At about 6:20 a.m. a Lebanese Shiite suicide bomber drove a large Mercedes-Benz truck laden with high explosives and circled the parking lot adjacent to a building near Beirut International Airport where the men of the 1st Battalion 8th Marines were housed. After picking up speed, the driver of the truck headed straight for the Battalion Landing Team building, broke through the security barrier and rammed the truck into the lobby of the building.

Instants later, the largest non-nuclear explosion in history literally lifted the building, bringing it down on itself and killing 241 U.S. military personnel, the vast majority Marines. It was the largest single loss for the Marine Corps since the battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.

Two minutes later and about 4 miles away, another similar explosion took down the "Drakkar" building housing French paratroopers of the 3rd Company, 1st Regiment of Chasseurs Parachutistes (Parachute Infantry Regiment) also serving with the Multinational Force. Fifty-eight French paras were killed. For the French, it was the single largest loss since Algeria's war of independence.

This correspondent was awakened just minutes later by a telephone call from a local informer who said, "There's been a large explosion at the Marine base. There are many dead and wounded."

Driving at breakneck speed just past the airport roundabout on the straight road leading to the Beirut Airport, I saw a lone Marine running toward the airport, his uniform covered in blood, and stopped to offer him a ride. It was not his blood, but that of a fellow Marine he had just taken to a nearby hospital.

Twenty-five years later it is still hard to forget the look in this young Marine's eyes. It's the look troops get after being engaged in a ferocious firefight or after sitting in a foxhole as mortar and artillery shells rain down around you, not knowing if the next one will hit your foxhole, or that of your buddy a few feet away. Or yet again, it's the look one gets after living through the largest non-nuclear explosion and having to carry your friend to a hospital.

It is also impossible to forget what this young Marine told me when I asked what had happened.

"Did you see the embassy when it was blown up?" he asked, referring to a car bomb that destroyed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut six month earlier, in April of the same year.

"This is 10 times worse," he said. "Everyone is dead," he added with that empty stare, his head shaking in disbelief at what he had just lived through.

I thought he was exaggerating. Minutes later, arriving just in front of where the BLT used to be, it was obvious the Marine riding in my car was not exaggerating.

As a correspondent who had covered every Middle East conflict since Black September in Jordan in 1970, and who had covered the entire Lebanese civil war since its first day in April 1975, I was not unaccustomed to seeing death and human suffering and man's unfathomable capacity to inflict pain and suffering upon his fellow man, all in the name of the same god they choose to call by another name.

But nothing measured up to the carnage of this bloody Sunday in Beirut 25 years ago this Thursday, in what was the opening salvo against the United States and its Western allies in what has become known as the "War on Terrorism."

The Marines who served with the Multinational Force in Lebanon had come as peacekeepers. They had come in peace, as the slogan of the Beirut Veterans Association reminds us. They came in peace but were thrown into a lions' den that was anything but peaceful.

What happened in Beirut two and a half decades ago was by no means an isolated incident. It followed on the heels of the bombing of the U.S. Embassy the very day the CIA was holding a meeting of its regional assets. Most perished in the explosion, setting U.S. human intelligence assets in the Middle East back decades. Coincidence? Hardly. That was the scene setter. Without proper intel the United States was flying blind in Lebanon.

Twenty-five years later, it seems as though U.S. foreign policy is still flying blind in the Middle East.

(Claude Salhani is editor of the Middle East Times. He was a correspondent in Beirut at the time of the Marine bombing.)

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