Combat· Lebanon Multinational Force (Beirut Bombing)
Lebanon 1982-1984
The Marine deployment to Beirut was an eighteen-month effort to help stabilize a Lebanon torn apart by civil war and foreign intervention.
It began in August 1982 when Marines landed to help oversee the evacuation of Palestine Liberation Organization fighters from Beirut, then returned the following month, alongside French, Italian, and later British forces, as part of a Multinational Force charged with a "presence" mission to support the Lebanese government. What was conceived as peacekeeping gradually drew the Marines into the surrounding violence as Lebanon's factional war closed around them, culminating in the catastrophic truck bombing of the Marine headquarters in October 1983, the Corps' worst single-day loss of life since Iwo Jima. The mission, never clearly defined and increasingly untenable, was abandoned, and the Marines withdrew in February 1984. The Beirut deployment became a defining and painful episode in modern Marine Corps history.
Engagements in this conflict (5)
Record no. 652