanon. Just like Hamas and the Houthi rebels, it continues to serve as a proxy of Iran. All three forces are a menace to peace in the region.
Colonel Timothy Geraghty, who was the commander of the Marines in October 1983, said the continuing violence originates with the tragedy that befell his men at daybreak on a Sunday morning four decades ago. “The failure of the United States to retaliate against this act of war sent the wrong message to the terrorist state powerbrokers,” he said. “Our timidity whetted the jihadists’ appetite.”
Jack Carr and James M. Scott are coauthors of Targeted: Beirut: The 1983 Marine Barracks Bombing and the Untold Origin Story of the War On Terror, which will be released Sept. 24 by Atria/Emily Bestler Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.