Better Late Than Never

One sunny day, I and my traveling companion, Peter Phillip, a German journalist, drove into the U.S. Marine Corps installation at Beirut airport in Peter’s fun-size Suzuki Jeep looking for something to report. It was October 1983, when anybody could drive in unchecked. The Americans had arrived to keep the peace. You saw them catching beneficial rays and cutting the grass and pumping iron, each Leatherneck with his Walkman and not a weapon in sight. Peter and I introduced ourselves to the press officer, a major with a tent of his own, and he said, “Are you here for the cheerleaders?”

Before I could ask, “What cheerleaders?”, Peter said yes.

“There’s a bird leaving now,” the major said. “Run get on it.”

We did. A crewman gave each of us a pair of earmuffs for the noise, and before you could say foreign correspondent, we’d been hoisted a thousand feet over the Shi’ite slums, the Palestinian refugee camps, the Commodore hotel where most of the foreign press slept and drank, and the campus of the university whose president, Malcolm Kerr, father of NBA standout Steve Kerr, would be killed the following year by either Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah, and were zooming over the Mediterranean, where ships of the Sixth Fleet, including the USS New Jersey with her fearsome guns, were strung out like the Revell models I’d put together in boyhood. Peter grinned and shrugged. Down the bird touched on the deck of the helicopter landing ship USS Raleigh.

The ship was sitting low in the water, because on her must have been half the sailors of the fleet and many of the Marines from on shore — 4,000 or so young American males packed together like expectant sardines. They clung to the Raleigh’s spars, hung from the bridge, and shinnied halfway to the top of the superstructure where the radar dishes rotated under the Stars and Stripes.

A lieutenant took me and Peter in hand. He brought us to the wardroom where the Dallas Cowgirls were mixing with officers and getting their USS Raleigh caps. Most of the ships of the fleet, the lieutenant explained, had sailed from Norfolk more than four months previous. There’d be no shore leave for another month — shore leave, by the way, in Haifa, not Beirut. It seemed like a good idea to have some entertainment for the men before then.

Back on deck, I asked a sailor why he’d been sent to the Middle East.

“We’re here to keep the sides apart while they reason with each other,” he said. “We’ll have to kick some ass, maybe.”

He was from Nebraska.

“This show is just going to be one big prick tease,” he forecast.

And indeed, when they appeared, the redhead, the brunette, the soul sister, and the five blondes had on virtually nothing and were more perfect than anything Hugh Hefner had dreamed of as a Chicago high schooler. Yet the show wasn’t hot. The young ladies did what they did, they gave it everything they had for 90 minutes, but it wasn’t hot, wasn’t apocalyptic. It was just good clean fun a long way from home.

“You men,” said the Black girl into the microphone, “are good-looking, you’re built, and we love what you’re doing for America!” The Raleigh shivered with cheers. The Cowgirls performed a hoedown, slapping rock-hard, silky thighs. They did a cancan. They sang a Pointer Sisters song — “I want to wrap myself around you.” They turned cartwheels under the blades of a chopper. An encore, then another. The show, viewed and enjoyed by some of the 241 Marines who’d be crushed to death in their sleep by an enormous Hezbollah bomb one quiet Sunday morning not long afterwards, couldn’t have been a greater success.

Update: Last week, the 60-something Fuad Shukr, a top Hezbollah operative and commander, was killed in an Israeli strike in Beirut. According to Israel, he headed Hezbollah’s rocket development, deployment, and firing program and was responsible for the attack earlier last month in Majdal Shams, a Druze village on the Golan Heights that killed 12 children and wounding dozens more. Some people believe the Israelis make things up. But the New York Times reports that Shukr planned and ordered the bombing of the Marines and for years had had a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head. The paper of record hasn’t said whether Israel will be claiming it.

Edward Grossman has reported for TAS, Wall Street Journal, Les temps modernes (Paris), Dagens Nyheter (Stockholm), Asahi Shimbun (Tokyo) and Shefa (Jerusalem).