Monday is 40th anniversary of Beirut barracks bombing

It was a Sunday morning in Lebanon and U.S. military personnel were sleeping in late. Outside, a truck filled with explosives driven by a suicide bomber pulled up outside the barracks at Beirut International Airport. When the truck was detonated on October 23, 1983, 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three Army soldiers were killed.

When Jon Vigue came to after the blast, he was trapped by slabs of shattered concrete and struggled to breathe with concrete dust in his lungs. There was intense pain in his lower abdominal area where a piece of rebar had impaled him, and the shouts of fellow Marines trying to pull him from the rubble filled his ears.

All three of Vigue’s roommates were killed.

“I was the only one in our room that lived,” said Vigue, a resident of Ellijay. “I couldn’t move. It just felt like something heavy had me trapped; it was cement. A piece of steel, a rebar, went through my lower abdomen, and I was pinned to the building. When they found me alive, it took about four or five hours to free me.”

When his fellow Marines found Vigue still breathing, they frantically tried to free him. In the process, they actually caused more damage to his body.

“When I woke up in the hospital, I was totally out of it and it was good news, bad news,” Vigue recalled. “The good news was you’re OK, the bad news is you’re not going to have children — the damage was so bad they could never fix it.” 

Lee Dillard, a Murray County resident who graduated from Gilmer High School in 1975 and served in the Marines from 1976-82, remembered the assault as “a sad day for the Marines and the nation.”

“In my opinion, it was not handled properly and in a professional manner,” said Dillard of all the troops being housed together in one area. “I even heard some of our Marines weren’t armed or allowed to use deadly force. It was a sad time in history, and I say ‘Semper Fi’ (Always Faithful) to my brothers and sisters.”  

Vigue verified the “scuttlebutt,” or rumor, that Dillard heard through the Corps grapevine.

“The terrorists started hitting us, and we were getting shelled every night (with artillery),” he said. “But we were there as a peacekeeping force, and they had decided that we would not chamber rounds (to fire weapons), and we would not shoot back.”

Another Vietnam?

Barry Robbins, a Vietnam-era Marine veteran who now serves as the District 1 Commissioner of Whitfield County, exited the Corps in 1971 and was working at a bank in Jacksonville, Fla., when he heard the news.

“(The bombing) happened the year before Kathy and I moved to Georgia,” he remembered. “Suicide bombers really weren’t as prevalent as they are now, and to think that somebody would be crazed enough to actually have an ideology that says ‘Go strap a bomb to your back or your car seat and drive it into a building’ … I couldn’t fathom somebody doing that, even if their ideology was over religion or hate for another country.”

At the time, Robbins said he thought back to his training that appeared to be heading toward deployment in Vietnam.

“It was dead serious,” he said of the drills and practice. “We knew we were going over there because we were fighting for democracy, if you will ... So that’s what I was thinking after the barracks bombing, ‘Why is this happening?’ And I had no answer — because after hearing about 58,000-plus dying (in Vietnam), my first thought was, ‘Oh no, it can’t happen again. We’re going to get into a war, or a police action’ as Vietnam was referred to — and hearing that always irritated me, being a Marine on active duty — and we lost 58,000 over there. It really bothered me. In other words, ‘Is this another Vietnam, and how long are we going to be there?’”

Brian Groenhout, a Marine helicopter pilot who actually retired out of the Navy, knew two of the Marine officers killed in the blast — First Lieutenant William Zimmerman and First Lieutenant Clyde Plymel. 

“We went to The Basic School (for officers) together,” said Groenhout, who has ties to northwest Georgia. “My wife (Angela) and I were living in base housing at El Toro MCAS (Marine Corps Air Station) in California.”

Groenhout trained and flew helicopters with the 161st HMM (Marine Medium Helicopter squadron) out of MCAS Tustin, Calif. The former Angela Pierce was born in Gilmer County and graduated Northwest Whitfield High School in 1977. 

“It was a big, big deal, of course,” Groenhout said. “I think everybody was just stunned when over 200 Marines were killed. You learn a lot from the after-analysis, but I just remember it being such a tragedy — why did it all happen — and the controversy of (President) Reagan even putting the Marines over there. Was that a good idea, or not a good idea?”

He said Zimmerman and Plymel were “just good guys.”

“We weren’t close friends; we were in the same company, but not the same platoon, so I didn’t know them as well,” he said. “Plymel, I mean even now I can see his face, I can hear his voice. He was kind of a soft-spoken guy, and Zimmerman was the same way. Some guys are high-energy and their presence is felt more, and they have that aura about them, but these guys were both low-key; I don’t remember any specifics … they were just good, run-of-the-mill second lieutenants going through training.”

Vigue knew he would never have the chance to have children of his own. However, an idea was hatched. He married the woman who was helping him to get through PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), and he and Michelle became Semper Fi Santa and Mrs. Claus.

“Twenty-some odd years later, I’m Santa Claus,” he said with a chuckle. “This is my way to experience parenthood to a degree. I went with Semper Fi Santa because the Marine Corps was my family. I ran away from home when I was 17 years old and joined the Marine Corps. It’s what I wanted to do my whole life.”

Groenhout was reflective as the 40th anniversary of the Beirut barracks bombing approached.

“When I think about things like Beirut, the main thing that comes to my mind is that I make the analogy to the Korean War — it’s a forgotten war,” he said. “Most people now don’t know anything about the Beirut bombing anymore. It’s like the Korean War. My point is it was a huge tragedy but yet that tragedy gets lost in the shuffle. Life goes on, and everybody forgets about it, unless they remember it like we do, or I do because of personal connections in knowing people … We later lost two more members of that basic officers’ school in helicopter crashes — the military is a dangerous business.”