Nestled in the mountains of
Lebanon, a small bouquet of silk roses lies near a chiseled stone bearing the
U.S. Marine Corps emblem.
Each rose, 270 in number and red,white and blue in color,
represents the American servicemen who died in 1983 while trying to bring peace to a
battered Beirut.
The chiseled words in the stone pay tribute to those same men,
the ones "who bravely gave their lives for Right and Freedom in Lebanon."
It's been 15 years since the headquarters building for 1st
Battalion 8th Marines in Beirut was bombed, killing 241 U.S. Marines, soldiers and sailors
and injuring hundreds.
But time has not erased the sacrifices or the lives lost.
Jack and Judy Young will be the first to tell you that. The
couple just returned from Beirut, where the Lebanese honored them with a special stone for
their son Jeffrey and his comrades who died while serving there.
"There have been a lot of emotional times since Jeffrey
died, but that was one of the most emotional times of my life," Judy said.' Keep your head low’
The Youngs vividly remember the
last day they saw their firstborn son alive. Jeffrey, a 22-year- old sergeant in the
Marine Corps, was preparing for his float to Beirut.
"He had come home for the weekend, and we put him on the
plane on May the 1st," Judy said. "Jack said to him, 'Whatever you do, stay away
from cars and keep your head low.' We really did not have any feeling that anything was
going to happen."
The Youngs regularly watched CNN to learn about what was
happening. Because Jeffrey wasn't much of a letter-writer, they didn't even know what
building he was staying in.
In the early morning of Oct. 23, 1983, Judy woke up suddenly,
feeling a dark cloud come over her. She thought it was because of her mother, who was
undergoing chemotherapy and was having trouble breathing the night before.
But after checking on her mom and finding her OK, Judy fell back
asleep. When she woke up, Jack was watching CNN and had just learned of a bombing in
Beirut.
Judy went to church that morning with a neighbor and returned to
a house filled with family and friends who had heard the news. "We kept saying 'No,
he's not in that building. He's not in that building,"' Judy said.
The following day, during "Monday Night Football," the
Youngs received a phone call from an uncle, saying that he saw Jeff on the news. After
retrieving a copy of the tape from the ABC station, they gathered all their friends and
family to view it.
"It was a small Marine wearing what looked like pajamas and
carrying a plastic bag, and there was a tall Marine with him," Judy said.
"Immediately, we said, 'That's Jeff and that's Bob, his best friend.
"Everyone in the room agreed,except Jeffrey's younger
brother John.
"He knew all along that it wasn't him," Judy said.
"But I can still look at that tape today and think it's him."
On the Tuesday night news, the local television station reported
that Jeffrey had been identified by the family and was alive. On Wednesday, the Youngs
went back to work and Judy wrote her son a letter.
"He didn't like attention, so I wrote and said, 'Jeff, when
you come home, you're going to find out that your dad and I were on television and all
your friends were here and there's been a lot of publicity.' I said 'I don't want you to
get upset, but you have to realize that we were in the dark here.' I wrote to tell him to
expect this because I didn't want him to get upset."
On Wednesday night, three men knocked on the Youngs' door,
telling them that their son was listed as missing.
"I said, 'Well, we've seen him, we saw him on television and
he's alive,"' Judy said. "I thought they were wrong."
On Saturday, the men returned to tell the Youngs that Jeffrey had
been killed.
"You can go through this and it's like it happened last
year," Judy said. "It doesn't seem like it's been 15 years. You stop and you
think, OK, he was 22, so he'd be in his 30s. Would he be married? Would he have children?
What would he be doing? Everybody thinks the same thing. What if?"
Jeffrey was buried on the following Friday near his hometown of
Moorestown, N.J., in Lakeview Memorial Park in Cinnaminson.
"Jeffrey was doing what he wanted to do and that's the way
we looked at it," Jack said. "That's what helped get us through. I mean, how
many 22-year-old guys know exactly what they want to do? He knew exactly what he wanted to
do. He wanted to be a Marine."
' I had to see that building'
Sifting through some of Jeffrey's
possessions that were sent home after his death, the Youngs found photographs of bombed
out buildings in Beirut.
"I could hear him saying 'We did that, we did that,this is
what we did.’ And that's why we had to go and see. We had to go to Beirut and
see," Judy said. "My thing was, I had to see that building."
The Youngs were going to visit Beirut five years ago, when a reporter with
Yorkshire TV offered to take them while he finished up a documentary on the bombing.
Preparing for her visit, Judy made a bouquet of 270 silk roses-
to represent all of the Americans who were killed while serving in Beirut. She chose the
colors of red, white and blue, and wrapped a list of all 270 names around the bunched
stems.
But the trip would never happen. Yorkshire TV said they
wouldn't be responsible for taking an American citizen over to Beirut and the reporter was
banned from going once folks there found out he was focusing his documentary on the
bombing and not the rebuilding.
The bouquet was packed up in a closet.
Every year, Judy wrote letters to the state department in
Washington asking for permission to travel to Lebanon. Every year, she'd get letters back
saying no. Only reporters, folks with family there or the Red Cross could go.
Then on a Wednesday morning in July 1997, Judy got a phone call
telling her that the ban on travel to Lebanon was being lifted.
"I was shocked,"Judy said."We decided we would go
on the 15th anniversary."
Despite the news that the bombed out building where Jeffrey was
killed was no longer there, the Youngs decided to go anyway.
They put a notice in the Beirut Veterans of America newsletter
asking if other families or veterans wanted to go, but only one person responded. Robert
Tichy, a Marine with the truck platoon who had been on the float prior to the bombing,
would join them.
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| 'Let Judy's bouquet never wither’ When Tichy and the Youngs arrived in Beirut on
Sept.30, nothing could have prepared them for what was ahead. |
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Emotional journey: a simple monument
commemorates the visit of the Young family to a Lebanese cemetery where tributes were paid
to servicemen killed in the Beirut Blast some 15 years ago |
"We got off the airplane and there was a lady holding a sign that said 'Mr. and Mrs.
Young.' We walked around the corner, and there were a dozen people waiting to greet
us," Judy said. "They presented me with a big bouquet of flowers and they had
three cars ready to take us to the hotel."
Their greeters were Lebanese Christians who lived in East Beirut and
were friends of Yasso. One, Fadel, was the leader of the Lebanese Movement. They would
later convince the Youngs to leave their West Beirut hotel.
After leaving the airport, they went to the cars waiting for them
in a nearby lot—the very place where the headquarters building for 1st Battalion 8th
Marines once stood.
"They said this is the parking lot and this is where the building
was," Jack said. "They let me stand right where the truck went into the
building. They wanted us to do it that night so we could get it behind us."
Judy didn't leave the bouquet of roses at the site, knowing that they
would be tossed aside at one point or destroyed. So she kept them with her, waiting until
she found the perfect place.
The next day, Oct. 1, the bus of new friends picked the three
Americans up at 9 a.m. and took them to a monastery in East Beirut.
There they met Father Luke Malik, a Catholic priest who supported
the Lebanese people. Malik gathered the group around a table in the monastery and
presented a personal message to the Youngs.
"Dear Judy and dear John, you shall find nowhere else in all
the world our faith and love and hope for the true America," Malik said. He concluded
with, "Let Judy's bouquet never whither."
Judy was puzzled. How did Malik know about her flowers?
After the message was presented, the Youngs went with their
Lebanese friends on a trip up through the mountains of East Beirut. It took an hour to
travel 4,200 feet up the mountain.
There, they were shown the "Cedars of Martyrs," a
memorial of sorts for all the Lebanese Christian martyrs who died fighting for their
freedom.
"These were all stone blocks, carved for their
martyrs," Judy said. "There are 280 of them and they are all done in numbers, no
names. Each stone has a cedar tree behind it." |
From where the Youngs stood, amid a stone altar and trees, Fadel pointed up to a rock on
another landing and said "Jeffrey." Judy asked, "You have a tree planted
for Jeffrey?" Fadel said, "Up here.We'll go see it."
As they walked up a path from the Lebanese memorial to a higher
landing, Judy saw a white stone ahead.
Then she spotted the U.S. Marine Corps label on the stone.
"We get to the top of this mountain and here is this
monument they had for us," Judy said. "That will be in those mountains for
thousands of years. We literally lost it."
The stone reads: "To Commemorate the visit of John and
Judith Young to the 'Cedars of Martyrs' in Tabriyyeh-Lebanon (October 1, 1998) during
which they paid tribute to their son Jeffrey (b. July 25, 2 1961) and his fellow Marines
who bravely gave their lives (October 23,1983) for 'Right and Freedom'in Lebanon."
Then the group started singing. And Judy finally laid down her
red, white and blue bouquet of roses.
"They consider Jeffrey and all the Marines part of their
martyrs," Judy said. "Needless to say, that was the highlight of our trip."
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The Youngs received a cell phone call from Yasso during the mountain trip, and realized
that Yasso was the one who told Malik about the bouquet of flowers and helped plan the
stone memorial.
The Youngs spent the next few days learning about their Lebanese
friends. They learned that they were Freedom Fighters who went to work in the morning in
suits and came out with their guns at night to fight the war.
They learned that the war was not a civil one, that Lebanon was
invaded by Syria in the north and Israel in the south and that they were fighting to get
their country back.
They learned that the Lebanese are proud people.
"They wanted to show us their way of life and what they have
to endure," Judy said. "And they did. We got a tour of Lebanon and an education
about the true Lebanese people."
On Sunday, the new friends said goodbye exchanged addresses and
promised to keep in touch.
"We got a chance to meet the Lebanese people and learn their
culture and to know why the Marines were there in the first place," Judy said.
"Judy and I never had any animosity toward the Lebanese
people about this tragedy," Jack said. "But some families blamed them. You can't
hold a country accountable for what one person or one cruel group did."
Though many of friends and family worried about their trip Jack
and Judy said they wouldn't trade it for anything and said they hoped to return again in
five years. |
| `It’s one
forth of us gone’
Today, Jack and Judy will reunite with the friends and families they have kept in contact
with off and on over the past 15 years.
Through the Beirut Connection, a support group/newsletter Judy
co-founded after the bombing, the two have communicated with folks just like them who lost
a loved one in the peacekeeping mission.
Some things have been a comfort to the Youngs: the memorials in
Jacksonville and Lebanon; the Jeffrey Young Memorial Park in Moorestown, N.J.; their
3-year-old grandson Jeffrey, who is "just like his uncle—he can't sit
still." But despite the comforts, their pain will never be healed.
"It's one-fourth of us gone," Jack said. "Some people
said maybe this trip will bring you closure, but it doesn't bring us closure, there will
never be closure. There isn't a day that goes by when we don't think about it. But we
don't dwell on it." |
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