LEBANON, BEIRUT AND GRENADA

Shortly after four o'clock Saturday morning, October 22, 1983 Nancy and I were awakened by a telephone call from Bud McFarlane, he said it was urgent that I meet with him and George Shultz immediately. In robe and pajamas, I listened to them explain that the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States had asked us to intervene militarily on the island of Grenada, one of their neighbors in the Caribbean located ninety miles north of Venezuela. In a bloody coup the previous week, Grenada's prime minister, Maurice Bishop, a Marxist protégé of Fidel Castro who had invited Cuban workers to Grenada to build a suspiciously huge new airport on the island, had been executed by leftists who were even more radically committed to Marxism than he was.

The leaders of Grenada's island neighbors - Jamaica, Barbados, St. Vincent's, St. Lucia, Dominica, and Antigua - told us that under Bishop they had been worried by what appeared to be a large Cuban-sponsored military buildup on Grenada vastly disproportionate to its needs; now, they said, these even more radical Marxists in control of Grenada had launched a murderous reign of terror against their enemies. They said that they wanted to join together in ousting the Cubans from Grenada before it was too late, but lacked the military wherewithal to do so, and asked us to join them with them in dislodging the radicals. There was one other thing we had to consider: Eight hundred Americans who attended medical school on Grenada, all of them potential hostages. Under these circumstances, there was only one answer I could give to McFarlane and Shultz and those six countries who asked for our help.

Several days earlier, after the coup and Bishop's execution, I had ordered a flotilla of navy ships that had just left for Lebanon as part of a routine rotation of marines there to make a detour toward Grenada, in case it was needed to evacuate the students. I asked McFarlane how long the Pentagon thought it would need to prepare a rescue mission on Grenada. He said the Joint Chiefs of Staff believed it could be done in forty-eight hours. I said, "Do it." We agreed that the operation would have to be mounted under conditions of the strictest secrecy, so that the Grenadan forces and Cubans on Grenada would not have time to bring in reinforcements or to make a run for the American students at St. George's University Medical School. Cuba was near enough that with forewarning it could send troops to the island in a hurry. If there were any leaks, the result could be war between us and Cuba, which we didn't want, and the taking of hundreds of Americans as hostage.

No rational person ever wants to unleash military force, but I believe there are situations when it is necessary for the United States to do so - specially when the defense of freedom and democracy is involved or the lives and liberty of our citizens are at stake. We decided no to inform anyone in advance about the rescue mission in order to reduce the possibilities of a leak. Grenada had been a British colony for almost two hundred years before it won its independence in 1974, and was still a member of the British Commonwealth. We did not even inform the British beforehand, because I thought it would increase the possibility of a leak at our end and elevate the risk to our students. I suspected that, if we told the leaders of Congress about the operation, even under terms of strictest confidentiality, there would be some who would leak it to the press together with the prediction that Grenada was going to become "another Vietnam." We were already running into this phenomenon in our efforts to halt the spread of Communism in Central America, and some congressmen were raising the issue of "another Vietnam" in Lebanon while fighting to restrict the president's constitutional powers as commander in chief.

We couldn't say no to those six small countries who had asked us for help. We'd have no credibility or standing in the Americas if we did. If it ever became known, which I knew it would, that we had turned them down, few of our friends around the world would trust us completely as an ally again. I knew that if word of the rescue mission leaked out in advance, we'd hear this from some in Congress: "Sure, it's starting small, but once you make that first commitment, Grenada's going to become another Vietnam." Well, that wasn't true. And that's one reason why the rescue operation on Grenada was conducted in total secrecy. We didn't ask anybody, we just did it. After giving my approval to the operation, I went back to sleep.

The next night Nancy and I went to bed a little earlier than usual because we were tired after the early morning interruption the night before. At about 2:30 A.M., however, our phone rang again. Again it was Bud McFarlane: He said a suicide bomber had just driven a truckload of dynamite past our sentries and smashed into the marine barracks at the Beirut Airport. According to the first reports, at least one hundred marines had been killed. There was to be no more sleep for us that night. I got on the phone with the Pentagon to make sure that everything possible was being done to protect the remaining marines in Beirut, then met with George Shultz and Bud for several hours in the same living room where we'd spent much of the night before. As dawn approached, the news from Beirut became grimmer and grimmer. At 6:39 A.M., we went to the airport, boarded Air Force One, and flew to Washington for what was to become a full day of National Security Council meetings in the White House Situation Room. We discussed the bombings and the preparations for the Grenada operation, which was scheduled to get started late that night with the infiltration of commando teams to gather intelligence paving the way for the landing the next day.

On Monday, October 24, the news from Beirut became even more sickening, in all, 241 marines had died as they slept, resting from the duties of trying to keep peace in Lebanon. Two miles away, and two minutes after the blast at the airport, fifty-eight French soldiers, also members of the multinational force, had been killed by a second car bomb. The evidence indicated that both suicide vehicles were driven by radical Shiite fundamentalists suicidally bent on the pursuit of martyrdom. They were members of the same group responsible for the barbarous bombing of our embassy in Beirut the previous April, a group whose religious leaders promised instant entry to Paradise for killing an enemy of Iran's theocracy. Nancy and I were in a state of grief, made almost speechless by the magnitude of the loss.

At 2:00 P.M., the Joint Chiefs of Staff briefed me on the final details of the Grenada operation, which was scheduled to start at 9:00 P.M. Throughout the day, we continued to worry about leaks that could endanger the students. But this time (for a change) there were no leaks from the White House, the Pentagon, or Congress. It was one secret we managed to keep. Just before nine, I was called out of the briefing to take a call from Margaret Thatcher. As soon as I heard her voice, I knew she was very angry. She said she had just learned about the impending operation (probably from British officials on Grenada) and asked me in the strongest language to call off the operation. Grenada, she reminded me, was part of the British Commonwealth, and the United States had no business interfering in its affairs. I had intended to call her after the meeting, once the operation was actually under way, but she'd gotten word of it before I had the chance to do so. I told her about the request we'd received from the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States and said I had believed we had to act quickly and covertly because I feared any communication could result in a leak and spoil the advantage of surprise. She was very adamant and continued to insist that we cancel our landings on Grenada. I couldn't tell her that it had already begun. This troubled me because of our close relationship.

Early the next morning, after more than nineteen hundred army rangers and marines had landed at two points on Grenada, we announced the news of the Grenada rescue operation to the press. Our forces, despite greater-than-expected resistance, quickly gained control of the island's two airports and secured the campus where the American students were. The Marxists and their Cuban puppeteers were defeated. After I received word that the students were safe and the Marxist neutralized, I wrote in my diary: "Success seems to shine on us and I thank the Lord for it. He has really held me in the hollow of His hand." The price we had to pay to ensure the freedom of the Grenada had been high - nineteen American lives and more than one hundred men injured. But the price would have been much higher if the Soviet Union had been allowed to perpetuate this penetration of our hemisphere. It would have only spread from there.

The Marxists managed to play one dirty trick on us: Atop one hill on the island there was a mental hospital, and near it was a Grenadan army headquarters and barracks. The army installation was one of the legitimate targets of our airplanes. The Marxist thugs took down the flag over their building and raised it over the mental hospital, and as a result planes attacked the hospital until our forces on the ground alerted them to the ruse. We discovered over the next few days that Grenada was far from the balmy resort island it was depicted as in travel brochures. Even more than we had realized, it was already a Soviet-Cuban bastion in the Caribbean. Grenada's neighbors had been right. We got there just in time. Grenada's new airport, with its nine-thousand-foot runway, had been designed not for tourism as Maurice Bishop claimed, but for refueling and servicing Soviet and Cuban military aircraft. The barracks used by the Cuban "workers" on Grenada contained enough weapons and ammunition to equip thousands of terrorists. In the Cuban embassy, we found hollow walls stuffed with more weapons, plus documents linking Grenada's Marxists to Havana and Moscow, including one letter sent six months before by a Soviet general to the commander of the Grenadan army that boasted Grenada could be proud of itself for becoming the third outpost of Communism in the New World - after Cuba and Nicaragua - and adding that soon there would be a fourth, El Salvador.

Our troops brought back this letter and hundreds of other documents proving that the Soviet Union and Cuba had been bankrolling the Marxists on Grenada as part of a scheme to bring Communism to the entire region. The program was just beginning in Grenada; it was intended to go all the way through the Caribbean and Central America. We took this storehouse of documents to a hangar at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington and invited the press to examine it. Reporters would have found evidence of everything we were saying. But very few did. Instead, for several days, most of the news commentators focused on claims that the landings on Grenada had been reckless. They said I was trying to turn the Caribbean into "another Vietnam" - until it began to sink in that the American people understood what was happening on Grenada and agreed that the operation had been a necessary step to foil Communist penetration of our hemisphere.

As for the eight hundred American students, I was among many in our country whose eyes got a little misty when I watched their arrival in the United States on television and saw some of them lean down and kiss American soil the moment that they stepped off the airplanes that brought them home. When some of the students later came to the White House and embraced the soldiers who had rescued them, it was quite a sight for a former governor who had once seen college students spit on anyone wearing a military uniform. In my diary entry for that day I remarked that we had had "the most wonderful South Lawn ceremony we've ever had. About 400 of the medical students we rescued on Grenada came here plus 40 military, all of whom had been on Grenada. Four branches of the service it was heartwarming, indeed thrilling to see these young people clasp these men in uniforms to their hearts."

Some of the students told me tender stories, including several who said they had had to hide beneath their beds for more than twenty-four hours while bullets whistled past their windows. Then, they said, they heard a shout: "Okay, you can come on out." They walked down the stairs, because, as one said, they'd just heard the greatest sound they had ever heard: the voice of an army sergeant, who, along with the other young soldiers, then bravely put their own bodies between the students and enemy fire while escorting them to rescue helicopters.

The people of Grenada greeted our soldiers much as the people of France and Italy welcomed our GIs after they liberated them from Nazism at the end of World War II. The Grenadans had been captives of a totalitarian state just as much as the people of Europe. Later, I went to Grenada and experienced a welcome that showed how deeply the Grenadan people felt about our efforts on their behalf. There were no YANKEE GO HOME signs on Grenada, just an outpouring of love and appreciation from tens of thousands of people - most of its population - and banners proclaiming GOD BLESS AMERICA. I probably never felt better during my presidency than I did that day. I think our decision to stand up to Castro and the brown shirts on Grenada not only stopped the Communists in their tracks in that part of the world but perhaps helped all Americans stand a little taller. But if that week produced one of the highest points of my eight years in the presidency, the bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut had produced the lowest of the low.

On a Friday morning in early November 1983, Nancy and I flew to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina for a service honoring the marines murdered in Lebanon and the American fighting men who lost their lives on Grenada. "It was a dreary day with constant rain which somehow seemed appropriate," I wrote that night in my diary.

All the ceremonies were outdoors, rain or no rain. It was a moving service and as hard as anything we've ever done. At the end, taps got to both of us. The only indoor part was a receiving line meeting the families of the deceased. They were so wonderful, sometimes widows or mothers would just put their arms around me, their head on my chest, and quietly cry. One little boy eight or nine politely handed me a manila folder saying it was something he's written about his father. Later when I could read it, I found it was a poem entitled Loneliness. We helicoptered back to Cherry Point and there I addressed a crowd of Marines and families. Before leaving Lejeune I spoke briefly to the families I'd met in the line the Lord was with me. The right words came. We flew back to Washington - a few meetings and then to Camp David where it was snowing.

I later corresponded with and spoke again with some of the families who lost loved ones during the barbarous suicide attack in Beirut. Many, God bless them, reached out and tried to help me deal with my grief. I'll share one of the letters I received:

Dear President Reagan:

I am the mother of L/Cpl. David Cosner, killed recently in Lebanon. I want to thank you for your kind letter sharing our grief. I know this was hard for you to do since you think everyone is blaming you for this tragedy. I was very angry at everyone, including you. I was not ready to give David up and I felt it was not our country he was keeping peace for. As the 23^rd of Oct. dragged on, I was constantly reminded that I had asked God to watch over him. I knew if he was safe, God was giving him strength to help his fallen buddies, but, if he was dead, I also know he would be at peace in God's arms. This turmoil continued until 9 P.M. The blessed peace and comfort came, telling me he was in his Heavenly Home. I really believe it was simply David's destiny to have been there. He was an excellent Marine and therefore had the choice of any base in the world. He chose to stay at Camp Lejeune knowing he was going to Lebanon. He was not sent nor did he have to go. This is why I am telling you this so you will know that David did indeed give his most precious gift to America, very unselfishly, and some good must come of this tragedy. He left us a beautiful 2-year-old granddaughter, Leanna, and wonderful memories from the 22 years we shared. I am so proud to be David's mother and I know in time I will get the hugs from him that are denied me now. I have asked our wonderful town to stand behind you, our chosen leader, so our enemies will know we are strong. One Nation, Under God. I pray that God will give you the strength to make the right decisions and keep you safe in His protective arms.

Sincerely,