Beirut Explosion Quotes

To the people of Beirut, the post-apocalyptic world of The Umbrella Academy is now a reality. They now live in an obliterated world. From this day forward, they exist in a destroyed world. For them, the End Times just happened.

Quickly, reality set in. It was obvious that we had suffered heavy casualties, but I still did not know exactly what caused the attack. Shortly thereafter, someone reported to me that a large truck had penetrated our perimeter south of the BLT’s headquarters from the direction of the airport’s main terminal. The driver had rammed through the sergeant of the guard’s post in front of the BLT building’s entrance and detonated the truck’s payload in the lobby. The explosive force of the blast caused the concrete, steel-reinforced four-story structure, which was considered one of the strongest buildings in Lebanon, to completely collapse. Its total devastation was astounding. I took in this carnage as cries for help pierced the air.

The next day, September 16, I was sitting with Kerr and several of my AUB colleagues on the veranda of his residence when a breathless university guard came to tell him that Israeli officers at the head of a column of armored vehicles were demanding to enter the campus to search for terrorists. Kerr rushed off to the university entrance, where, he later told us, he rejected the officers’ demands. “There are no terrorists on the AUB campus,” he said. “If you’re looking for terrorists, look in your own army for those who’ve destroyed Beirut.” Thanks to Malcolm Kerr’s courage, we were temporarily safe in a faculty apartment at the AUB, but we soon heard that others were at that moment in mortal peril. On the same night, September 16, Raja and I were perplexed as we watched a surreal scene: Israeli flares floating down in the darkness in complete silence, one after another, over the southern reaches of Beirut, for what seemed like an eternity. As we saw the flares descend, we were baffled: armies normally use flares to illuminate a battlefield, but the cease-fire had been signed a month earlier, all the Palestinian fighters had left weeks ago, and any meager Lebanese resistance to the Israeli troops’ arrival in West Beirut had ended the previous day. We could hear no explosions and no shooting. The city was quiet and fearful.

My friend Oz Katerji once saw a great line of graffiti in Beirut that can work for every war reporter in every war: ‘I don’t believe in anything. I am just here for the violence.

But this morning would be anything but quiet and routine. At 6:22—soon after I returned to my quarters/office, which I shared with Lt. Col. Harry Slacum, to review the daily schedule and reports—a massive explosion rocked our headquarters, followed by enormous shock waves. Shards of glass from blown-out windows, equipment, manuals, and papers flew across my office. Fortunately, we had put duct tape on all the windows for such an eventuality, but a large section of the sandbag wall, built on the outside ledge, was blasted away. The entry door to my office, which was on the far side away from the explosion, had been blown off its hinges, and the door frame was bent. The force of the blast had cracked the reinforced concrete foundation of my headquarters. Other than superficial cuts, neither Harry nor I was injured. With

Explosion at BLT 1/8 HQS … a large explosion at BLT 1/8 HQS Building collapsed the roof and leveled the building. Large numbers of dead and wounded. Are using MSSG-24 and Italian MNF medical and will medevac out of LS Brown. French report a building in their sector also bombed … unknown injured; BLT HQS destroyed.

Good man, yeself.

debacle in Lebanon was also ignored, even when in mid-September terrorists drove a truck carrying explosives into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and blew it up, killing twenty-three people. Reagan responded to critics by charging that the blame for the disaster lay with “previous administrations” for the “near destruction of our intelligence capabilities.” By this time, Reagan had been in office three and a half years!