How the Beirut bombing of a Marine Corps barracks changed everything

Forty-one years ago today, a Hezbollah affiliate rammed his yellow Mercedes stake-bed truck through a chest-high concertina wire fence at the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, detonating a deadly payload that killed 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three soldiers.

To this day, that event remains the largest loss of life the Marine Corps has suffered since the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.

A new book on the bombing argues that it was also an opening salvo in the decades-long fight between the United States and Middle East terrorist organizations. The truck driver was later found to have links to Hezbollah, the Iran-backed, armed wing of the Lebanese Shiite Muslim political party.

Hezbollah has largely operated as an informal arm for Tehran for years, and is now in battle with Israel in Lebanon.

How the Beirut bombing has echoed through decades of American foreign policy frames the central thesis of “Targeted: Beirut: The 1983 Marine Barracks Bombing and the Untold Origin Story of the War on Terror.”

Former Navy SEAL sniper turned New York Times bestselling author Jack Carr, creator of numerous military-political thriller novels, co-wrote the book with James M. Scott, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and nonfiction writer, producing a work that examines the barracks bombing and its reverberations through the years.

Both men talked with Military Times ahead of the publication of the book, which is now available, sharing some of what they remembered themselves and what they learned in the research and writing.

This interview has been edited for length and style.

Military Times: This bombing happened more than 40 years ago, do either of you remember when and how you learned about this event?

Jack Carr: I was very aware of this as I was already on a path to joining the military. I devoured anything I could find, specifically on terrorism. I remember the Time and Newsweek magazine covers on our dining room table. I probably still have them in a box somewhere.

James M. Scott: I distinctly remember when this happened. I remember coming home from school and my mom telling me that it had happened. This also happened the same week as the Grenada invasion. It was huge news. My parents had been in the Navy. I remember being worried if the United States was going to end up war again?

MT: Mr. Carr, you have a fiction background while Mr. Scott is a nonfiction writer, what brought the two of you together on this project?

Carr: I like to weave a lot of historical events into my work. I always knew that I’d move into the nonfiction space, much like Tom Clancy did in the 1980s and 1990s. So, I began looking to start a series of books focused on terrorist events. I wrote down about three pages worth of different terrorist events from the end of World War II. There were a lot, unfortunately. But I kept coming back to Beirut because it was such a turning point in our relationship with the Middle East and Iran in particular, through its proxies.

Iran learned lessons through the bombing that became almost the model for everything they did afterward. I told Simon and Schuster I want to work with someone and there’s only one person I want to work with, it’s this guy James Scott. I have all his books and I love his work. My editor and agent had a connection, and we started talking on a Zoom call, which kicked things off and we’ve become friends throughout this process.

Scott: When he reached out it was so serendipitous. I’d watched the TV show “The Terminal List,” based off Jack’s books. Then I get this email about the Beirut project. At about that same time I was going to this conference on World War II history and one of the guys there was a former director of the Marine Corps History Division. I told him about this new Beirut project, and he said the Marine Corps archives have all these oral histories of Marines who experienced the incident or were in command at different levels at the time of the bombing. I thought, this is just meant to be.

MT: What are some of the things you learned while researching and drafting the book?

Carr: What I didn’t realize at the time this happened in October 1983 is all the things that led to the event, starting in April. Most people are aware that something happened in Beirut in the 1980s. They’re usually thinking about the barracks bombing in October. But if you understand that there was a bombing at the U.S. embassy in April 1983, and that at the time the servicemembers there were peacekeepers. We did lose troops over the summer; they were in combat long before the barracks bombing.

Scott: I think one of the best lines that sums up Beirut is from Col. Timothy Geraghty, commander of the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit at the time.

He said, “During the time they were there the situation changed but no one changed the situation.” I think that sentence encapsulates more than anything what happened to the guys over there. The Marines landed in Beirut in 1982 as a stabilizing force. The idea is if the Americans are there as a peacekeeping force along with the French, Italians and British, that we can provide some sort of stability.

But over time, that peace erodes, the infighting begins again between the separate groups and, essentially, there is a civil war. So, you see the situation starts sliding over the summer. Iran sees this opportunity to come in and capitalize off the chaos, send revolutionary guardsmen to create terror training camps and an infrastructure. The guys on the ground in Beirut, they see what’s going on right outside the wire. But it takes a lot longer for Washington to catch up to the reality of what’s going on over there.

MT: What should servicemembers today understand about the bombing and its effects on U.S. policy and military engagements in the Middle East?

Carr: There was a lot of tough talk from the presidential administration in the direct aftermath of the bombing. And then we slowly and quietly essentially leave in early 1984 and that teaches Iran that, one, proxies work, and two, they can get the result they want by using proxies and by using terrorism and a spectacular event. That’s to describe an event that draws the lens of the world media. So, this really became the model for Iran going forward.

Scott: I’d say that it’s not just this event but for history in general, it’s our duty as citizens to study history. Yes, there are lessons here for operational and tactical levels. But now that this event is humanized, we need to ensure that people in power understand the nature of the conflict in which they’re engaging before committing U.S. forces.