11 years ago today 20 years later, Aurora vet haunted by Beirut bombing By David Garbe STAFF WRITER AURORA �Twenty years ago today, John Hartman was ducking into his tent after finishing his dawn guard duties at the U.S. Marines encampment in Beirut, Lebanon. At 6:30 a.m., the young Aurora soldier was just about to head out for breakfast when he heard the explosion that still rings in his ears today. A suicide bomber drove a truck loaded with 2,000 pounds of explosives through the camps gates and into the barracks, set up in a four-story office building at the Beirut airport. The blast leveled the building and killed 241 American servicemen and wounded more than 100. It was one of Americas earliest and worst experiences with terrorism. After two decades, the attack has faded from many Americans memories, blending in with the seemingly endless cycle of tragedy in the Middle East and overshadowed by the Sept. 11 airplane hijackings. Forgetting, however, hasnt been so easy for Hartman and his fellow survivors. I still have flashbacks, he said. Theyll never stop. People say you need to put it in the past and forget about it. You can deal with it, but as much as you try, you cant forget about it. Hartman enlisted in the Marines shortly after he graduated from East Aurora High School in 1981, and Beirut was his first overseas posting. War-torn city A force of 1,800 Marines had been deployed to the war-torn city multiple times in the early 1980s in an attempt to bring stability after an Israeli invasion and Lebanese civil war. The area around the airport where the Marines were based took artillery fire regularly from militants hiding in the hills outside the city. In fact, when Hartman first felt the explosion from 50 yards away, he thought it had been a direct mortar hit inside the camp. The sirens were going off and everyone ran for the bunkers, he said. There was dust everywhere. We didnt know what was going on. Then a guy ran into the bunker all bloody and said (the barracks) was destroyed. Everyone ran outside and started digging out the bodies. He said he pulled out about 20 people who were still alive, and more dead than he cares to recall. Album of tragic memories Hartman sighed as he flipped through an album of photos he took of the bombing site: All that remained of the four-story building was a pile of shattered concrete and a charred crater. Hartman and his comrades dug for victims for six days. On the sixth day, Hartman himself found the last body to be removed from the wreckage. He trailed off as he tried to describe the scene: If you can imagine a body under four floors of concrete, just crushed, and the maggots, everything ... The source of the attack was never conclusively proven, although the Reagan administration suspected the Lebanese Islamic militant group Hezbollah. To avoid raising the ire of the Arab world any further, then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger aborted a planned military response against Hezbollah, which denied any involvement. Four months after the bombing, the battered Marine force pulled out of Lebanon. Shaping foreign policy As an adviser to Weinberger at the time, current Secretary of State Colin Powell saw the bombing as a formative incident in the development of American foreign policy in the 1990s. Our Marines had been stationed in Lebanon for the fuzzy idea of providing a presence, Powell wrote in his 1995 autobiography. There are times when American lives must be risked and lost. Foreign policy cannot be paralyzed by the prospect of casualties. But lives must not be risked until we can face a parent or a spouse or a child with a clear answer to the question of why a member of that family had to die. To provide a symbol or a presence is not enough. As a 20-year-old lance corporal caught on the ground, Hartman had perhaps an imperfect understanding of the political and ethnic tensions involved in the bombing. To this day, he is bothered by the militarys response to the troops at the camp. The ones that were there and digging out bodies should have gotten a bronze star for saving lives, or something ... just some recognition, he said. What the Marines got were combat service ribbons for their peacekeeping mission, an irony not lost on Hartman. When his tour of duty with the Marines ended in 1986, Hartman returned to civilian life. Since, he has worked as a carpenter and handyman; he currently runs his own business in Aurora. He thinks about the bombing when he cant avoid it. The Sept. 11 terror attacks, for example, brought back a lot of memories. They kept saying theyre digging and looking for bodies, but I knew they werent going to find anyone. Ive been there. Contact staff writer David Garbe at (630) 844-5903 or dgarbe@scn1
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 11:27:31 +0000
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