This Game of Ours, Chapter Eight
published on 10/29/08 at 2:59 pm
I had asked my buddy for a post which would get me out of the States as soon as possible and I certainly got my wish. After I finished basic training, I didn’t even get time to unpack my duffel bag. I was sent out to join my unit, who were on a field exercise at the time. By the time I arrived there, the exercise had come to an end and we returned to barracks. Back at the barracks, our orders to ship out were already waiting for us. So I, and my unpacked duffel bag, was immediately on a transport ship steaming out into the Atlantic Ocean. My plan to evade any pursuers had certainly been a success.
Of course I was upset about Joey’s death. But I was upset for him, not for myself. Grieving is generally a selfish emotion, in the sense that it is your own loss you mourn. When my father died, my grief was that he would no longer be around for me, that I had been left alone. That’s what you cry about, not the death itself.
My relationship with Joey was not the same as with my father, or with my best friends today. If my brother-in-law died I would be unable to function for about a month. My sense of loss would be tremendous. That’s not to say I didn’t care about Joey, but I wasn’t close to him in the same way.
I spent many hours with the guy, we even had a hell of a lot of fun together at times, but I never made friends with him because he was the nicest guy in the neighborhood. I cared for him in a way, but ours was a friendship of convenience for so long. Friendships in Queens were like friendships you make with cellmates in prison. You may well up end genuinely liking someone in that situation, but you start off being friends with them because you have to. In fact, it was just at the point when we were both trying to build a true friendship out of that relationship that he got shot.
So I was upset by his loss, not mine. He spent all his life in Queens. He was pretty much born into the mob. He made it through all that shit to get to where he was. Just as he got set, it was all taken away from him. That’s what saddened me.
I had been slowly leaving behind the world I had grown up in. All the benefits it brought me in my youth I ended up paying for many times over. I saw Joey get shot and I was forced overseas for three years of military service. My Queens connections were never any use to me again. That whole
aspect of my past faded from view and Joey’s death was the final stage. Now it was time to adapt to a whole new world of challenges.
I actually enjoyed the training. Boot camp was as tough as the folk tales suggested, but I was able to adapt to survive. I would say I have the ability to adapt to any situation I find myself in – it’s one of my God-given talents. If I go on holiday to, say, Trinidad, then after three days you’d swear I was born and raised there. I’ll know every back alley and every underground game. I’ve always been confident, almost aggressive, in my exploration of a new environment. And the way I approached the military was no different. It was another set of rules to live by and another system to adopt.
In fact, it was a set of rules I had already learned to live by. The toughest disciplinarian I ever met wasn’t in the military – it was my father. The meanest, baddest, toughest drill sergeant the marines could dredge up to terrorize raw recruits couldn’t put a dent to him. In our house, if you did something wrong, you weren’t just punished. You reported to my father as though you served under him and a punishment was handed down to you. It was like being court-martialed. That made adapting to life in the military one of the easiest tasks of my life – boot camp was like a Saturday at home!
The key to adapting to any situation is actually very simple. You just need to understand what the rules and guidelines of the system are. And the quicker you understand the system, the quicker you can function within in it. It’s just a matter of observing your surroundings so you alter your own behavior accordingly. The military, like my house, is a very easy environment to understand because it’s so highly regulated.
People have this strange misconception that growing up in a densely populated urban environment like New York is a free-for-all. In fact, it’s the complete opposite. There are a hell of a lot more rules on the streets than there are in the Marines and the penalties for breaking them are far more severe. Added to that, no-one tells you what the rules are in advance. Most of the time you only find out you’ve broken them after the event. In the Marines, on the other hand, they tell you exactly what the rules are in great detail and even helpfully explain what the punishment will be if you break those rules.
After the trauma of seeing my oldest friend shot, I was in a situation that was risk-free. My mind was clear and I was able to concentrate on the physical side of the training. My primary responsibilities were: wake up, shut up and listen. How hard can it be to adapt to that? Everything was laid on a plate for me – for the first few weeks it felt like a vacation.
Physically, I left the boot camp in the best shape of my life. My body fat was down to 3% and I felt great. I had been in reasonable shape in New York, but a lifestyle of spending 40 or 60 hours a week in smoky card rooms playing poker and drinking scotch was one that could send you downhill pretty
quickly. In the 1970s, it just wasn’t main stream for men to be body conscious or even fashion conscious. If you went to the gym, you snuck off and did it quietly. Physical exercise was almost taboo. Running or jogging was unheard of.
So I enjoyed the chance to really feel in peak condition. Mentally, the training period gave me a three month break from playing cards – the longest run in my life without poker, before or since. The beauty of it was that I was busy enough and exhausted enough not to miss it. They spent three months running us into the ground. I was so tired that whenever I had any time off, my priorities were to grab a shower and get some sleep.
Long before my mind ever started to drift, it was already morning and someone was shouting at me to wake me up. Then I’d be off for another day packed with fun and activities – it was like a bad package holiday!
And I didn’t miss the competitive element of cards, because that element was there in the training every day. You have to realize that Marine training is designed not to bring you up, but to break you down. They want to completely break you before they can start again and build you up again as a marine. That way they make you feel invincible in your new persona. So the training was very much a head game and an arena in which a poker mentality came in very useful.
In that environment, as soon as you work out what their objective is, you can tell them they’ve fulfilled it and behave as though they’ve shaped you the way they want to. The sooner you do that, the sooner they stop trying to break you and get off your back. I worked out what they wanted to see
and hear from me. Life got easier for me after that.
It would have been a very different life if I’d held out for a commission instead of enlisting. I think the decision to join the ranks, and to opt for the infantry over going in the navy, was probably one last way to spite my father, an act of defiance against my family’s heritage. Not only had my father held the rank of colonel in the Greek royal navy, his father had been an admiral and his grandfather had been a rear admiral. By contrast, three months after fleeing New York, I was a private in the 1st Battalion of the 8th Marines as part of the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit. And I was setting out to sea on a transport ship of the sixth fleet as a passenger, not a seaman.
Our original destination was Alexandria in Egypt, but after only a couple of days on board, we learned that new orders had come through. There had been another flashpoint in the checkered history of the Middle East and we were sent to be deployed in Beirut, Lebanon. Ostensibly, our role was to act as peacekeepers, but the reality was that the situation was rather more complicated than that.
A civil war of sorts had been raging since 1975, with various Christian and Muslim factions competing for control of different parts of the country, backed at different times by neighboring forces, most notably the Syrian army. The Palestinian Liberation Organization was also heavily present after being expelled from Jordan. After fierce internal fighting in the 1970s, a second conflict raged in 1978 when Israeli forces crossed the border into South Lebanon, ostensibly to wipeout Palestinian bases responsible for rocket attacks on Israel.
A period of ceasefire followed the withdrawal of that first Israeli advance, but the situation escalated once more in 1982. Israel bombed PLO positions in Beirut and the PLO launched further rocket attacks across the border as tensions rose following the attempted assassination of Shlomo Argov, the
Israeli ambassador in London.
Under the leadership of then defense minister Ariel Sharon, Israeli troops crossed the border into Lebanon en masse once more on 6th June, on a program entitled “Operation Peace for Galilee.” The published plan was to advance 40 kilometers into Lebanon and destroy PLO bases. But in reality the Israeli forces continued on to Beirut and besieged the city.
The capital suffered severe damage in the shelling that followed, as first the PLO fired on Christian-held positions in the East, and then the surrounding Israelis bombed the PLO themselves. The international community tried to broker as peaceful a solution as possible. But a UN security council resolution demanding the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the city environs was vetoed by the US on the grounds it was “a transparent attempt to preserve the P.L.O. as a viable political force.”
Finally, Ambassador Philip Habib, who had been sent to the region as a special envoy by President Reagan, managed to find agreement from all sides for a new solution. Israeli troops agreed to pull back from Beirut while a multi-national force of American, French and Italian troops oversaw the withdrawal of the PLO from the country.
The 32nd Marine Amphibious Unit formed the American portion of the multi-national force and arrived in the city on August 25th 1982. They successfully supervised the evacuation of the PLO at the start of September. The evacuation passed off as peacefully as could be expected, although a major incident was narrowly averted when French, American and PLO troops almost clashed over the right to oversee the departure of PLO leader Yasser Arafat.
With their job done, the Marines actually withdrew back to their ships in the Mediterranean on September 10th. But later that month, the assassination of President Bashir Gemayal and the massacre of 3,000 Palestinians by Christian militia as Israeli troops stood guard plunged the situation back into confused chaos. The multi-national troops were recalled on September 26th, this time as peacekeepers.
The continued presence of Syrian and Israeli troops in the country, as well as several heavily-armed militia groups, meant it was hardly an easy peace to keep. To make things harder, because the troops were technically there to “assist” the Lebanese government in maintaining law and order, the marines were told their primary objective was just to be “a presence.” If troops were fired upon, they were instructed to respond “with minimal force.” And all this was about to become our concern. A month after returning to Lebanon, the 32nd’s tour of duty came to an end and they were relieved by my unit. We landed in Beirut on 30th October 1982.
Unlike the vast majority of Marines, I actually knew a lot about Beirut. It wasn’t first hand knowledge, but my parents had vacationed there several times in the 1960s and I had seen their photos and home movies. Beirut had been pretty much the Monte Carlo of the Middle East at the time – with a strip of hotel after hotel, casino after casino. It was also a banking Mecca somewhat akin to Switzerland. All in all it was a desirable holiday destination for the European jet set.
Now this tiny country had become the theatre for an increasingly complex conflict, the latest battleground in the ongoing war for control of the region. The state I found Beirut in when we landed really shocked me. Comparing what we could see to the movies I remembered watching as a child was
an awakening experience. By now the buildings were so riddled with bullet holes the city looked like a Swiss cheese.
And by now, poker had re-entered my life with a bang. I had worried the three week Atlantic crossing would be hellishly boring. In fact, it proved to be the start of another extraordinary chapter in my poker-playing life.
The sheer scale of the ship astounded me. It wasn’t a vessel, but a floating city. There were 6,000 of us on board, Marines and navy personnel, other ranks and officers. And the second big surprise for me was how little difference I found between the crowd on board and the people I knew back home. You had similar diversity to a five mile radius of the neighborhood in New York: blacks, Hispanics, Italians, Greeks, the Irish etc.
The only group that was really new to me was the Southerners: the good ol’ boys from Oklahoma, North and South Carolina and Georgia. They were like a breath of fresh air. They had a certain innocence about them – the southern states are pretty much a different world compared to New York. That’s not to say I considered them ignorant. They certainly weren’t stupid, but they’d just had such a very different life experience to me up to that point.
As ever, if you throw a load of guys together, a poker game will break out. And several did. In the mornings we had physical training and classes on matters like bio-chemical defense, but in the afternoon and evening we’d have free time before and after supper. There were only so many times you could go for a jog round the deck or watch the reruns of terrible old movies, so poker was an obvious way to pass the time.
At first it didn’t strike me as a financial opportunity. It just seemed like a good distraction and a welcome taste of home. But as I walked through the ship and saw the games being played all over the place, I realized that this was a situation with good earning potential.
If you spend enough time in poker rooms, you soon become able to spot good players, and identify the weaker ones. I got to know a couple of the other guys who had grown up in inner city environments and had strong knowledge of the game. I knew they would understand what I was trying to achieve. It was to be a long-term strategy. First we needed to build the infrastructure and then the opportunity would follow. I had gone on board with $5k of my bankroll and soon put it to work.
As ever, the key lay in understanding the motivation for people to stay in the game. You must understand what your opponents are doing there. You have to tailor your approach to the environment. Setting up the game needed exactly the same qualities that it took to survive military training: understanding the situation and adapting to it.
Overall, this was a very different poker-playing environment to New York, but there were a couple of key similarities it was important to note. Back home, when I used to play with people like Joey and Mike, I wasn’t trying to beat them out of their next mortgage payment, but I still wanted to get paid at the end of the night. So if I got into a pot with a friend of mine, I was more likely to slow-play a hand, or check it down to the river. I wanted to win money, but I didn’t want to put a hurting on them in the process.
Onboard ship that was the situation I was in with everyone. You don’t have one friend in the marines. Everyone is your friend. Everyone is your lifeline. You will depend on these people in a life or death situation. So you don’t want to hurt them. Equally, you have to understand who is going to be in the game and why they are there. You have to work out what will keep people in the game the longest. Unlike New York, you know they don’t have any other source of income. They get paid on the 15th and 30th of every month and that’s it. There’s no bookie or loansharks to lend out money with like there was in Queens, and no Daddy to write out checks like there was in the suburbs.
That doesn’t mean we set out to play soft. It wasn’t a case of worrying about everyone else more than worrying about winning. But it was a simple function of longevity. If you run a restaurant, you don’t poison your customers on your first night. I had a choice. Did I want to take people for a grand each on day one and then god knows when I would get another game, or did I want to set up a regular game in which they would drop their money on a weekly basis and let it go on for a year?
And the lessons of my teens served me well at this point in time. Once more, my new crew and I were able to make money the way I had with the old crew back home. We lent money to people who wanted to take a seat in the game, at the usual vig of course. There wasn’t anybody on that ship who
couldn’t use a few extra dollars now and then. And the collection system for debts was brilliant.
If one Marine owed another money, they were able to write out an IOU. The second guy could then take the IOU to the disbursement officer, who handled the payroll. When the pay was sent out twice a month, that amount would automatically be debited from the first guy’s paycheck and credited to the second guy’s account. So for the duration of my time in the military, the Marines gave me plenty of opponents keen for a game of poker and then Uncle Sam collected my debts pro bono!
The biggest problem we had with the games was calming people down enough to play a sensible form of poker. We mixed up stud, draw and a bit of Hold’em to keep people interested. A lot of them were used to crazy games of deuces wild and follow the queen. Those are games of chance. If people wanted to play those games, then great, we would lend them the money and good luck to them! But why would I want to sit down with people gambling like that and play something ridiculous in which I have no advantage? That’s not poker, it’s roulette with cards. So along with the solid players I had identified, I set out educating people away from those games of chance in favor of regular reliable poker sessions.
As far as limits were concerned, we didn’t play anything under $1-2, and levels went up to $5-$10, as well as some no-limit games from time to time. The average buy in was $100-$500 at a time when the weekly wage was $400. It took time to build it up to that level, but we got there as the games became more aggressive and more regimented.
That in turn produced regular paydays. I cannot stress enough that my aim was never about being viewed as the best player on the boat, or even being identified as the best player in any particular game. The whole setup wasn’t a question of stature or grandeur. It was just about taking care of business and getting paid.
And there were more games going on than we could be part of. In our circle, there must have been 20 or so games going on, while we were actively involved in two or three. That was fine, because we benefited from the rest by bankrolling them. If someone needed 90 dollars to play, they would sign an IOU to us for $100 and then sit down. So we were able to take out the equivalent of a rake, not from the table itself, but in the vig on the money.
And things really got interesting when we got to Beirut. In many ways, being stationed there was like being on vacation at a European camping ground. Every country had its own area, and every area had its own action and its own games. The ones who were a real riot were the French. For a start, they
were the only ones who brought women with them. They’d brought along an entire hospital of 200 nurses. And I have no idea where they found 200 women who looked that fine. I can only assume they were handpicked on physical grounds because there’s no way a couple of hundred women looking that good could have ended up there by chance.
The marines had a tiny camp of a perimeter wall, a mess room and some tents. The French compound literally had cafes set up on the pavements, with umbrellas and chairs outside and 16 barrels of wine. They aren’t always my favorite people in the world, but I have to admit they certainly know how to travel! We would beg for tours of duty in a different compound, because at that point you could hit a different game. And then, of course, you could play with no holds barred. You could be as reckless and aggressive as you wanted in your play and the way you maximized your earnings, because it was of no consequence to you. You could spend the night in the French compound, take them for a couple of grand, and leave. You couldn’t do that in your own barracks.
In the first six months after joining my unit, I earned about $400 per week in Marines pay. I was making up to $1,500 a week from playing cards. So my take-home pay was tripled or quadrupled by my earnings from the tables. And my takehome pay was making it home almost untouched. I was only
keeping back $25 a month for toiletries and various expenses, while the rest was going directly to my mother back in the US.
Making money was easy. Many of the games were the weakest I have played in, weaker even than the Atlantic City games. One of the main reasons for that was simple. At home, people only sit down at a poker table because they want to play poker. That means you pay a certain amount of attention to the money you’re losing, even in a casino. Here, some people were so glad to have something to do, they would accept paying money just to be sat at the table and be part of the conversation.
Other people were even more profitable for us because they would drift in and out of the game, viewing it as a quick gamble. Loads of marines and sailors would think nothing of sitting down, quickly running through 20, 80, even 100 dollars and then walking out again. It’s exactly the same as the way
people play slot machines in a casino.
If you watch people whose eyes get drawn to the slots in casinos, you’ll notice they wander over and have a few spins. But if they win, they will nearly always end up sinking all the money they won back in again. In the same way, if the guys who sat down with us to gamble made some money because they hit one of their few hands, they would nearly always stick around and lose it all back again. In fact, it was so rare for someone to sit down, run up a profit and leave again straightaway, we used to wish them good luck and congratulate them if they did it. There was always someone else stepping through the door behind them to take their chances.
So making money didn’t present any kind of challenge to an established player. It was just a function of time. Added to which, we had a monopoly running. If we weren’t playing in a game, we were providing the funding.
Occasionally, we did have the odd problem or two. Once or twice a month, someone would bet a bit more than they could afford or lose too much and not want to pay. They’d try to complain, say they’d been hustled, or claim they were busted. Now and then the commanding officer would get letters from wives or loved ones back home wanting to know why the right amount of money hadn’t been transferred to their bank accounts. That meant a soldier had run up too many IOUs.
Because of our relationship with these guys, in certain circumstances out there you would even forgive a debt or two – that was something that would never happened in New York. In fact, it was of the few things my “partners” and I disagreed on. They didn’t understand why I wouldn’t let someone sit
down and play when they had debts outstanding.
But, of course, the reason for that is simple. You know these people only get a few hundred dollars a month and don’t have any other way of getting money. So if they sit down to play and lose this month’s money, when are they going to be able to pay you back?
Everybody is entitled to make a mistake and you let them off once, but only once. They get one free pass and that’s it. You love them like a brother and let them off, but at that point they are out of the game and out of your book. Their gaming ability is zero and their borrowing ability is zero. They can sit in the corner playing for quarters if they want, but that’s their level now.
We never really had any problems with the authorities over the games. The higher ranking officers knew the games were going on to a certain extent, but they didn’t really make an issue about it. The higher ranks could see that the stakes were actually pretty high, but they were also able to see that things were being handled well. There was no abuse. There were no shakedowns. The games were helping rather than hindering morale. That meant they tolerated what was going on, because they could see that we had identified longevity as a key aspect of the venture.
Of course, there will always be some people in authority who will not tolerate any gray area. Lending money without a banking license is technically loan sharking, so to prevent anyone contesting our arrangements, we always made sure the full amount was signed for, including the vig. So if someone borrowed 250 dollars from us, they would sign the IOU for the full 300 of the amount to be paid back. That meant there was no way anyone could contest the situation, or, in fact, produce evidence of interest being charged on the loan.
In fact, the longer we spent in Beirut, the better we got to know the junior officers. That was great news, because it opened up more games at higher stakes. Initially, our contact with the commissioned ranks was limited to saluting them and walking away. But as things got more casual and we started to fall into conversations with some of the officers, the more we realized we had in common with them.
We started to be invited to the officers’ camp for a drink in someone’s quarters now and then. As ever, put a few guys and some beer together and a poker game breaks out. If you hang out long enough, it’s inevitable. It was a win-win situation for us, because whilst all hell would break loose if the
fraternization led to problems, the blame would all lie on the officers. They were supposed to know better.
Once more, you had to analyze the table carefully. If you were playing with five officers and the platoon commander was one of them, you wouldn’t make sure he won, or you would check it down to the river if you were heads up with him. It was another great source of players drifting in and out for us. Officers would drop in from their battery, transport or payroll duties, only too keen to have a beer or two and a bit of fun with the troops.
A lot of the officers were basically washed-up jocks who’d been college football players. They tended to come from institutions that were third rate academically, but had excellent athletic programs. For the majority, these guys would have been there on a football, baseball or basketball scholarship, but ended up graduating last in their class as their aspirations to play sports professional did not come to fruition. Suddenly the military looked like an attractive proposition.
Most of them were extremely young and missed the college environment. They were used to frat parties, games and having fun. The military didn’t suit their lifestyle and their life experience left them less well equipped to adapt to it than the enlisted ranks. So they found anything that reminded them of home a welcome distraction.
That was pretty much that for almost a year in Beirut. Our military activities were rare enough and light enough to be a nuisance that interrupted our daily card games. Even on guard duty, we were probably playing gin rummy or heads-up poker. If you heard firing, it would only be a few sniper shots going overhead. It was an aggravation, but little more.
The whole situation was aggravating, because our orders left us pretty much sitting there waiting to be shot at. Because our role was as peacekeepers, we were told not to return fire. “Deter but do deny” – those were our orders. In practice, that led to some farcical situations.
We were often on patrol, or on guard duty with Lebanese government military forces. They wore the same uniform as us, because we supplied them with it. They fired the same weapons as us because we supplied them with them also. After four months in the desert, everyone tends to look the same. It doesn’t matter what color you start from, you end up with a hell of tan after that. The only way a Lebanese soldier differed from a marine was in his helmet cover. We supplied them with their helmets, but whereas we had a camouflage cloth on ours, they wore the plain green helmets with no cover.
That’s not that obvious a difference from yards away.
So when shots were fired at us by militia on while we were out on patrol together, I and the other marines would radio back for permission to return fire. Permission would be denied. We would be told, “They’re not shooting at you, they’re firing at the Lebanese troops.” So I’d be standing there thinking, “Ok, that’s just great. They’re not firing at me. They are firing at a guy three feet away from me.” So all you could do was trust the sniper’s aim and hope they could spot what helmet cover I was wearing. How comforting!
Because we weren’t supposed to return fire, there were checkpoints as we went back to barracks where they would examine our weapons and check our ammunition. That meant shift sergeants would sneak out to see us just before we reached the barracks, so we could reload any spent rounds. It was an absurd situation.
It didn’t make any sense to me. Marines are trained to go off and kill people, as quickly and efficiently as possible. They are athletes, and the combat zone is their Olympics. But there we were in our first Olympics, being told we weren’t allowed to run. We were manning a line that didn’t exist, trying to make friends with people who were shooting at us and supposedly that was keeping the peace as part of a multinational force. In reality all we were doing was hanging around and waiting to get shot. People turned to cards as much out of frustration as anything else.
The situation changed completely on the morning of Sunday 23 October 1983. At 6:22am, a yellow Mercedes truck packed with explosives ran over the perimeter wire barricade and smashed into the USMC barracks. The blast had the force of 12,000 pounds of TNT and the four-story building collapsed
instantly. Hundreds of marines and non-combatants were asleep inside. It was among the first examples of terrorist suicide bombing, but it wouldn’t be the last.
In total, 241 men were killed, including 220 marines. It was the biggest death toll for the corps since the attack on Iwo Jima in 1945. It remains the deadliest attack on Americans overseas since the Second World War, a cowardly act that killed clergy, clerical personnel and medical staff as they slept. Hundreds more were wounded and injured. And it was poker that prevented me from being numbered among the casualties.
On the previous evening, there was a big game organized back on board one of the transport ships, the USS Iwo Jima. I was more than eager to play, as you would expect. But I hadn’t managed to secure passage out there on one of the helicopters. At the last minute, one of the staff sergeants decided to stay behind and I was able to take his place on the last chopper that went out to the ship. As a result, he was in the barracks when the truck hit. He survived, but lost a leg. I was still at the poker table the following morning, when the alarm was raised after the attack.
By the time we got up on deck to see what was happening, the choppers were already returning to the ship. This time they weren’t transporting poker players, but wounded soldiers and bodies. Immediately, we got split into two groups. The first half went on shore for a “search and rescue” mission at the barracks, while the other half stayed onboard to deal with the large number of wounded arriving.
To start with, I was in the second group, after two hours, I was sent onshore to assist the mission back at the barracks. By now the search and rescue had moved on from finding men to finding body parts. It wasn’t a case of looking for bodies even. My task was to collect together enough composite parts to put a body back together out of courtesy to people and their families. There was a torso here, while the feet were over there and the head was somewhere else. It wasn’t a pleasant
situation.
Growing up in the inner city I’d seen dead bodies before, but nothing prepared me for what I saw that day. It was a slaughterhouse. Visually, I can only describe it as a violation of the senses. Those images are seared onto my mind. 25 years later, if I close my eyes, I can still see them as though it
all happened two minutes ago. But the worst thing about it was the smell.
The smell of burning flesh, and burnt bodies, is an indescribable odor. I can’t sit down and analyze it to tell someone what it is. There’s nothing to compare it to. But what I can tell you is that if you smell it, wherever you are, you will KNOW what it is. Even if you haven’t ever smelt it before, something in your body, a feeling in the pit of your stomach identifies it for you. It is a horrible sense of awareness.
That attack changed everything. Its long-term ramifications reverberate till this day. The Beirut bombing was the first major attack on the US by Islamic militants. I firmly believe that if the Reagan administration had reacted more strongly, we would not be ending up erecting memorials in Manhattan
where buildings used to stand.
In the short term, everything changed for us marines on the ground. A one km area around the barracks was designated a kill zone. That meant anyone walking into it was liable to be shot immediately. They might get a warning shot first, but that was it. Rather different from “deter but do not deny.”
As we were still coming to terms with the death of so many of our colleagues and friends, the situation continued to be tense. Every now and then a civilian would wander into the zone and someone had to run out and grab them to get them out of there. It was tough of course, because civilians have a tendency to freeze when they are fired at, rather than backing up. The US had helpfully put up signs to warn the locals to back up, but perhaps English wasn’t the best language to choose when trying to communicate with farmers who probably couldn’t read their own language. Still, those kind of executive decisions are for officers and government officials to consider, not the troops on the ground.
Our tour concluded after five more weeks in the zone. During the last month, the unit was split into three. Some of my colleagues were sent up to the hills bordering Syria and others were detailed to cover the Lebanese university. I was transferred to embassy duty, still in Beirut. While I was there,
a car bomb was detonated outside. No one was killed, but I caught some shrapnel in my back. It damaged my spine and my golf swing has never been quite the same since. Not long after that, we were finally rotated back stateside, setting off on the return voyage at the end of November 1983 with 241 fewer comrades than on the way out. We played poker all the way home.
John “The Greek” Leontakianakos is a professional poker player with 27 years of experience. He runs his own website called JohnTheGreekPoker.
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