Beirut - Free Range International

June 26, 2025June 26, 2025

The Iran Punitive Raids were a Long Time Coming

We finally have a Leader in the White House.

I was a member of two renowned infantry battalions while serving as a company-grade officer in the Marine Corps. The first was the 1^st Battalion, 9^th Marines (1/9), and the second was the 1^st Battalion, 8^th Marines (1/8). 1/9 was known as the Walking Dead, a moniker they picked up after losing a rifle company (Bravo) to a North Vietnamese Army ambush in the Leatherneck Square area of Northern I Corps in 1967. 1/8 was the battalion targeted by Iran in the 1983 Beirut bombing.

Former 1/9 Marines are constantly creating new and improved 1/9 logos

The term “The Walking Dead” originated as a pejorative label for the battalion, referring to it as a hard-luck outfit that suffered excessive casualties. Vietnam-era Marine infantry battalions averaged 800 men. During the four years 1/9 fought in Vietnam, they sustained 747 men killed in action.

Despite the casualties that earned 1/9 the “Walking Dead” nickname, Marines assigned to 1/9 embraced the Walking Dead handle. It was on our PT shirts in the 1980s when infantry battalions were allowed to have distinctive physical training uniforms. It was on our unit plaques; every Marine assigned to 1/9 was proud of being in the famous Walking Dead battalion.

The 1^st Battalion, 8^th Marines was the exact opposite. There was no institutional memory of the Beirut disaster. When I served in 1/8, I knew the battalion had been decimated in Beirut because my surgical support team was deployed there following the bombing. While I was with the battalion in the mid 90s nobody ever talked about or acknowledged the Beirut disaster.

Former 1/8 Marines do not seem that attached to the battalion despite its long history of combat excellence.

The difference in how Marines viewed the disasters in Vietnam and Beirut proves an old saying, frequently forgotten by officers, that you can’t fool the troops. Vietnam-era Marines knew the media were lying about Vietnam. They knew, after Walter Cronkite said that the War was lost, that it was, in reality, won. The Marines knew that they had beaten the NVA to a pulp, destroying entire divisions with their aggressive deployment of raggedy ass infantry battalions into the Demilitarized Zone.

Despite media skepticism, regardless of the popular histories written by unpopular journalists like Stanley Karnow, Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam, and Michael Herr, the troops knew who won the fighting portion of the war. Not until legitimate historians like Mark Moyar, who can read Vietnamese and spent time in Hanoi’s archives researching the war from the North Vietnamese perspective, did the truth known to troops on the ground reach a wider audience.

After the Marine barracks bombing in 1983, the troops knew they would never get payback. They intuitively understood our feckless national leadership would not punish Iran but would, as hard as it was to believe, reward them in the ensuing years. Our national leadership was incapable of understanding or operating from first principles; they refused to understand the Koran, the purpose of Islam, or believe that Islamic clerics and militants meant what they said about the infidel West.

While the “best and the brightest” flailed about in the Middle East, the troops seethed. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the troops got a little payback. Still, they were halted long before the job finished because our leaders were squeamish about the disproportionate casualties they were inflicting on the Iraqis. Then 9/11 happened, and instead of going into Afghanistan and destroying the Taliban and killing Osama bin Laden in a massive punitive raid, we destroyed the Taliban, then let Osama get away because our leaders are risk-averse careerists. The idea of “mission first” or winning a war is an alien concept to careerists.

Then, inexplicably, we decided to stay in Afghanistan because of the “you break it, you buy it” rule at Pottery Barn. That Pottery Barn has no rule like that was irrelevant; our best and brightest do not concern themselves with trivialities like the truth, the narratives they create are more important.

After allowing OBL to slip away, we then invaded Iraq for unexplained reasons, placing our troops in mortal danger while spouting nonsense like Islam is the religion of peace. Islam has never been a “religion of peace” and never will be. Early during the Iraq debacle, the CIA was warned about Iranian military officers infiltrating Shia areas to introduce explosive formed penetrating IEDs designed to destroy American armor and automatic weapons to cleanse Iraq of its Sunni Muslim minority.

The CIA came up with a plan to kill the Iranian agents using contractors, and Eric Prince got busy putting together a force to do it, but, at the last minute, Susan Rice canceled the plan. Every American killed by an explosive-formed penetrator died because Susan Rice found the idea of killing Iranian agents distasteful. The troops who served in Beirut, the ones deployed by dumbasses who had no idea what they were doing, were denied payback by a new generation of feckless idiots.

Public service announcement: I don’t speak for every Marine, sailor or soldier who deployed to Beirut; just the ones who are worth a damn.

Now, finally, we have our payback in the form of a punitive raid launched by a President who understands how to wield the power granted him by our constitution. The hammering of three Iranian nuclear sites by giant GBU 57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators was gratifying. Watching the press, the military YouTubers, and the know-it-all podcasters prove wrong in real time was even more gratifying. I know some of the guys who have taken to the airways, trying to cover their flawed analysis by doubling down with opinions that are half-baked and dead wrong. They’re still my friends, but they’re wrong, and I have never been shy about pointing out the obvious to my friends.

Few institutions in America are as worthless as the media, but idiot congressmen and the Council on Foreign Relations run a close second.

The thought that President Trump would put boots on the ground in Iran, of all places, is ludicrous. Iran is a natural fortress protected by massive mountain ranges and deep, hot deserts. The fear that Iran is capable of hurting the United States financially by closing the Strait of Hormuz or by activating “sleeper cells” of battle-hardened jihadists is a pipe dream. Closing the Hormuz hurts Iran (and China), not the United States. How long would “sleeper cells” last in a country that has more firearms in the hands of its civilian population than people?

I admit that using firearms to kill Americans would work in the blue cities that prohibit or restrict their citizens from owning or carrying firearms. It would be most effective in Washington, D.C., where the law-abiding are unarmed and law enforcement DEI-centric. Still, Iran isn’t stupid enough to do us the favor of shooting federal officeholders.

Punitive raids do not start wars; they avoid them by punishing the targeted country so severely that they are incapable of meaningful retaliation. And we just saw one pulled off by true professionals. The plans were kept secret, and the operation was flawless, indicating that we now have a Secretary of Defense who knows how to operate effectively. President Trump did a masterful job of obfuscation, which enabled both strategic and tactical surprise.

This proves that being a wounded combat vet doesn’t prevent one from becoming a political hack who places her dysfunctional political party and personal interests above a competent military.

I don’t care how much of Iran’s nuclear program was destroyed, and I know that nobody currently commenting in the old and new media about it has any idea about the extent of battle damage from our GBU 57s. Not that it stops people from claiming it had a limited effect or that it destroyed the targeted facilities. Nobody will know that for a long time, and the only source that has proven it has the human intelligence networks to find out is Israel.

I hereby retract every snarky thing I have ever said about the Air Force. They did us old Marines a solid by putting the big boom on target in Iran.

We now have a ceasefire between Iran and Israel, which is impressive, and it might even hold. I don’t care about that either, although it is certainly an impressive accomplishment by President Trump. All I care about is that we finally got our payback on a bill that has been long overdue. Iran delenda est, let’s hope they do something stupid so we can destroy more of their military infrastructure.

Dar al-Harb is still out there, and there will come a day of reckoning with them. Let’s hope President Trump or someone like him is at the helm when that happens.

April 20, 2025April 20, 2025

The Foot Sergeant

*Although based on actual events, this is a fictional story of love and forgiveness that seems timely on Easter Sunday. But this is a man’s story, so there is no actual love or formal forgiveness, because that is not how men love each other.

When the 1MC (ship loudspeakers) erupted with “Mass Casualties Inbound,” I hustled down to the hangar bay and started to set up stretcher stands. Ship-to-shore communications were not robust in 1983, so we had no idea how many wounded we would see when the elevator came down from the flight deck. It was just one Marine on a stretcher; the red shirts from the flight deck deposited him in front of us; one of the squadron corpsmen was with him, and as he talked with the surgeon, the other corpsmen and I started prepping him for the Operating Room.

The Marine was a sergeant, but he didn’t look like any of the Marines from Beirut International Airport that we had previously treated. His camouflage utilities were clean and starched, and the boot he still wore was shined. He didn’t smell from weeks without showering, yet he was lying before us, missing a good bit of his right hand and left foot. The battalion aid station had administered morphine before he flew out to us, so although alert, he wasn’t feeling any pain. When I removed his boot, I gasped in amazement. The surgeon and Marine looked at me, so I pointed to the intact foot, saying: “Holy shit, his feet are clean, and toenails trimmed; he doesn’t even smell bad. I’ve never seen a wounded Marine who wasn’t filthy; I think he might be a homosexual.”

I made the joke because the sergeant was starting to freak over the severity of his injuries; getting him focused on something else was a professional move. Back then, you could joke about the gays without fear because the military was male-dominated. Men don’t coddle other men – they teased them, often unmercifully, even if they were friends. The Foot Sergeant was a public affairs Marine assigned to the USS New Jersey and had been riding a CH-53 ashore to do man-on-the-street interviews of the grunts for his ship’s newspaper. The pilot thought he saw an RPG grenade launched at his aircraft as he was landing and dumped the collective, skipping his tail rotor off the deck. The rotor shattered on impact, and pieces flew into the big airframe, hitting the Sergeant, the only passenger. When the sergeant heard my allegation, he protested his innocence as expected, starting a heated back and forth with me until the Anesthesiologist put him under. We were professionals, after all, and knew how to handle injured Marines, even clean ones.

The surgeons trimmed up his lower leg stump and right hand, and both were elevated with Penrose drains inserted in the wound tracts to facilitate proper healing. The sergeant joined another recently wounded Marine in the USS Guam’s seven-bed sick bay. The other Marine was a machine gunner from New York City nicknamed Second Best. He had been wounded in the right leg by First Best, a Syrian machine gunner. They had been dueling for fifteen minutes before Second-Best, who was lying prone behind his gun, was hit by a round that traveled the length of his leg. Although the wound track was long, the injury was minor, allowing Second Best to return to duty in a few weeks for another attempt at his Syrian nemesis.

The Foot Sergeant would be sent back to Bethesda Naval Hospital at some future date. For now, he was stuck on the USS Guam because all our helicopters were ferrying the equipment and entertainers for a Bob Hope Christmas Special to the ship. The lineup included TV stars Brooke Shields, Cathy Lee Crosby, Ann Jillian, and Miss USA Julie Hayek. This would be the last Bob Hope Christmas Show for service members deployed in a war zone, making it a big deal. Not that the Pentagon was admitting Beirut was a war zone, but the loss of over 250 Marines, sailors, and soldiers over the months made it seem damn close to one.

The big show was on Friday, the 23^rd of December, and was impressive. The Marines had flown a few hundred of the grunts in from the beach, and they were given the front-row seats. I had a dirty pair of Marine Corps cammies stashed in my locker for just such an occasion and was hanging out close enough to the stage to be selected to go up and get a Christmas present from Brooke Shields, who kissed me on the cheek on national television. I couldn’t have had a better day before Christmas Eve.

On Christmas Eve, I strolled into the ward to check on the Foot Sergeant and Second Best, who were restricted to their racks while their wounds drained. The Foot Sergeant asked if one of the Hollywood stars or Miss USA would be dropping by, and I said they would, but added, “Not to see you; they want to see wounded Marines, not a closet homo injured by a shitty pilot.” My joke was not well received; instead of calling me foul and filthy names, the Foot Sergeant started to cry. I didn’t know what to do and looked to Second Best for some guidance, but he called me a motherfucker for teasing the Foot Sergeant until he cried. I felt like shit and apologized profusely, but the Foot Sergeant was inconsolable.

I had to make things right; it was Christmas Eve, a time to share joy and love with your fellow man, even those with clean feet and trimmed toenails. I glanced into our two-room ICU and was suddenly inspired. I told the Foot Sergeant to calm down as I was moving him into the ICU, where we could cover him with bloody bandages, hook him up to the EKG, and lure a Hollywood starlet in to spend some time comforting him. The sergeant thought about it for a minute and decided he liked the idea, so I got a wheelchair and moved him over to the ICU.

Pulling Liberty in Haifa, Israel, with one of the Foot Sergeants’ Marine buddies

In 1983, the ICU aboard the USS Guam had an illegal washer and dryer set up in its bathroom. The washer and dryer ran 24/7, except when patients were in the ICU, so the room was hot, and the floor was covered in dust bunnies from the dryer vent. The ICU beds were bigger and taller than the medical ward racks, so the foot sergeant fit comfortably in one, wearing just his pajama bottoms. I covered up his chest and head with gauze, poured a little blood on him, hooked up the EKG monitor, and put an oxygen mask on him without connecting the hose to oxygen (that required doctor orders), so it hung down on the deck.

I sat at a portable stand with a logbook open, mimicking the ICU critical patient watch because the Foot Sergeant looked like a goner. A chair was between the two ICU racks for the Hollywood stars to use if they felt compelled to comfort the fallen warrior. The Foot Sergeant was happy; Second Best was delighted too but bitching about not being in the ICU with us, and I felt like I had made up for teasing the Foot Sergeant until he cried (which was gay, as I pointed out to him later). The stage was set, and we didn’t have long to wait.

The first VIP to wander down the passageway was Bob Hope, who appeared to have had too many celebratory drinks. He was escorted by the Surgeons from Mobile Medical Team 11 and my boss, Dr. Derbert. Fortunately, they, too, had been drinking because they overlooked the missing Foot Sergeant when they escorted Bob Hope to meet with Second Best. I had closed the door to the ICU when I saw them coming, saving the Foot Sergeant for one of the starlets. When I saw a gaggle of news photographers in the passageway, I opened the ICU door and told the Fort Sergeant to stand by. Brooke Shields was the first celebrity to poke her head in, but she immediately decided against entering. Miss USA did the same; looking at the bloody, bandaged spectacle of the Foot Sergeant, she took a pass. But not Ann Jillian. She and her husband immediately entered the ICU, asking how badly the Foot Sergeant was injured. I made up some bullshit about him being shot multiple times when he ran into the no man’s land to rescue a small child in the middle of a firefight. I finished my report, telling the couple we did not expect the Marine to survive the night.

The story moved Ms. Jillian; she had wedged herself into the chair between the ICU beds and was stroking the Foot Sergeant’s blood-matted hair while whispering in his left ear. As I watched, I realized that the Foot Sergeant may not handle this attention well. The room was hot, so he just had a thin sheet covering him; his pulse was starting to skyrocket, which we could hear on the monitor, and suddenly his breathing became labored. That was most likely due to dryer lint clogging the open end of the O2 mask tubing. Then nature stepped in to refute my claims about his sexual orientation. Suddenly, the Foot Sergeant had a massive, rock-hard erection that lifted the sheet covering him like a tent pole.

When that happened, the poor guy turned bright red and began making strange noises as he struggled to breathe. Being a sharp lad, I shouted, “Oh my God, he has a priapism. I’m afraid you must leave now.” I thought I was home free as I escorted the pair to the passageway. But when they left the ICU, they ran into the ship’s doctor, who looked in to see what was happening. “What the fuck is going on in here?” He shouted, probably because he, too, had been drinking.

As the other physicians crowded into the ICU, I explained that some of the corpsmen had been teasing the Foot Sergeant about maybe being gay for some reason. I wanted to make amends for their despicable behavior by getting him some one-on-one attention from a Hollywood starlet. My boss, Dr. Derbert, wasn’t having it; “Bullshit, Lynch, you’re the one who started that rumor when he arrived in the hangar bay, and you’re the only corpsman to tease him about it ever since.” That wasn’t true; one of the other corpsmen occasionally teased the Foot Sergeant, but I was still screwed. The only thing that saved me was the propensity of the American military to cover up embarrassing incidents.

When the officers piled into the ICU, one of the nurses escorted Ann and her husband from the room. He confirmed to them that the badly wounded Marine would probably not survive, while Dr. Derbert read me the riot act. The medical men then gathered in a scrum to get their story straight before heading to the bridge to report to the Captain what had happened. When everyone cleared out of the ICU, our charge nurse, Frank, stood there looking at me with a wry smile. He was a good man, and we got along well, but I was still surprised by his following comment.

“Look at the bright side, Lynch; you got the physicians so pissed off they didn’t notice the washer and dryer. Your illegal laundry is safe for the time being.”

That was a big deal; clothes washed in the ship’s laundry returned damp, smelly, and wrinkled. If I had been responsible for losing our machines, I might have been even less popular with the crew. My new reputation for being the guy who took advantage of Ann Jillian’s kindness and sympathy was bad enough.

At Captain’s Mast, the skipper fined me three hundred bucks for being a dumb ass but suspended half of it after Nurse Frank read a statement from the Foot Sergeant about the impact Ann Jillian had on his flagging morale. The Foot Sergeant was a stand-up guy, and we stayed in touch. He married and left the Marine Corps for the big leagues in 1990. In 1992, he won a Pulitzer while writing for the New York Times. Then the son of a bitch got leukemia and died in 1995. I don’t think I ever cried as hard as I did the night his wife called to tell me. The fucking Foot Sergeant was a good man, and It’s been lonely growing old without him.

September 24, 2024September 27, 2024

Back to Beirut?

Forty one years ago, the 1^st Battalion 8^th Marines were attacked by the first modern suicide bomber at the Beirut International Airport. A dump truck packed with 12,000 pounds of explosives crashed through a flimsy gate and into a building being used as barracks for the Marines, killing 241 Marines and sailors. At the time, I was a Navy corpsman assigned to the Naval Hospital in Newport, Rhode Island. I was also the leading petty officer of the Surgical Support Team, and we were rapidly mobilized, vaccinated, and sent overseas to join the unit, replacing the devastated Marine Amphibious Unit in Beirut. In the ensuing months, I witnessed, mostly from our ship but sometimes on the shore, an American military disaster.

Doc Lynch on the ground in Beirut. standing in front of what was left of the Barracks

Nobody in that operation knew what we were supposed to do on the ground in Beirut.

In November 1983, the various warring factions were stupid enough to attack the Marine positions, which allowed for some mission clarity. One thing Marines understand is killing people, so when attacked, they responded by killing everybody shooting at them. That caused the various warring factions to stop shooting any weapons anywhere near Marine positions. With no enemies attacking them, the Marines returned to displaying the flag as our political masters dictated. The Marines also found creative ways to trick Lebanese militia into firing their weapons near them so they could kill more of them. That’s what bored Marines do in undefined combat adjacent spaces.

The anniversary of that pointless disaster is the perfect day for the FJB administration to announce another pointless deployment of American combat troops into the Middle East, where they will do… What? Question number one is, who’s deploying them? It can’t be Joe Biden because he turned over his first cabinet meeting in over a year to Jill Biden. Is this Dr. Jill’s idea? Or is Cackling Kamala doing the saber-rattling? These are questions the regime media will never ask because the answers will reflect poorly on their democratic sponsors.

What the hell is this? Why are we forced to act like this is normal or acceptable?

Could you imagine the media frenzy if Melania Trump chaired a cabinet meeting? What if Melania took over a cabinet meeting, and the next day, the military made the following announcement:

“In light of increased tension in the Middle East and out of an abundance of caution, we are sending a small number of additional U.S. military personnel forward to augment our forces that are already in the region,”

We know precisely what would happen: the end of the world, with media hysteria cranked up beyond the endurance of mere mortals.

What will a “small number of military personnel” do in the Middle East? What capabilities do they bring to the fight? If the Pentagon wants to exercise “an abundance of caution,” how about you leave those troops in the United States? They cannot influence a damn thing happening on the ground in Lebanon. We tried that in 1983, thinking the mere presence of a Marine Corps expeditionary unit would stop the internecine fighting in Beirut. We stopped nothing. Instead, we presented an attractive target for Iranian-financed proxies to destroy in the biggest nonnuclear detonation in history.

We just completed a 20-year, multi-billion dollar effort to replace the Taliban with the Taliban and have learned nothing. The same “smartest kids in the room” who gave us the Kabul fiasco are driving this ridiculously under-resourced response to a war that is none of our business. It has been all war all the time in Lebanon for the past 40 years, and we’ve done nothing about it. Why start now by once again exposing our military to grave danger while failing to give them a mission, a desired end state, or adequate resources?

Maybe “Doctor” Jill thinks getting American troops killed overseas is a brilliant election-year strategy. It would certainly generate some “rally around our troops” support, forcing attention away from Kamala and FJB. That may be smart politics if you’re a raging sociopath. Melania Trump, who is fluent in five languages with a measured IQ an entire standard deviation higher than “Doctor” Jill, would never risk the lives of American troops for political gain.

In 1983, if the military said it was building a pier, it would have built one that could handle the moderate seas of the Mediterranean.

The truth lands with a thud and requires no further explanation. The truth is, we have no idea what we are doing in the Middle East. We didn’t have a clue in 1983, and we don’t have one today. Nor do we have a capable military, adequate naval shipping, or capable Marine Corps battalions. We can’t even build a temporary pier, something the Roman army was quite proficient at building 2500 years ago. Those capabilities have been sacrificed on the altar of equity and inclusion by men who placed access to power and post-retirement riches over the stewardship of their respective service branches. Other people’s children will be paying the price for that folly in the future. And it will be a painful lesson for all involved, just like Beirut in 1983.