8
They Came in Peace
—Inscription on the memorial to the 241 Marines and other servicemen killed in Beirut in Camp Johnson, Jacksonville, North Carolina
Funny country, Lebanon. The minute one army packed up and rushed out, another one swaggered in and took its place. There always seemed to be someone knocking on the door to get in—and someone inside dying to get out. Unlike the PLO and the Israelis, though, the U.S. Marines came to Beirut as “peacekeepers”; they even had a list of ten rules governing when they could fire their weapons, to prove it.
Whenever I think back on the Marines’ sojourn in Lebanon, which lasted from August 1982 until February 1984, I am reminded of a remarkable scene in Tadeusz Borowski’s book about the Nazi concentration camps, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Borowski, a Polish poet and political prisoner of the Nazis, described how, at the end of World War II, a large group of Auschwitz inmates got hold of a Nazi SS guard and began to rip him apart, just as their concentration camp was being liberated by American GI’s.
“At last they seized [the SS guard] inside the German barracks, just as he was about to climb over the window ledge,” wrote Borowski. “In absolute silence they pulled him down to the floor and panting with hate dragged him into a dark alley. Here, closely surrounded by a silent mob, they began tearing at him with greedy hands. Suddenly from the camp gate a whispered warning was passed from one mouth to another. A company of [American] soldiers, their bodies leaning forward, their rifles on the ready, came running down the camp’s main road, weaving between the clusters of men in stripes standing in the way. The crowd scattered and vanished inside the blocks.”
But not without the Nazi guard. The prisoners dragged the German soldier inside their blockhouse, put him on a bunk, covered him with a blanket, and then sat on top of him—looking innocent and waiting for the American soldiers to show up.
“There was a stir at the door,” wrote Borowski. “A young American officer with a tin helmet on his head entered the block and looked with curiosity at the bunks and the tables. He wore a freshly pressed uniform; his revolver was hanging down, strapped in an open holster that dangled against his thigh … . The men in the barracks fell silent … . ‘Gentlemen,’ said the officer with a friendly smile … . ‘I know, of course, that after what you have gone through and after what you have seen, you must feel a deep hate for your tormentors. But we, the soldiers of America, and you, the people of Europe, have fought so that law should prevail over lawlessness. We must show our respect for the law. I assure you that the guilty will be punished, in this camp as well as in all the others.’ … The men in the bunks broke into applause and shouts. In smiles and gestures they tried to convey their friendly approval of the young man from across the ocean … . The American … wished the prisoners a good rest and an early reunion with their dear ones. Accompanied by a friendly hum of voices, he left the block and proceeded to the next. Not until after he had visited all the blocks and returned with the soldiers to his headquarters did we pull our man off the bunk—where covered with blankets and half-smothered with the weight of our bodies he lay gagged, his face buried in the straw mattress—and dragged him on to the cement floor under the stove, where the entire bunk, grunting and growling with hatred, trampled him to death.”
So it was with the Marines in Beirut—good, milk-faced boys who stepped into the middle of a passion-filled conflict, of whose history they were totally innocent and whose venom they could not even imagine. For a few months after the Marines arrived in Beirut the Lebanese natives sheathed their swords, lowered their voices, and sat on their hatreds, while these clean-cut men from a distant land spoke to them about the meaning of democracy, freedom, and patriotism. After a while, though, the speech got boring, and the wild earth beckoned. Unlike the concentration-camp victims of Borowski’s tale, however, the Lebanese would not wait for the American lecture to end before returning to their feuding ways, so familiar, so instinctual.
So the Marines got an education they never bargained for, and like everyone else who went to Beirut, they got it the hard way.
In my observations of the Marines in Beirut, one of the things that always fascinated me was how concerned Americans were that our boys ate properly—a concern that at times reached mammoth proportions, as in the case of the melting burritos.
“We didn’t know who they came from,” said Lieutenant Colonel George T. Schmidt of the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit (MAU), the last Marine contingent to serve in Beirut, referring to a surprise airlift of Mexican food. “But the day we got [to Beirut] you can imagine the confusion. Right in the middle of that we get a phone call that there is a package at the airport for [us]. We get down there and it’s about three thousand burritos. We didn’t know who they came from—nothing about them. They were dry, [and] it was hot, so we sent a guy down to get them and [bring them] back, [but] in all the confusion they melted. Finally our doctor went down and stuck his thermometer in [them] and said, ‘Hey, these things are gone.’ So we dumped them. We [didn’t tell] the press, because the press had made such a big deal about the [two thousand] hamburgers [someone sent from] Minneapolis. They were going to have a ball finding out that we trashed three thousand or five thousand burritos, or whatever it was. To this day I could not tell you where the burritos came from. There was some generous person in the United States that worried about the boys eating right.”3
The burritos were only the beginning. The Marine spokesman’s office at their Beirut International Airport headquarters became crammed to the ceiling with cardboard boxes stuffed with chocolate-chip cookies, brownies, and homemade cakes, while the walls were decorated with 50-foot-long letters signed by whole schools or neighborhoods wishing the leathernecks godspeed in their mission. I used to love visiting the Marine spokesmen just for the opportunity to munch on their baked goods, although, I have to admit, the practice always left me feeling strangely out of sync with the wider Beirut environment, as though I were nibbling Betty Crocker brownies in Dante’s Inferno. I always half expected one of these brownies to blow up in my hand. I had been in Beirut too long. Not so the Marines. The way they inhaled those goodies from Mom always symbolized for me the trusting naivete with which they walked through Lebanon’s revolving door.
If there is one sentiment that tied together everything the Marines did right in Lebanon and everything they did wrong, it was naive, innocent optimism. It showed itself right from the beginning in how the Marines got roped into the Lebanon operation in the first place. One of the great ironies of the Marine mission in Beirut was the fact that the man who first suggested sending American troops to Lebanon was the man who would pass them on the way out—PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat. During the negotiations over the PLO’s withdrawal from Beirut in the summer of 1982, Arafat, according to American diplomats, insisted that American—along with French and Italian—troops be involved in overseeing the departure of his men from Israeli-besieged West Beirut. Arafat was no fool. He understood that an American umbrella covering the PLO’s withdrawal was the best insurance against Israel breaking its promise not to invade West Beirut just as the PLO was letting down its guard to leave.
So, to facilitate the PLO’s withdrawal, President Reagan agreed to dispatch an 800-man Marine contingent to Beirut harbor on August 25, 1982. The American troops were scheduled to remain for up to thirty days, according to the withdrawal agreement worked out between American Special Envoy Philip C. Habib and the PLO, through Lebanese intermediaries. However, because the evacuation of the 14,000 PLO and Syrian fighters was successfully completed by the first week in September, and because Habib was determined to make sure that the Marines did not slip into any kind of open-ended mission in Beirut, the President ordered the leathernecks withdrawn on September 10, 1982—two weeks before the thirty-day limit. The French and Italians were quick to follow.
None of them had an inkling of how soon they would be back.
On September 14, only five days after he had reviewed a Marine honor guard, Lebanon’s President-elect Bashir Gemayel was blown apart and Israel invaded West Beirut. The Sabra and Shatila massacre followed two days later. The pictures of butchered Palestinian bodies strewn about the filthy streets of Sabra and Shatila sent shock waves reverberating all the way to Washington. The message was loud and clear: Had the Americans not been in such a hurry to get the Marines out before the thirty-day deadline expired, the massacre never would have happened. The Reagan Administration felt compelled—as it should have—to return to Beirut out of an overwhelming sense of guilt. However, it could never admit that to the American people, who were not aware of the Administration’s promises to Arafat that the Israelis would not enter West Beirut. As a senior member of the American embassy staff in Beirut at the time put it, “The Marines were sent back to Beirut because we felt guilty about what happened in the camps. We couldn’t say that, of course. So at the time that we decided to send them back, Washington developed a rationale for their presence.”
That rationale was formulated in the White House over the weekend between Saturday, September 18, when the massacre was exposed, and Monday, September 20, when America’s new Lebanon policy was unveiled to the American people. President Reagan declared that the Marines were being sent back to Beirut “with the mission of enabling the Lebanese government to restore full sovereignty over its capital, the essential precondition for extending its control over the entire country.” The Marines, said Reagan, were to act as a “presence” supporting the Lebanese central authority. The French and Italians agreed to return as well, but while they took up positions in the heart of West Beirut, the Marines, numbering 1,500, were stationed alongside Lebanese army units in the least populated area possible—Beirut International Airport and its environs. Their length of stay this time was left open-ended.
The impulse underlying this weekend whim was quintessentially American. It came out of something very deep in the American psyche: a can-do optimism, a conviction that every problem has a solution if people will just be reasonable.
At first, the American optimism seemed justified. The mere arrival of the Marines convinced many Beirutis that their then seven-year-old civil-war nightmare was about to come to an end and that the Lebanon of old would be reconstructed. After all, America, the greatest power in the world, had committed itself to rebuilding Lebanon’s central government and army. Things had to get better. The Lebanese view of America was a view gleaned from movies and in the movies the cavalry was never late. As the Marines took up their positions in West Beirut, a contagion of optimism replaced fear in the streets: the main highway between East and West Beirut was reopened for the first time in years; bulldozers moved in to clear the Green Line as architects unfurled their plans to reconstruct the city center. Ghassan Tueni, the American-educated publisher of Beirut’s leading newspaper, An-Nahar, boasted to me one afternoon after the Marines arrived that “the Che Guevara era of Lebanese politics is over. People have had their fling with radicalism. Beards and jeans are out now. Neckties are in.”
The Marines found it easy to mingle freely among the Muslims and Palestinians of West Beirut and to chase Lebanese women, many of whom were only too happy to get caught. They spent their days making leisurely patrols and passing out bubble gum to the Lebanese kids they met along the streets. Not far from the Marines’ airport compound was the densely populated Shiite southern suburb of Hay es Salaam, which, for some reason, was not on the maps issued to the American soldiers, so they dubbed it “Hooterville,” as though it were some friendly American small town. A succession of Lebanese “Hey, Joes” used to come around the Marine compound selling everything from honey cakes to Arab headdresses, and they moved among the men as if they owned the place. So trusting of the Lebanese were the first Marines to arrive in Beirut that more than one hundred of them, including some officers, gave their uniforms to a mustachioed Lebanese male claiming to be a dry cleaner and promising prompt service. He hasn’t been heard from since.
But it wasn’t only the Lebanese who took the Marines to the cleaners. In these heady days when the Marines were popular and relaxed, all kinds of American VIPs and performing artists flocked to Beirut to have their pictures taken with the American fighting men. But all this entertainment in the interest of the boys away from home was very costly, explained Lieutenant Colonel Schmidt: “As a matter of fact, we’re still owed over $2,000 for having to foot the bill of these guys that would show up. You know, we had a country-Western group that showed up and they had no money—zero money. And a week or two later the cheerleaders from the Los Angeles Rams showed up. No money. So we had to pay the [cheerleaders’] bill to get them in the country and a little under-the-table fifty-buck fee [to Lebanese customs]. We had to pay their hotel bills, pay their chow bills, and they said, ‘We’ll send you the money right away.’ Well, that was in December [1982] and it’s now March [1983] and we have yet to see the first penny.”4
The American officials who dispatched the Marines to Beirut seemed to believe not only that the Lebanese problem, like all problems, had a relatively easy solution, but that the solution could be understood in American terms. The Americans looked at Lebanon, saw that the country had a “President,” a “parliament,” and a “commander in chief” (sound familiar?) and said to themselves, in effect, “Look, they have all the right institutions. The only problem is that these institutions are too weak. So let’s just rebuild the central government and army and they can be like us.”
In other words, in order to make sense of Lebanon and to justify the American presence there, the Reagan Administration made Lebanon an extension of what it knew—and what it knew was American political culture, patriotism, and devotion to the concept of one nation under God. Therefore, when the young, Kennedyesque Lebanese President, Amin Gemayel, came to the Americans soon after they arrived and asked them to go beyond their symbolic “presence” role and assume primary responsibility for training and equipping the Lebanese army—which was under the direct authority of Gemayel and his Maronite commander in chief Ibrahim Tannous—so that it might one day reoccupy the whole of Lebanese territory, the Reagan Administration said yes. This training process, which began in December 1982, created a symbiosis between the Lebanese army and the Marines. The Lebanese army soldiers who graduated from the Marine—U.S. Army training course were given khaki camouflage uniforms almost identical to those worn by the Marines, making the two virtually indistinguishable at checkpoints. At the same time, a team of U.S. Army Special Forces advisers moved into offices in the Lebanese Ministry of Defense in Yarze, adjacent to the Christian eastern half of Beirut, and they were frequently called on by the Lebanese general staff for operational advice on troop movements and other matters, which they innocently gave.
This military relationship would ultimately undermine the entire American mission in Lebanon. What the Americans did not understand in December 1982 was that while they were making Lebanon an extension of what they knew, the Lebanese were doing the same thing in reverse. In order to handle the Americans, to digest them, to make them fit into their tiny land, they made the Marines an extension of what they knew and what they knew was the feud. President Gemayel, instead of using the Marines as a crutch to rebuild his country, began to use them as a club to beat his Muslim opponents. Instead of using the strength he derived from his American backing to forge a political entente with the Muslim and Druse leaders of West Beirut and make real national unity possible—at a time when they had yet to side with Syria and were open to compromises on moderate terms—he began to behave with typical tribal logic, which says, When I am weak, how can I compromise? When I am strong, why should I compromise?
And Gemayel thought he was strong. His national security adviser, Wadia Haddad, was so convinced of America’s support for the Lebanese President that he once boasted to Syria’s Rifaat al-Assad, “I have the United States in my pocket,” according to an Arab diplomat privy to the conversation. More than once Amin’s advisers warned his Muslim and Christian opponents, “Toe the line. We are not alone.”
Gemayel totally ignored feelers from Shiite Amal leader Nabih Berri, whose support could easily have been won by a Lebanese President ready to commit some resources to rebuilding the predominantly Shiite southern suburbs of West Beirut, which had been savaged by the Israeli invasion. Instead, Gemayel’s government ordered that 20,000 Lebanese pounds (or the rough equivalent of $4,000) be set aside for rebuilding this neighborhood—enough maybe to repair a single three-bedroom apartment. Worse yet, one of the Gemayel government’s first acts was to order the Lebanese army in West Beirut to bulldoze illegally built shanties that had encroached on roads in the southern suburbs. In other words, in the Beirut neighborhood most short of housing, he ordered houses demolished. As a young Shiite leader, Ali Hamadan, observed at the time, “Amin was interested only in dealing with us through the Ministry of Defense. The Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Public Works, the Ministry of Social Welfare, those he never wanted to send into our neighborhoods.”
My friend Lebanese Shiite professor Fouad Ajami appeared on Face the Nation in October 1983 with the Marine commandant, General P. X. Kelley, and Amin Gemayel’s ambassador in Washington, Abdullah Bouhabib. P. X. Kelley spoke earnestly about how he would follow the Lebanese army commander in chief Ibrahim Tannous “into battle anywhere,” and Bouhabib waxed eloquent about how much America was needed to support Amin Gemayel’s rebuilding of the Lebanese state, while Fouad, speaking for all the Lebanese Muslims who felt they were being abused by Gemayel’s government, warned the Americans that they were getting involved in a family feud they did not understand. A few weeks later Face the Nation sent Fouad a transcript of the show and a glossy photograph of the three panelists in the studio with moderator Leslie Stahl. Shortly thereafter, Fouad told me, a friend of his visited Ambassador Bouhabib in his Washington embassy office and there he saw the same picture. Only there were just two people in the picture—P. X. Kelley and Ambassador Bouhabib. Fouad had been edited out, except for his elbow, which jutted in from the side like some loose end. Fouad’s friend, who was also a Shiite, could not resist asking Bouhabib, “Abdullah, whose elbow is that?” This was a graphic depiction of how Amin Gemayel and the Maronites wanted to think of things: they and the Americans shaping Lebanon’s future together—alone.
As for Druse leader Walid Jumblat, Gemayel tried to edit him out of Lebanon’s future entirely, treating him as mountain peasant, unworthy of even being invited to the presidential palace. Worse, Amin stood by and watched, probably even encouraged, the Phalangist militia as it tried to settle an old score with the Druse over who would be rooster on Mt. Lebanon. The Druse in recent years dominated most of the Shouf district at the southern end of Mt. Lebanon, while the Maronites controlled the larger Kesuran region to the north and east of Beirut. The rough division of the mountain between these two communities—which had a long history of both antipathy and cooperation—served as the foundation for the larger power-sharing balance between all Lebanese Christians and Muslims.
After Israel invaded Lebanon, though, the Phalangist militia tried to take over the Shouf from the Druse with Israeli help. The Maronites claimed they were only trying to protect the Christian villagers in the Shouf, but these had been living quite peacefully with the Druse for years. The Druse, feeling their only real turf in Lebanon was being threatened, responded to the Phalangist infiltrations with a venomous force, and before long—only a month after Amin Gemayel had taken office in September 1982—a low-grade tribal war was under way between the Phalangists and Druse for control of the Shouf.
Gemayel even managed to alienate the conservative Sunni Muslims of West Beirut, who were actually quietly supporting his presidency. During the first year of his rule, some 1,000 Muslims and Palestinians disappeared in West Beirut; they were either swooped up by the army and imprisoned without trial or abducted by the Phalangists and suffered fates unknown. At first, many West Beirut Lebanese Muslims, starved as they were for law and order, welcomed the Christian-led Lebanese army when it came in and replaced the PLO. They were even ready to overlook some of its excesses, while they waited for a similar crackdown to take place in Christian East Beirut. But that crackdown never came, so West Beirut went into a slow burn and Muslims there began attacking the army. Gemayel responded by putting West Beirut under an 8:00 p.m. curfew. Across town in East Beirut, though, he turned a blind eye to the activities of his father’s Phalangist Party and militia, with its illegal ports and private army, and refrained from even deploying the Lebanese army there, let alone imposing its authority. Muslim West Beirutis had to sit locked in their homes at night, listening to the Phalangist Radio carrying advertisements for the Jet Set disco in East Beirut, where customers were invited to dance “twenty-four hours a day.”
Finally, Gemayel snubbed his nose at the Syrians and entered into direct negotiations with Jerusalem over a withdrawal of Israeli forces and a treaty governing security, trade, and tourism between the two countries.
If there were any in Lebanon’s Muslim community whom Gemayel did not alienate, I didn’t know of them. Gemayel’s pigheadedness soon became America’s liability.
“When we first arrived in Beirut, it was just great,” Corpsman José Medina, who was with the first and last Marine contingents in Lebanon, told me one day. “People were always stopping you and giving you things. We really felt appreciated. The people saw us as their protectors from the Israelis. But eventually their anger began to rise, and for some reason they thought we were against them.”
No wonder. As the Marines continued training and supporting Gemayel’s Lebanese army, they increasingly came to be viewed by Beirut’s Muslims as stooges of his regime. The first signs of trouble were felt by Marines on foot patrol, who, in the spring of 1983, six months after they had arrived, suddenly began reporting that Lebanese boys along the roads were throwing stones and taunting them with obscenities. In Beirut, no one throws stones for long. On March 16, 1983, five Marines were injured in a grenade attack in West Beirut. The Marines were not prepared for this. They had come to Beirut with a strict set of “Rules of Engagement” governing their use of force. Their ten rules included:
1. When on the post, mobile or foot patrol, keep loaded magazine in weapon, bolt closed, weapon on safe, no round in the chamber.
2. Do not chamber a round unless told to do so by a commissioned officer unless you must act in immediate self-defense where deadly force is authorized.
4. Call local forces to assist in self-defense effort. Notify headquarters.
7. If you receive effective hostile fire, direct your fire at the source. If possible, use friendly snipers.
A few weeks after the March 16 grenade attack, the Che Guevara era of Lebanese politics would make its comeback in full splendor and the Marines would be exposed for the first time to the local rules of engagement. It happened at 1:03 p.m. on April 18, 1983. At the time, I was sitting in the office of my new apartment, which was just around the corner from the one that had been blown up. I had my feet resting lazily on my desk and was listening to the BBC World Service. Three minutes into the news broadcast my transistor radio was knocked over by a tremendous blast that shook our building like a rattle. I ran down the stairs and out my front door and immediately spotted in the distance a gray mushroom cloud shooting up from near the seashore. Without thinking, I ran toward it. I ran and I ran, and as I got closer I started to say to myself, “No … Could it be?”
A suicide bomber had driven a Chevrolet pickup truck into the front door of the American embassy of Beirut, then detonated it into a massive fireball that ripped off the front of the building, killing more than sixty people inside. When I arrived, I stared open-mouthed at a man dangling by his feet from the jagged remains of the fourth floor, while the rooms below coughed smoke and flames like a dragon in distress.
In the best tribal tradition of Lebanon, some Muslim or pro-Syrian group had sent Amin Gemayel a smoke signal. The message was brief: Your American friends are not as invincible as you think. Beware.
A month after the embassy attack, the United States brokered the May 17, 1983, peace treaty between Gemayel’s government and Israel, a lopsided—if impracticable—agreement favoring Israel that deepened Lebanese Muslim resentment all the more. Secretary of State George P. Shultz personally came out to the Middle East in April 1983 to put the finishing touches on this treaty by shuttling between Beirut and Jerusalem. Throughout the negotiations with Mr. Shultz, Lebanon’s Muslim Prime Minister, Shafik al-Wazzan, the only top official in Gemayel’s circle who lived in West Beirut, warned that the mood on the street there was increasingly against the kind of agreement with Israel that was being midwifed by the Americans. He kept urging Washington to curb the Israeli demands for formal security, trade, and diplomatic relations, and to settle instead for quiet de facto arrangements—for everyone’s sake. On May 8, 1983, the last day of the Shultz shuttle, the Secretary met at the presidential palace in Baabda with a group of senior Lebanese officials to tie up the final details. When they were all done, everyone started shaking hands and slapping each other on the back in congratulation. Everyone except Wazzan. According to an official who was present, Wazzan looked directly at the American Secretary of State and declared, “I want you to know this is the saddest day of my life. This is not an honorable agreement. I don’t believe America has done its best [in limiting Israel’s demands]. I am a very unhappy man.”
During the following summer and early fall, outgoing U.S. Ambassador Robert S. Dillon began to urge President Gemayel to make some conciliatory overtures to his domestic Muslim and Christian opponents, who were beginning to drift into Syria’s pocket. Dillon understood that building the Lebanese army without also fostering national reconciliation was like building a house with bricks and no cement. Gemayel frostily dismissed his advice, and relations between the two men quickly deteriorated. When Dillon left Beirut for good in October, Gemayel refused to present him, as was Lebanese government custom, with the honorary Order of the Cedars. He left the task to his Foreign Minister Elie Salem in a calculated insult.
Whatever remained of American credibility in Lebanese Muslim eyes completely disappeared after Israel decided to withdraw its army from the Shouf Mountains and pull back to the Awali River in south Lebanon on September 4, 1983. The Israelis had spent a year sitting in the Shouf, overlooking Beirut, trying to pressure Amin into signing a peace treaty, but as soon as it became clear that he could not implement it, the Israelis decided to simply pull out of the Shouf and hunker down in south Lebanon, leaving the Marines to pick up the pieces in Beirut. The Israeli withdrawal from the Shouf left a vacuum which everyone rushed to fill. From one side came the Druse, led by their warlord Walid Jumblat, who saw the Israeli departure as his chance to roll back the Phalangist encroachments into his ancestral homeland. From the other came the Phalangists and Gemayel’s Lebanese army, which saw the Israeli pullout as their opportunity to finally extend Christian and government control over this strategic turf. The Shiites, Sunnis, and Syrians backed the Druse. The Marines, who by then were totally intertwined with the Lebanese army, had no choice but to throw their weight behind Gemayel. The Reagan Administration policymakers apparently believed that they were supporting the right of a government to extend sovereignty over its national territory. Gemayel, in fact, was supporting the “right” of Christians to dominate Druse.
The specific event which turned the Marines from neutral peacekeepers into just another Lebanese faction was a battle for an obscure Shouf mountain village named Souk el-Gharb. Shortly after the battle for the Shouf began in September 1982, Lebanese army commander in chief Tannous began hinting to his American military advisers that he would like to see the Marines get more directly involved on the side of the Lebanese army, since the Syrians were actively supporting the Druse. The Americans consistently refused. However, at around 2:00 a.m. on September 19, 1983, Syrian- and Palestinian-backed Druse units launched a major artillery and ground assault on the strategic Lebanese army position at Souk el-Gharb, which controlled the ridge line overlooking Beirut. If the Druse and their allies took Souk el-Gharb, they would be able to shoot down directly on the presidential palace in Baabda, the Defense Ministry in Yarze, and Phalangist-controlled East Beirut. Some time between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. on September 19, a group of senior U.S. Army trainers, as well as Brigadier General Carl Stiner, the military aide of the Special Middle East envoy, Robert McFarlane, were gathered in the operations room at the Lebanese Ministry of Defense. An agitated General Tannous came up to General Stiner and informed him that a “massive” offensive was taking shape against his army at Souk el-Gharb, that he didn’t think his defenses could hold out another “thirty minutes” and that one of the three Lebanese army howitzer battalions providing support for Souk el-Gharb was out of ammunition. He needed American help immediately.
General Stiner passed all this on to McFarlane, who was staying at the nearby U.S. ambassador’s residence and had been up all night due to the heavy shelling of the area. Without seeking any independent confirmation of Tannous’s assessment, McFarlane ordered the Marine commander in Beirut, Colonel Timothy Geraghty, to have the navy ships under his authority fire in support of the Lebanese army. Colonel Geraghty strenuously opposed the order. He knew that it would make his soldiers party to what was now clearly an intra-Lebanese fight, and that the Lebanese Muslims would not retaliate against the navy’s ships at sea but against the Marines on shore. But he was overruled by McFarlane and Stiner. Early on the morning of September 19, the guided missile cruisersVirginia, John Rodgers, and Bowen and the destroyer Radford fired 360 5-inch shells at the Druse-Syrian-Palestinian forces, to take the pressure off the beleaguered Lebanese troops. The next morning the Americans learned that only eight Lebanese army soldiers had been killed and twelve wounded in the whole previous day of fighting.
Had the Americans been had? No one will ever really know if it was deliberate, but as one senior American officer in Lebanon remarked to me later, it was “a nice opportunity for [Gemayel] to get what he wanted all along.” What he had wanted was to make the Americans an extension of his feud, and that he did.
There was only one Marine sentry—Lance Corporal Eddie DiFranco—who got a glimpse of the suicide driver who slammed his yellow Mercedes-Benz truck filled with 12,000 pounds of dynamite into the Marines’ four-story Beirut Battalion Landing Team (BLT) headquarters just after dawn on October 23, 1983. DiFranco could not remember the color of the suicide driver’s hair, or the shape of his face. He could not remember whether he was fat or thin, dark-skinned or light. All he could remember was that as this Muslim kamikaze sped past him on his way to blowing up 241 American servicemen “he looked right at me … and smiled.”
Sergeant of the Guard Stephen E. Russell never saw the smile, he only heard the roar. He was standing at his sandbag post at the main entrance of the headquarters, when his eye was suddenly drawn to a huge truck circling the parking lot. The driver had revved his engine to pick up speed before bursting through the fence around the complex and barreling straight for the front door. According to Marine Corps historian Benis M. Frank, Russell “wondered what the truck was doing inside the compound. Almost as quickly, he recognized that it was a threat. He ran from his guard shack across the lobby toward the rear entrance, yelling, ‘Hit the deck! Hit the deck!’ Glancing over his shoulder as he ran, he saw the truck smash through his guard shack. A second or two later the truck exploded, blowing him into the air and out the building.”5
Colonel Geraghty was in his office around the corner, checking the morning news reports, when the explosion blew out all his windows. He ran outside only to find himself caught in a cloud.
“I ran around the corner to the back of my building, and, again, it was like a heavy fog and debris was coming down … and … then the fog cleared, and I turned around … the headquarters was gone. I can’t explain to you my feelings. It was just unbelievable.”6
For me too. It was 6:22 a.m. and I was sleeping ten miles away in the heart of West Beirut. Despite the distance, though, the explosion of the Marines’ headquarters shook us out of our sleep. At first Ann and I thought it was an earthquake. There had been a tremor a few months earlier that had wiggled the house the same way. Ann and I did what we always did in such situations: we lay perfectly still in bed waiting to hear if there were sirens. No sirens meant that it was not an explosion, not an earthquake, but just one of a thousand sonic booms Israeli jets set off over Beirut. It took about a minute before the sirens began to wail from every direction. It was too early for me to track down my assistant, Mohammed, so Ann and I hopped into our Fiat and followed the first fire engine we came across. Careening through Beirut’s empty streets, the fire truck eventually led us to the French paratroop barracks, a ten-story apartment block that had been completely blown apart by a suicide bomber, who had driven into the underground garage before detonating his car bomb. After I had interviewed people there for about an hour, someone mentioned that they had heard the Marines also “got a rocket,” so several of us leisurely rode over to see the Marines, only to find them staggering about with bloodied uniforms, picking through what was the BLT building, where that afternoon there was supposed to have been an outdoor barbecue—Americanstyle. Within hours of the blast, rescue teams using pneumatic drills and blowtorches had begun working furiously on the mound of broken concrete pillars, trying desperately to pry out the dead and wounded. Their efforts were hampered, though, by the fact that unidentified snipers kept firing on the relief workers.
Having come to Beirut to protect the Lebanese, the Marines now seemed to be the ones needing protection. As a Lebanese friend put it, “It’s like diapers inside diapers.”
Much of the discussion in the wake of the Marine headquarters bombing would focus on why the Marines did not have an extra barrier here and an extra guard post there to prevent such a suicide attack. The explanation is not a technical-security one but a political-cultural one. The Marines had come to Beirut with such good intentions that it took them a long time to realize (and some of them never did realize) that in being forced by their superiors in Washington to support Amin Gemayel they had become a party to the age-old Lebanese intercommunal war. Shortly after the BLT explosion, I wrote a piece for the Times in which I argued that the Marines had turned into just another Lebanese militia. The Marine spokesman in Beirut cut the article out and put it up on his bulletin board, where other Marines scribbled obscenities all over it, such as “Fuck You, Tom” and “Thanks, Asshole.” Even once they recognized that they were embroiled in a tribal war, however, the Marines failed to take all the necessary precautions against something as unusual as a suicide car bomber, because such a threat was outside the boundaries of their conventional American training. Lance Corporal Manson Coleman, an enormous Marine with a warm smile and American small-town politeness, served as sentry in Beirut. He told me one day shortly after the Marine headquarters bombing, “We used to get reports all the time about different things terrorists were supposed to be planning against us. One day they said we should look out for dogs with TNT strapped to their bellies. For a few days we were shooting every dog around. Imagine, someone would stoop so low as to have dogs carrying TNT. Now, we have some ingenious ways of killing people, but we are restricted by the Geneva Conventions. Well, these people over here never had any conventions.”
Colonel Geraghty, a taut, controlled man who always evinced an air of real decency, was no better prepared for Beirut’s surprises than his men. But who could blame him? He was caught in the middle of two political cultures totally missing each other: there was no course on Beirut at Camp Lejeune and there were no rules of engagement among the Lebanese. When Colonel Geraghty was asked whether he ever anticipated a suicide attack, he was categoric in his answer: “No, no. It was new, unprecedented. We had received over 100 car-bomb threats—pickup trucks, ambulances, UN vehicles, myriad types. Those … things we had taken appropriate countermeasures toward. But never the sheer magnitude of the 5-ton dump truck going 50—60 miles an hour with an explosive force from 12,000 to 16,000 pounds. [That] was simply beyond the capability to offer any defense. When was the last time you heard of a bomb that size?”
Colonel Geraghty then added, “There may have been a fanatic driving that truck, but I promise you there was a cold, hard, political, calculating mind behind the planning and execution of it.”7
Whether that mind was Syria’s or Iran’s or both together will never be known for certain, but American intelligence officials who have seen all the evidence are convinced today that one of the two must have been involved. Which brings up the other reason the Marines were caught unprepared: they were set up. While the Marines were victims of their own innocence, they were even more the victims of the ignorance and arrogance of the weak, cynical, and in some cases venal Reagan Administration officials who put them into such an impossible situation. Reagan, Shultz, McFarlane, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, and CIA Director William Casey will all have to answer to history for what they did to the Marines. By blindly supporting Amin Gemayel, by allowing Israel a virtually free hand to invade Lebanon with American arms and by not curtailing Israel’s demands for a peace treaty with Beirut, the Reagan Administration had tipped the scales in favor of one Lebanese tribe—the Maronites—and against many others, primarily Muslims. Washington was helping to inflict real pain on many people, and there would have to be a price to pay for that. I will never forget that as I left my apartment house on the morning of the Marine headquarters disaster, a group of Lebanese were playing tennis on the clay court next door. The explosion had probably shaken the ground from under their feet, but it did not interrupt their set. It was as though they were saying, “Look, America, you came here claiming to be an honest broker and now you’ve taken sides. When you take sides around here, this is what happens. So go bury your dead and leave us to our tennis.”
The Reagan Administration also took far too long to understand that the United States, in having supported the Israeli invasion and the May 17 peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon, was undercutting Syria, which viewed Lebanon as part of its traditional sphere of influence, and that eventually there would be a price to pay for this as well. Finally, the Reagan team took far too long to understand that back in Teheran, Ayatollah Khomeini was still nursing a grudge against the Americans for having supported the Shah for all those years. Having driven them out of Iran, he wanted to carry on and drive them out of the region altogether.
All these aggrieved parties decided to fight the Americans in the only way they knew how, and that was not according to the Geneva Convention. I would never justify what they did, but I cannot say it was without logic. Colonel Geraghty was right: there were cold, calculating minds behind it.
America’s arrogance was the arrogance of power. What the United States learned in Beirut, maybe even more than in Vietnam, was the degree to which the world has undergone a democratization of the means of destruction. For the first two hundred years of its history America lived in glorious isolation from the rest of the world. It was protected by two vast oceans, and its only serious foreign engagements after independence were the Mexican—American War and the Spanish—American War, which is to say no serious foreign engagements at all. There was no real need for Americans to learn the seamier dimensions of diplomacy, espionage, and covert operations in order to survive in the world. When the twentieth century arrived, America could no longer avoid being fully involved with the world in the First and Second World Wars; but by then, America was able to step into the world with such overwhelming power and weight that whatever she lacked in cunning and guile was easily compensated for in sheer military might. Who needed to be cunning when you had battleships like the Iowa and New Jersey that fired shells as big as Chevrolets? Where does a 1,000-pound gorilla sit? Answer: Wherever he wants.
That was true up until the Vietnam War, when American military and economic power began to decline relative to the rest of the world and the nature of warfare changed in a way that allowed an illiterate peasant with a shoulder-held Stinger missile to shoot down a $50 million fighter aircraft. Small powers, such as Syria and Iran, and even small militias, using highly unconventional methods, such as suicide car bombers, were able to neutralize American policy in Lebanon with just 12,000 pounds of dynamite and a stolen truck. Suddenly the United States found its power checked in a thousand different ways, but as the Marine encounter with Lebanon demonstrated, it had not yet generated a vision of the world, or of the exercise of power and diplomacy, that was as subtle, nuanced, and cunning as the world itself. The world had changed, and America was not ready when it did.
The American officials who dispatched the Marines, and the Marines themselves, were so enamored of their detailed maps and their night-vision equipment that they could not imagine that all their conventional force would not translate into military superiority in a place like Beirut. They were certain that weapons, like the New Jersey or fighter aircraft, used sparingly and in conjunction with verbal threats, would be enough to intimidate the local forces. They thought in such conventional terms they even extended to the Lebanese their concept of who the enemy was. One day the Marines reported spotting men on their perimeter wearing what they described as “Warsaw Pact uniforms.” It was the Russkies all along! They did not realize that in Lebanon the color of a man’s uniform was no more a tip-off to his real political allegiance than the color of his eyes. When I was interviewing Marines on the U.S.S. Guam helicopter carrier after their departure from Beirut, one earnest young man took me aside and asked in a whisper, so that his friends could not hear, whether it was true that “all Druse are Communists.”
In the wake of the Marine bombing, the Italian ambassador to Lebanon, Franco Lucioli Ottieri, remarked to me, “You know how they say people are always fighting the last war? Well, you Americans have been preparing yourselves for the confrontation on the Eastern front. That’s fine. The Eastern front with the Soviet Union is now secured. But you are deplorably unprepared for the war in the Third World. You are like a big elephant. If you are up against another elephant, you are fine. But if you are fighting a snake, you have real problems. Your whole mentality and puritanical nature hold you back. Lebanon was full of snakes.”
A few months after the Marines arrived in Beirut, President Gemayel sent former Prime Minister Saeb Salam to Washington with a letter for President Reagan. The letter was meaningless; all that was important was the postman. Salam’s chance to meet with Reagan was Amin’s way of paying him off for supporting his presidency. A Sunni Muslim, educated at the American University of Beirut, Salam was the quintessential pro-American Third World politician. Like so many politicians born and raised in countries that had not managed their own affairs for years, even centuries, Salam was convinced that there was always somebody else in the world, some distant power, which had the ultimate word and the military might to impose it. When he was born, it was the Ottoman Turks; when he grew up, it was the British and French, and when he grew old, it was the Americans. People who have never really wielded power always have illusions about how much those who have power can really do. Whenever I would mention some problem that needed addressing in the Middle East, Salam would just shake his head back and forth and say, “America, America, America.”
After Salam returned to Beirut from delivering his letter to Reagan—his visit was splashed on the front pages of all the Lebanese newspapers—I went to see him at his huge house in West Beirut. When he greeted me at the door, I found him dressed in a dapper gray suit adorned with a white carnation.
“Saeb!” I said, slightly startled. “Why are you wearing that carnation?”
“Because I met with Reagan,” he answered, eyes twinkling, “and he told me that on Lebanon he has no reverse gear.”
Eventually, though, Salam’s carnation wilted and its petals fell; American policy went into reverse gear, after all, and a bitterly disappointed Saeb Salam probably never donned another carnation again. I learned a valuable lesson from this incident.
I have no doubt that when President Reagan told Saeb Salam that he had “no reverse gear” on Lebanon, he was simply mouthing one of those cute toss-off lines a head of state says to a visitor while escorting him to the door. Like the whole American decision to get involved in Lebanon, the statement was an afterthought. Reagan, I am sure, would never remember it. But Salam would never forget it. He went out and put on a carnation after hearing it—as though he had won the lottery. Many other Lebanese went further. In the months following the Marines’ arrival, you could walk into virtually any Beirut home and find someone who would say, “I did this when I heard the Americans were coming.” One of my closest Lebanese friends, a Muslim lecturer at the American University, went to the bank and changed his life savings of some $25,000 from U.S. dollars into Lebanese pounds. He was convinced the Lebanese currency would make an immediate comeback under the American umbrella. It was a bad calculation. At the time, the rate was about 4 Lebanese pounds to the dollar; today the rate is about 500 to the dollar.
I knew a young Lebanese couple, Nabil Yacoub and his wife, Vicky, who had been living in Abu Dhabi since the beginning of the Lebanese civil war. He had started his own electrical engineering business there, saved his money, and dreamed of one day returning home to Beirut when the war was over. After the Marines arrived, Nabil and Vicky decided the war was over. In the fall of 1982, the Yacoubs told me, they took all their savings out of the bank, spent $70,000 just to move their household and business from Abu Dhabi to Beirut, and then purchased a $150,000 three-bedroom apartment just off Hamra Street, where Nabil was going to open a consulting business that would specialize in reconstruction.
“I thought the Americans had it all planned out and nothing could go wrong,” Nabil said to me, as we sat on the couch in the living room of his new apartment. “They kept talking about all their plans and commitments. We thought there would be a new order in Lebanon patroned by the United States.”
But just when Nabil and Vicky finally got settled in Beirut in the summer of 1983, things began to unravel for Lebanon and the Marines. The Lebanese economy went soft and no one dared to invest in reconstruction. The last time I saw Nabil, he was unemployed. His final words to me, only half in jest, were: “I am preparing a lawsuit against Reagan for consequential damages, opportunities lost, and psychological harm. You Americans don’t understand the confidence you inspire in people. You had a direct influence on our decisions.”
Ghassan Salame, the Lebanese political scientist, who formerly taught at the American University, once pointed out to me how the daily White House and State Department briefings were played back in the Arabic press in Beirut. Those State Department briefings might each have been one hour long, and during that one hour maybe only one question was asked about Lebanon, to which the spokesmen gave some boilerplate answer about America standing by its commitments there. This statement would not merit even a passing mention in any American newspaper, but it would make front-page headlines back in Beirut. The State Department spokesman in 1983, Alan Romberg, would have won any name-recognition contest in Lebanon. “My students all thought that Reagan was talking about Lebanon every day,” remarked Ghassan.
So, too, did President Gemayel. A senior American embassy official in Beirut during this period once told me that Gemayel “always made assumptions as to how far we would go in supporting him that were never consistent with what we told him. But the truth is, we were never clear enough with him. We never spelled out the limits as clearly as we should have. Also, all of those general statements by the President that we were with the Lebanese ‘all the way’ certainly contributed to Amin’s misperceptions.”
What is the lesson of all this? I think my friend Fouad Ajami captured it the best. “The Lebanese, like all Middle Easterners, are a people with a vivid imagination,” remarked Fouad. “That is why a great power should never wink at anyone in the Middle East. Small winks speak big things there. You wink at Ariel Sharon and he goes all the way to Beirut. You wink at Amin Gemayel and he tries to invade the Shiite suburbs of Beirut. They all want America’s license, its resources and its green lights. And they all want to implicate you in their schemes. They like you big, but they want to send you back small; they like you a virgin, but they want to send you back a whore.”
The Druse—Maronite war for the Shouf intensified in early 1984, and as it did the Marines got to see the real Lebanon in all its tribal splendor. Eighteen months after they had landed in Beirut, armed with incomplete maps and “rules of engagement” and wearing naive American optimism on their sleeves, the Marines finally understood that they had come to support the center in a country where there was no center—only factions. Once they realized this, there was nothing for them to do but dig in behind their sandbags, keep out of the Lebanese—Lebanese cross fire, and wait for Reagan to declare victory and bring them home. They stopped lobbing shells in support of the Lebanese army and simply tried to protect themselves, firing back twice at anyone who fired at them once. Forget the rule book, they said, let’s just get even. The British, French and Italian “peacekeeping” troops adopted a similar approach. The Lebanese daily newspaper As-Safir began to refer to the multinational peacekeeping force as the “international militia.” During these weeks of waiting for a graceful exit, it became a lot of fun talking to the Marines, because they stopped trying to see Lebanese politics as an extension of American politics and began to talk about it as just the opposite of American politics.
When I asked Marine Sergeant Jeffrey Roberts what he thought was happening in Lebanon, he explained, “To me it was a civil war, only it wasn’t just the North against the South. It was North against South, East against West, Northeast against Southwest, Southeast against Northwest, and we were in the middle of it all. There were just too many different sides. If we picked one, we had four others against us.”
Marine spokesman Captain Keith Oliver was even more succinct one afternoon as we walked around the Marine compound while the bass drumbeat of Lebanese militias pounding each other with artillery echoed in the distance. He said with a shake of his head, “You know, these people just aren’t playin’ with the same sheet of music.”
In fact, they weren’t playing with any music at all. The Marines’ Beirut Airport headquarters was surrounded by areas of sand dunes and scrub where Lebanese boys used to like to hunt for pigeons each day. Even after the Marines were on alert, some Lebanese youths insisted on going out and hunting along the Marine perimeter. Eventually, a Marine officer was sent out to speak with them.
“Look,” he explained to the Lebanese boys, “we are Marines. You don’t hunt pigeons around Marines! Got it?”
But each day the Lebanese boys would come back with their old-style, muzzle-loaded bird guns and hunt for pigeons, constantly setting off alarm bells among the nervous leathernecks. The exasperated Marine sergeant who related this problem to me one afternoon at his checkpost growled under his breath, “You know what? You just gotta shoot these people. They don’t understand anything else.”
Having stepped into Beirut with a feeling that everything was possible and everything made sense, the Marines began to pack their bags with a feeling that in such a place nothing was possible and nothing made sense. The absurdity of their predicament eventually found its way into verse. The poem was written with a blue ballpoint pen on a 4-by-4 piece of lumber that served as a door frame for an Echo Company bunker on the perimeter of Beirut Airport. I met more than one Marine who had it memorized. It read:
They sent us to Beirut
To be targets that could not shoot.
Friends will die into an early grave,
Was there any reason for what they gave?