EXCLUSIVETerminal List author Jack Carrs devastating account of the 1983 Marine massacre in Beirut and the heroic rescue operation
As the sun was breaking over the Mediterranean Sea, most members of the U.
As the sun was breaking over the Mediterranean Sea, most members of the U.S. 8th Marine Regiment’s 1st Battalion were still asleep in their racks.
It was Sunday October 23, 1983, and they were due a well-earned day of rest on their deployment in Beirut, a city overrun by terrorist attacks, assassinations, and militants wanting American blood.
Around 1,800 Marines were stationed in what had once been known as the ‘Paris of the Middle East’ to provide stability for a nation torn apart by civil war and sectarian violence that had killed tens of thousands of civilians.
The morning was unusually quiet, after six months of relentless rocket and sniper attacks.
In April, a suicide bomber killed 63 people at the U.S. embassy. Marines at the Beirut International Airport were sitting ducks, and knew the chances of making it home before another terrorist attack were slim.
Almost 6,000 miles away in the White House, President Ronald Reagan and his administration reiterated that they were ‘peacekeepers’, but in reality they were in an impossible situation surrounded by a storm of violence.
At 6.21 am, any hope of the smallest reprieve was completely shattered and the carnage that ensued became one of the deadliest attacks on the U.S. military in its history.
The harrowing details of what happened and the sacrifice of the Marines in one of the world’s most unforgiving places are documented in Terminal List author Jack Carr and historian James Scott’s Targeted: Beirut.
The search for victims after a suicide bomber at the Battalion Landing Team (BLT) headquarters in Beirut killed 220 Marines
The book describes how a 19-ton yellow Mercedes truck tore through the concertina wire surrounding the airport into the public parking lot.
The vehicle was filled with pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) explosive wrapped in compressed gas canisters.
It sped towards the Battalion Landing Team (BLT) headquarters, the four-story administration building nicknamed the ‘Beirut Hilton’ that housed 350 American service members.
The Marines standing at their guard posts were helpless as the vehicle passed them, and could only catch a fleeting glimpse of the driver.
Strict rules of engagement during their deployment meant they couldn’t even have a round in the chamber of their rifle. They were unable to open fire to try and stop it.
The truck covered the 450ft between the perimeter fence and the barracks in 10 seconds, smashing through the pile of sandbags that lay in its path.
The death toll was the highest for the Marines since the battle of Iwo Jima in 1945, when 7,000 were killed. 2,501 were killed on D-Day in 1944. It sparked a recovery operation like no other
The driver ended up inside the lobby, underneath hundreds of Americans, and detonated the payload equivalent to an excess of 20,000 pounds of TNT.
The blast was the biggest non-nuclear explosion to date. Minutes later a similar truck bomb went off at the nearby French paratrooper headquarters.
Randy Gaddo, a staff sergeant correspondent, had left the building to get film for his camera when he was knocked off his feet and lay unconscious for two minutes.
‘My God, the BLT building is gone!’ Major Bob Melton said as debris rained down, the air filled with ash and a mushroom cloud started to rise.
The devastation was immense and the sheer force of the blast sent bodies flying from the building, along with shattered glass, paper and limbs.
Gaddo noticed the leaves had been blown off the trees and everything was gray. When he looked at the ground more closely, he could see dead Marines.
The suicide bomber attack 220 U.S. Marines and wounded another 112.
The death toll was the highest for the Marines since the battle of Iwo Jima in 1945, when 7,000 were killed. 2,501 were killed on D-Day in 1944.
The suspect was linked to Hezbollah, which was then an Iranian proxy that had been founded just two years earlier.
A mushroom cloud rises over Beirut International Airport, after a 19-ton yellow Mercedes truck tore through the concertina wire and detonated its payload equivalent to an excess of 20,000 pounds of TNT
It was the birth of a terrorist organization that four decades later has grown into a behemoth in Middle East politics.
Some of the Marine victims were barely out of high school, and their posting to Lebanon was the furthest they’d been away from home beyond a family vacation.
The aftermath saw a rescue operation unlike any other. Marines who were thrown from their bunks and nursing their own injuries pulled their fellow leathernecks from the rubble.
The harrowing details of what happened and the sacrifice of the Marines in one of the world’s most unforgiving places are documented in Terminal List author Jack Carr and historian James Scott’s Targeted: Beirut .
They used shovels, knives and their bare hands to hack away at the crumbled rebar and giant blocks of concrete that used to make up the BLT.
Snipers fired at those frantically digging into the piles of ruin.
The chaos surrounding them didn’t distract them. They were Marines and they responded in the way they were trained, and the only way they knew how.
Danny Wheeler, a chaplain, was the final person pulled alive from the remains of the BLT after being trapped for five hours in the darkness.
He couldn’t move and could barely breathe because of concrete crushing his chest.
All he could do was have an argument with God about whether he had sent him to Beirut to die.
Don Howell, a Navy corpsman, was in the basement in his bed when the whole building came down on top of him.
As he was saying the Lord’s Prayer, a tiny shaft of light reached him from between the rocks and he was pulled to safety.
Marines who were thrown from their bunks and nursing their own injuries pulled their fellow leathernecks from the rubble. They used shovels, knives and their bare hands to hack away at the crumbled rebar and giant blocks of concrete that used to make up the BLT
Men spent up to 17 hours desperately looking for signs of life as the news crews of the world arrived to find devastation beyond anything they had seen.
Forty years on, the attack is considered the starting point of the war on terrorism that has endured U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The stories of the survivors - including those who held the hands of the wounded as they were stretchered to safety - those killed, and their grieving families are being immortalized.
Carr and Scott’s Targeted: Beirut uses letters from Marines to their families, accounts from journalists and recently declassified documents to piece together the events of the seismic assault on U.S. forces.
They use minutes from the White House meetings as Reagan’s administration figured out how to find a diplomatic solution in a region so volatile there seemed like no solution
The memories came flooding back last week when Israeli forces announced that Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqil had been killed in an airstrike.
Aquil was wanted by the U.S. for his role in the barracks bombing and the attack on the U.S. Embassy a few months before that killed 63 people.
The American government had a multi-million dollar bounty on his head and had survived multiple assassination attempts before his demise.
For some it was retribution. Marine 1st Lt. Mark Singleton, who survived the 1983 attack, said he had been waiting 41 years for justice.
The blast was the biggest non-nuclear explosion in history. It reduced the BLT (above) from four stories to one
When the suicide bomber hit, he had only just returned from the U.S. where he had buried a friend, one of the six Marines killed in the six months of escalating violence from the embassy attack.
‘I do believe justice prevails over time. Some people call it karma, some people call it fate, but you cant do evil c*** without it catching up to you,’ he said.
‘To see that this guy is finally killed is fair and equal justice. Im very happy about it.’
Others said that the vicious cycle of terrorism meant another militant full of hate would quickly take Aqil’s place in the Hezbollah hierarchy.
PETN - the material used by the barracks suicide bomber in 1983 - was the source of the explosions in pages and walkie-talkies used by members of Hezbollah.
Carr served as a Navy SEAL for 20 years as a sniper and the leader of special operations teams with tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He then turned to writing thrillers to fulfill one of two lifelong dreams. The other was serving his country.
His first novel The Terminal List was adapted into the hit Amazon series starring Chris Pratt and Taylor Kitsch.
Terminal List author Jack Carr and historian James Scott tell the story of the 1983 bombing through the survivors and the grieving families of the victims
He remembers watching the news in the aftermath of the bombing as a child.
The Time and Newsweek magazine covers laying on his parents’ kitchen table carried powerful images of Marines carrying the wounded with the devastation in the background.
The headline for Time read ‘Carnage in Beirut’, while Newsweek led with ‘The Marine Massacre’.
As he studied some of the most devastating modern terror attacks, he kept coming back to Beirut in 1983.
It became clear to him that to understand the ‘why’ behind such carnage, he needed to study the bombings in greater detail.
A moment of frustration from Marine Corps Commandant General Paul Kelley’s testimony to Congress in the immediate aftermath sticks in his mind.
In a warning to lawmakers, he asked if it would take a suicide bomber flying a plane to get them to wake up to the threat of terrorism.
Eighteen years later, he got his answer.
Catastrophic attacks of mass destruction are a now model commonly used by militants around the world.
The 1983 barracks bombing also ‘taught Iran that terrorism works’, and they could carry it out without repercussions.
U.S. forces left Lebanon a year later and the White House didn’t order any strikes in retaliation.
Carr told DailyMail.com that what unfolded in Beirut is a lesson for future administrations to be well-versed in the situation before committing troops.
President Ronald Reagan and first lady Nancy view the coffins of the victims of the embassy bombing six months before the barracks attack
He drew parallels to the Marines who were stationed at Kabul International Airport’s Abbey Gate during the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan.
A chain of command that starts in the Oval Office with the decision makers ends with a 18-year-old kid holding a rifle standing at a checkpoint.
In 1983, it was the young Marines who could only watch as the truck hurtled past them - not knowing if it was full of explosives or just had bad suspension.
‘You put troops in a tactically disadvantageous, essentially untenable position.
‘Both situations (Beirut and Kabul) are so heartbreaking. There are multi-generational impacts to decisions being made in the White House.
‘But what gives me hope is that there was a similar response by the people on the ground.
‘When people were blown off their feet or were hurt, they ran to the sound of that explosion to try to save as many of their brothers in arms as possible.’
Carr wanted the people still living with the emotional and physical trauma of the day to be at the center of the story.
Howell, now an intensive care unit nurse, told DailyMail.com he is still blind in one eye because of the blast.
But a moment that will always stick with him was when a Marine lying under concrete blocks threw rocks at him to get him to get his attention, and when another was given CPR as he was flown to Germany for treatment.
He saved one man by sliding down a huge concrete slab and pushing it aside after he heard a voice asking for help.
Carr also wanted to tell the story of the family members who have an empty seat at the table still living with the loss.
He wants readers to learn the heroism of U.S. service members who continued to do their job when they were put in an untenable position, through no fault of their own.
Scott, a historian and author of multiple books on the Second World War, agrees the barracks bombing is the genesis of the dynamics we see in the Middle East today.
The Iranian proxies that have caused tensions in the region to the brink of an all-out war were in their infancy, including Hezbollah that was founded just two years earlier.
‘At that point, the Cold War is winding down. Its going to be over in about a decade, and youre going to see that the American global emphasis is going to shift to the Middle East, even though we didnt quite realize it at the time,’ he told DailyMail.com.
‘Iran drew a very important lesson from (the bombing) because what theyre going to see is that, for a relatively inexpensive investment - a truck, some explosives and a single life - you can affect massive change for a superpower like the United States.
The memories of the Beirut bombing came flooding back last week when Israeli forces announced that Hezbollah commander and attack potter Ibrahim Aqil had been killed in an airstrike
‘In the end, we left, and we left Lebanon to fall into disarray and become a hotbed for Hezbollah to then rise up and become the important political player that they are today.’
In his research for the book, he remembers the extraordinary cooperation from the veterans and the families of the victims.
‘We wanted to get as many voices in there as we could and really make this their story, because thats what it is.’
‘These men were regular guys, regular Joes that were sent out there to do a job, and they were dedicated to getting that job done,’ Don Howell added.
‘These guys are really good dudes, not as Marines, but just genuinely good fellas.
‘They were compassionate towards each other. Thats something that I would like for readers to understand.’
The barracks bombing was considered a failure among the Marines. The security was woeful and Americans ended up paying the price in blood.
But the sentiment among veterans that they were in it together still rings true.
At the 40th anniversary of the attacks last year, one man told Marine Col. Timothy J. Geraghty, the commanding officer in Beirut, that he would follow him anywhere.
Targeted: Beirut is the first in a series of non-fiction books from Carr and Scott analyzing some of the devastating attacks that have shaped history.
The next, they say, will be announced soon.
The foundation is the incredible stories they uncovered from the rubble of Beirut.
