Thirty years ago today, I was working in Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia, when the BBC began reporting that a suicidal terrorist had driven
a water tanker loaded with explosives into a four story building in Beruit,
Lebanon, that housed a detachment of U.S. Marines.
More than 240 of our soldiers died in that attack.
It was the first and most substantial attack by
radical Muslim extremists that I had seen up until that day, and it wouldn’t be
the last. Unfortunately, I would see many more, including the worst in world
history.
I don’t think we learned much from that attack,
or from the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, an American businessman who was thrown
overboard, from the cruise ship Achille Lauro, by Palestinian terrorists less
than two years after the Beruit bombing.
To me, those events were the beginning of radical
Islam’s war against the west, a war that has only increased over time. And,
with each attack that has followed, we have learned more and more about our new
found enemy, most importantly, that it looks like they’re here to stay.
If history has taught us anything, it is that
good will prevail over evil.
As we continue in that battle between good and
evil, let us not forget those that sacrificed, so that we could live in freedom.
God Bless those soldiers that died on October 23,
1983, and those that have died since.
May they never ever be forgotten.
