1983 Beirut Barracks Bombing: No Round Chambered and an Intercept Too Late

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A multinational force of American, French, Italian and British troops entered Lebanon in August 1982 to oversee the PLO's evacuation after Israel's invasion, then returned after the assassination of President Bashir Gemayel and the Sabra and Shatila massacres. As U.S. warships including the USS John Rodgers and USS Virginia shelled Druze positions in support of the Lebanese army, local Muslim and Druze communities stopped seeing the Marines as neutral. The Marines still operated under peacetime rules: weapons on safe, magazines loaded, no round in the chamber. Meanwhile Iran's Revolutionary Guard was training the proxy force that became Hezbollah in the Bekaa Valley, and on September 26, 1983, the NSA intercepted a message ordering a spectacular action against the Marines that reached the commander only after the attack.

At 6:22 a.m. on Sunday, October 23, a 19 ton yellow Mercedes truck crashed through concertina wire into the lobby of the 1st Battalion 8th Marines headquarters at Beirut International Airport. Only Lance Corporal Eddie DiFranco managed to chamber a round. The butane and PETN device, equal to as much as 12,000 pounds of TNT and set on concrete and marble to direct the blast upward, lifted and collapsed the four story building, killing 241 Americans, the Marine Corps' worst single day since Iwo Jima. Minutes later a second truck killed 58 French paratroopers at the Drakkar building. George Shultz pushed for retaliation, Caspar Weinberger blocked it, and U.S. forces left Lebanon by early 1984.

• Rescuers worked under sniper fire, and Navy dentists set up triage stations in the rubble.
• Rafic Hariri, later Lebanon's prime minister, supplied a 40 ton crane from nearby airport work sites.
• The battalion's Lutheran chaplain was the last survivor pulled out, at noon on Sunday.
• The Long Commission faulted the chain of command, the slow intelligence pipeline and a perimeter of chain link fence, wire and sewer pipes.
• A U.S. federal court ruled on Iran's responsibility in 2003, in a civil suit filed by victims' families.