When Reagan Sent In the Marines by Patrick J. Sloyan

Author:Patrick J. Sloyan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

10

Peace in a Madhouse

Colonel Timothy Geraghty waved away his aide.

The Marine commander was too busy for a phone call on September 8, 1983. He was in a crisis meeting at the Beirut Ministry of Defense. Whistling artillery and mortar rounds exploded nearby. His Marines in Lebanon—Task Force 62—had come under fire once again. Two had been killed last night for a total of four, along with 29 wounded, in the past week. Geraghty’s Atlantic Fleet commander, a three-star general, was in from Norfolk, Virginia. His division commander from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, a two-star, was also at the table. Their earlier inspection of the Marine front line was cut short by a spray of shrapnel from big, 122 mm Russian-made Katyusha rockets. A fiery fragment could sever an artery. The Marine assignment had become keeping the peace in a madhouse. Peace was being shot away by an ancient Mideast feud between Jews, Muslims, and Christians that confounded Geraghty. Angered by the attack on the visiting brass, Geraghty ordered his 155 mm howitzers and—for the first time—5-inch shells from the USS Bowen, a warship in Beirut harbor. They silenced the offending Shuf Mountain battery.

The men in the meeting were listening to the commander of the Lebanese army, a three-star, about resumption of a century-old Shuf Mountain war. The aide sidled up once more to pull Geraghty aside. He hunched over and whispered in Geraghty’s ear.

“Sir, you have to take this call,” his aide said.

The Marines were deployed on the worst possible low ground around Beirut International Airport. To keep Israeli forces away from Lebanon’s only airport, the US embassy rejected pleas from at least three commanders for a base on higher ground. To the Marines’ backs were airport runways and then the shore of the blue Mediterranean. The Marines were sitting ducks for artillery, rocket, mortar, and sniper fire from the looming Shuf Mountains. Their mission was to be a neutral buffer between factions with unsettled ancient vendettas. Geraghty limited his infantry to a self-defense Condition 4: No bullets in rifle chambers. Withhold fire unless directly threatened. The Rules of Engagement were becoming meaningless. Peacekeeping had become a bloody joke. Geraghty was restricting use of his artillery and mortars to tit-for-tat: Fire on the Marines and—after a warning—the Marines will shoot back. But he was determined to avoid using offshore fighter-bombers and warship guns that could destroy everything in the mountains above.

The Marines were under attack by different Arab factions. Ragheads, his Marines called them. On that day, Geraghty was being bombarded by Shiite Muslims who wore the lacy, filigreed white skullcaps of the Druse mountain tribe. For 100 years, the Druse exchanged massacres with the Maronite Christians, and the blood feud was under way once more. The Druse leader—the bey—was Walid Jumblatt. In leather jacket, boots, and blue jeans, Jumblatt prowled the mountain battlefield aboard a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Once inside Christian mountain villages that day, the Druse favored knives for the slaughter. The Christian leader was Amin Gemayel, who had replaced his assassinated brother, Bashir, as president of Lebanon.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.