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CHAPTER 1

The Lebanese Jigsaw

If we are there to keep peace, we are far too few.... If we are there to die, then we are far too many.

— Representative Sam M. Gibbons (D-FL)

The parking lot had become a morgue. Unrecognizable pieces of what had once been United States marines lay on stretchers lined up on the rubble-strewn tarmac. There was no time for the niceties of body bags or blankets. Those would come later. The living took priority now; God only knew how many were still buried under there.

Scores of marines, some in the red gym shorts they slept in, others wearing camouflage pants and T-shirts, scrambled over the smoking wreckage, prying at the broken concrete with shovels, picks, and their bare hands, desperately trying to reach the buddies they could hear pleading for help below. Italian peacekeepers, Lebanese troops, and teenagers clad in the white aprons of the local rescue squads, toiled beside them. As the survivors were dug out, stretcher-bearers rushed them to hastily set up first aid stations or waiting ambulances.

The roof of the four-story Battalion Landing Team (BLT) headquarters now stood at eye level. The phenomenal force of the blast had literally lifted the building from its foundation, sheared off concrete columns 15 feet around, blown out the lower walls, and caused the structure to collapse onto itself.

The wail of sirens was deafening. Ambulances raced in and out of the compound, some heading for local hospitals, others for helicopters waiting to shuttle the wounded out to hospital facilities aboard the USS Iwo Jima offshore. The only medical officer on the beach and most of the hospital corpsmen had been in the BLT. They were dead or wounded. The battalion aid station had been in the basement. It was buried under tons of debris. The surviving medics and ordinary marines frantically applied first aid to the wounded waiting to be loaded onto ambulances, treating the worst cases first, putting to one side those whose injuries were not going to kill them immediately and those who were beyond help.

Jumpy marines, some fighting back tears, took up positions along the fence facing the road that flanked the wrecked building. Eyes shifting nervously over the crowds of Lebanese soldiers and rescue workers who rushed past their posts, it was clear the American boys didn't know who or what they were guarding against. Some of the ambulances were from the militias they had been fighting for months. Whose side were they on now? Later, there would be intelligence reports that the rescue teams had been infiltrated by more terrorists. No one was ever sure if the stories were true. How could the marines tell who among the scores of Arabs was "good" and who was "bad"?

Other marines, trucked in from units on the airport perimeter, stood in stunned silence, awed by the scale of the destruction. When the explosion had first crashed through their dreams, they had assumed that they were under artillery bombardment. They could deal with that. But this ...

Four miles away, the French were digging out their own. The bomb at the Drakker Building had gone off within seconds of the one that hit the Marines. It had been smaller, but so was the building. Unlike the Americans, who were confined to the airport compound, the French were responsible for a wide area of residential Beirut, so their men were scattered at smaller, neighborhood outposts. Fifty-eight French soldiers died when the suicide bomber detonated his load at the entrance to their quarters. The Lebanese civilians who shared the apartment building with them perished, too. One man who lived there survived by a fluke. He had gone out that morning to catch some fish for a friend's Sunday lunch. When he heard the explosion, he quickly returned. His wife and children were gone.

The sound of the explosions woke much of Beirut that quiet Sunday dawn. On the sixth floor of the Commodore Hotel, at least five miles from the Marine compound, I was shaken awake as the building trembled and windows rattled. A groggy glance at the alarm clock revealed the ungodly hour: 6:20.

There comes a time when car bombs begin to lose their fascination. For me, that time had long since passed. Any evening might bring the echo of two, three, or four resounding blasts in the night. Most were the work of local protection rackets or the result of petty feuds. Nothing worth passing on to the American television viewer, whose excitement threshold had been raised in direct proportion to the ability of the people of the Middle East to inflict increasingly horrendous violence on each other.

Most blasts would result in a few injuries or maybe one or two dead. "A little girl was killed, nothing to worry about," someone would report as they came into the hotel, and everyone would relax. In Beirut, cynicism took root quickly. At one time, we would run out with the cameras every time something went bang in the night (or day). But in the weeks before October 23, 1983, so many things had been going bang, with so little return for us, that we had become more selective in what we pursued. It was that or never sleep.

So it was difficult to be enthusiastic about the idea of getting out of bed at 6:20 on an otherwise quiet Sunday morning to go chase some silly noise. I let my head flop back onto the pillow and debated the idea of going back to sleep. It was tempting. The explosion had been loud, louder than anything I had heard in a while, but then it was probably close by. Maybe Lucy Spiegel, my producer, or one of the half dozen camera crews we had on hand would go and check it out on their own. But what if it hadn't woken Lucy? And if the crews didn't get the call, each would probably figure I had phoned someone else. Ah, I told myself, it was probably just somebody blowing up a grocery store again. But then someone had set off a remote control bomb as a Marine patrol had passed a few days before ...

I reached for the phone and rang cameraman Dave Green. He had heard the explosion, too, and was already awake.

In the car moments later, the pillar of smoke led us like a beacon to the French blast. As we raced along behind ambulances and fire trucks toward the smoking pyre, it never occurred to us that this was just a sideshow. The main event lay four miles away.

Dozens of French soldiers were carefully climbing over the wreckage. Others stood watching, unsure where to start. Muffled cries for help could be heard from below. Soldiers crowded around one spot. An outstretched hand reach up through the rubble, gripping that of a comrade on the surface as if clinging to life itself.

Some French officers, calm and deliberate, conferred over how to proceed with the search, while others issued orders to the troops.

"How many men are inside?" I asked one officer."Many," he said, shaking his head gravely. "Too many."

The American television networks spend vast amounts of money pouring people and equipment into foreign stories, but success or failure often ends up resting in the hands of the local drivers. That morning was to be no different. With the videocassette containing the first ten minutes of Green's footage of the French disaster, I hurried back to the hotel to get the tape on the road to the satellite station and send more crews out to the French bombing. As I came in the door and tossed the tape to Lucy, Ayad Harake, one of our best drivers, rushed up.

"They blow the Marines," he shouted.

No, I assured him. It was the French.

"No," he insisted,"the Marines."

"Ayad, I just came from there. It was the French."

He was angry now. It was tough dealing with these thick foreigners.

"The Marines, too. They blow the Marines, too," he said, grabbing me by the shoulders.

I jumped into Ayad's car with Sami Awad and Hassan Harake, our Lebanese camera team, to check out his story. I was convinced we were on a wild-goose chase.

My skepticism ended on the airport road. The thick, gray plume of smoke could be seen a mile away. As we got closer, a cold, empty feeling settled in the pit of my stomach.

In big explosions, where buildings are destroyed, the area immediately around is carpeted in dust and bits of debris. A half-mile away from the Marine compound, the road looked as if it was covered with a layer of fresh snow. As we approached the first Marine positions, still more than 100 yards from the main compound, the car bounced over chunks of cement littering our path. This was a big one.

The wind shifted, blowing the smoke toward us, obstructing our view. I strained to see what had been wrecked, looking for the four-story Battalion Landing Team headquarters to use as a point of reference. The sudden realization was like hitting a brick wall. The BLT was gone.

In a disaster on the scale of the morning of October 23, 1983, the adrenaline takes over. Emotions are sealed off. The door to that part of the brain crashes shut. The mind becomes like a camera. It registers images. It accepts facts. It assesses scale. It notes the human tragedy, but it does so on a mechanical level.

It's almost like watching television. You are caught up in what's going on, but somehow it doesn't directly affect you.

For soldier, rescue worker or reporter, the process is crucial to the ability to function. If the enormity of the horror breaks through at the time, you become useless. The human reaction can come later. If it does not, the emotions have become cauterized. It is time to find another line of work.

From the chaos of the scene at Beirut airport that fateful Sunday morning, individual images linger:

A black marine, his face caked with cement dust, reaching back to pull up a pair of red gym shorts to cover his exposed rear end even as the stretcher that held him was lifted from a gap in the rubble. There was a huge lump on his forehead. Beneath it, his eyes showed wide and frightened. Ignoring fellow marines who were trying to get him to lie down and relax, he propped himself up by his elbows and surveyed the scene in disbelief as they carried him away.

A helicopter pilot, helmet visor obscuring his face, kneeling as if in benediction beside a single stretcher in the empty runway, imparting a few works of encouragement or prayer to a wounded buddy before the flight out to the ships.

The thousand-yard stare on the face of a young marine as he sat in the shade of a water tank to take it all in.

The gaunt, gray face of Major Robert Jordan, the Marine spokesman. Stopping in front of Sami and Hassan, he pushed his helmet back, gazed directly into the camera lens as if it was not even there, and in a voice heavy with unspeakable sorrow, whispered "Sami" in recognition, shook his head as if trying to make himself believe it had all really happened, then wandered off. There was nothing more to say.

Twelve thousand pounds of explosives. FBI investigators would later report that they had never seen an explosion so devastating. British troops in their bunkers a few miles away saw a huge mushroom cloud rise over the Marine compound and thought the Americans had been nuked.

Instead, one man driving a yellow Mercedes truck had taken the lives of 241 U.S. military personnel. Not since D Day on Iwo Jima had so many marines died on a single day.

It wasn't as if the Americans hadn't been warned. The rubble of the U.S. Embassy stood just three miles away. Six months before, it too had been ravaged by a suicide bomber. Sixty-three people had been killed. Security at the new, temporary embassy in a complex of buildings on the seafront corniche had been beefed up, but the lesson had apparently been lost on the Marine brass, who were preoccupied with the political mission to "show the flag" imposed on them by the White House. The Marine compound was protected by the usual barbed wire and guardposts, but, tragically, not enough to deter a suicide bomber.

Blowing up diplomats was one thing, but the attitude among Marine officers seemed to be: "It can't happen to us." After all, Marines knew all about wars.

But they didn't know all about Lebanese wars.

You can't tell the players without a scorecard, so before coming over from the States, Marine units heading for Lebanon were shown a movie that gave them a thumbnail sketch of the country where some of them would soon die. It showed clips of children playing and fighters fighting. The marines saw the Shi'ites and Palestinians they would meet in the shantytowns around the airport, the Druzes of the mountains (they were the guys in the funny baggy pants), and all the rest. Only there was no narration, and the chaplains who led the discussion groups did not really know much more about it all than what they had read.

Nobody ever told the marines who the enemy was. A lot of the young leathernecks decided they were fighting Communists. That was just fine with Ronald Reagan. He thought so, too.

If the Marines were having a hard time figuring out who the bad guys were, they were not alone. In the autumn of 1983, there were at least 25 separate militias operating in Lebanon. They ranged from powerful armies such as Yasser Arafat's wing of the PLO to gangs of thugs that set off a car bomb killing scores of innocents and then disappeared back into the woodwork.

You name the political complexion, it was there: right wing, left wing, pro-Khomeini, pro-Nasser, pro-Begin. Some groups were brought and paid for by foreign governments, others were willing to alter their political stripes as the market required. Alliances changed as fast as dollars at the money stalls on Hamra Street. The joke about the left-leaning, Israeli-backed, pro-Syrian, Islamic fundamentalist Christian militiaman was only just beyond the realm of the possible.

Splinter group bred splinter group. Any band of a dozen thugs could find a sponsor, come up with a nifty name, and go out and kill people. The politically and religiously committed, too, split into tinier and tinier factions for ever more obscure reasons. Even the experts sometimes ended up baffled.

"I have all the intelligence resources of our organization at my disposal," Ghassan Siblani, a top official of the Shi'ite Amal (Hope) militia, once replied when asked about the Shi'ite splinter groups. "I know the sheikhs [religious elders], I have an extensive network of contracts, relatives, and acquaintances to draw on, and even I have no idea who some of these groups are."

The biggest factions, the Shi'ite Amal and the Druze Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) on the Muslim side and the Christian Lebanese Forces (Phalangists), were, in broad terms, working for clearly defined political goals: the Muslims were demanding more power and the Christians were trying to prevent them from getting it. But they, too, operated at the whim of others.

"Nobody is free in Lebanon. Nobody at all," Walid Jumblatt was firmly convinced. As warlord of the Druzes, a breakaway Muslim sect, he was in a good position to know. "Even the president is not free. Everybody does rely on somebody else; a foreign power."

Since civil war erupted in 1975, the feuds of the Middle East had been fought on the streets of Beirut. If a government wanted to make a point without itself going to war, it commissioned a battle in Beirut or hired an assassin to knock off one of its enemies there. The going price for a hit was about $500, but plenty of people were prepared to do it a lot more cheaply.

The Syrian Socialist Party battled the Iraqi Baathists (just to confuse the issue, there were also Syrian Baathists) one day and Christian Phalangists the next. The Syrian-backed Shi'ite Amal militia clashed with Syrian-backed Palestinians. The Jordanian chargé was kidnapped; the Saudi consul disappeared; Libyan and Turkish diplomats were assassinated; the Iraqi embassy was blown up; the Saudi embassy was stormed and burned.

One night in February 1984, the Pakistani ambassador barely escaped death when a sniper on a nearby rooftop fired at him as he sat reading a book in his room at the Commodore Hotel. The ambassador came from a strict Islamic nation. He had refused to flee with the rest of the diplomatic corps when Muslim militiamen took control of West Beirut a few days before. "It is my duty as a Muslim, and the representative of a Muslim country, to stay," he insisted. Even he couldn't figure out why someone would want to shoot him. By the summer of that year, only one Muslim ambassador, the envoy from North Yemen, was left in Beirut, and he was living in Christian East Beirut.

The naive who tried to find logical explanations for everything that went on in Lebanon quickly gave up.

If violence could be bought, so too could peace. After each round of fighting, the checkbooks would come out. Sometimes Syria would foot the bill, but more often than not, Saudi Arabia would open its ample purse. Swiss bank accounts would be fortified, arms stockpiles replenished. And the Lebanese would have a few weeks, or perhaps a few months, but more often only a few hours, of relative calm. A Lebanese cease-fire was nothing more than a chance to reload.

At the end of 1983 someone came up with the figure that there had been 179 formal cease-fires – the kind arranged by politicians – since the war began in 1975. Then there were the informal truces worked out by the fighters on the ground. Both kinds often collapsed as quickly as they were arranged. Some days there were so many cease-fires that it became impossible to keep track. "What's this, the fourth or fifth?" a reporter on deadline would shout to his colleagues. "Where have you been? It's number nine," was often the reply. In the time it took to go to the bathroom, a truce could be announced and collapse.

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Excerpted from "Seeds of Hate"
by .
Copyright © 2003 Lawrence Pintak.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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