The 1983 terrorist bomb in Beirut, Lebanon that ignited the Wests War on Terror

In a week where Israel killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, Lebanon — and launched a ground offensive in the southern region of the country — a new book revisits the 1983 terrorist bombing in the city that resulted in the biggest single-day loss of life suffered by the US Marine Corps since the 1945 Battle of Iwo Jima.And as Jack Carr and James M Scott, reveal in “Targeted: Beirut: The 1983 Marine Barracks Bombing and the Untold Origin Story of the War on Terror” (Atria), it is a terrorist attack that “continues to influence US foreign policy and haunts the Marine Corps to this day.”Based on interviews, military records, personal letters and diaries, “Targeted” is the story of one of the most shocking acts of violence ever perpetrated on the United States military and how America’s failure to mount a robust response merely served to embolden terrorist networks across the Middle East in the years that followed.Early on a Sunday morning on Oct.23, 1983, a truck packed with 12,000 pounds of explosives was driven into a building in Beirut, Lebanon, housing troops of the 1st Battalion 8th Marines (Battalion Landing Team) of the 2nd Marine Division, destroying the barracks and killing 241 servicemen.The strike came six months after a suicide bombing at the US Embassy in West Beirut that killed 63 people.

“That attack would prove to be not only the bloodiest assault on an American Embassy but the opening salvo in the nation’s four-decade war on terrorism,” writes Carr. As the Lebanese Civil War raged, the US Marines arrived as part of an international peacekeeping force but as Carr notes, it was “a mission of peace that would prove anything but peaceful.”The Battalion Landing Team took over a four-story concrete building that once housed Lebanon’s Aviation Administrative Bureau but had also been used by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and as an Israeli field hospital.Battle-scarred with few windows intact, t...