FROM THE COLLECTIONS
By: Andrea Hoffman Collections Manager
“I know there are no words that can express our sorrow and grief over the loss of those splendid young men and the injury to so many others…Likewise, there are no words to properly express our outrage and, I think, the outrage of all Americans at the despicable act, following as it does on the one perpetrated several months ago, in the spring, that took the lives of scores of people at our Embassy in that same city, in Beirut.” – President Ronald Reagan, October 23, 1983
F
orty years ago this fall, in the midst of the Lebanese Civil War, suicide bombers destroyed buildings that housed U.S. and French military personnel who were stationed in Beirut as part of a multinational peacekeeping force. The barracks for the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit (MAU) Battalion Landing Team (1/8) was one of the bomber’s targets. The Marines lost 220 of their own in addition to the 18 sailors and three soldiers who were killed. October 23, 1983 proved to be the deadliest single day for the U. S. Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima. The continued breakdown of local order led to the withdrawal of their replacements, the 22nd MAU, by February 1984, and yet a contingent of Marines stayed to continue providing security at the U.S. Embassy. The amphibious assault ship USS Nassau (LHA-4) brought 115 24th MAU replacements for such duty to Beirut during the spring of 1984. For U.S. Navy Boiler Technician David R. Homan, Jr., a petty officer first class from Racine, Wisconsin who had boarded Nassau that January, his April 7, 1984 arrival off the coast of Beirut marked his second time there in two years. Homan was previously in the region during the summer of 1982 on USS Biddle (CG-34), a guided missile cruiser that escorted refugees of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) fleeing to Tunisia. Upon his return, Homan was already well acquainted with the serious tensions across the Middle East at the time. Beirut wound up being the site of an incident that nearly cost Homan an eye and later earned him a Purple Heart medal. He was on the ship’s deck during a fire fight that erupted onshore. When machine guns suddenly turned and struck his ship, shrapnel hit him in several places and caused him to fall to the deck below. The pain in his back initially distracted him from shards of glass that went in his eye when his glasses shattered, but that was the more severe of his injuries that day. He needed a cornea transplant and three weeks of recovery. These injuries were far from the only ones Homan would incur during his 22 years of service, with his work in the boiler room proving hard on his body. From the time he enlisted in 1974 until the day he was transferred to the Temporary Disability Retired List in 1991, he developed a heart condition due to repeated heat stroke, suffered permanent nerve damage to his legs and hands, and broke his back twice. These injuries meant Homan did not return to the Middle East again during the Persian Gulf War, but instead spent three months at the end of 10