Beirut, 1983. Our platoon went over on MARG 1-83 as the last platoon to ever deploy from UDT-21, and while in Beirut we became the first-ever deployed platoon from SEAL Team 4. The photo (see below) with the flag was taken circa January or February, 1983. The building had plenty of battle damage, but it was roughly cleaned up and used for office space by the Marines. Note the major boulevard just above the aerial photo, which connected downtown Beirut to Beirut International Airport. Thousands of vehicles traveled that avenue every day, just a stone's throw from the building.

The building shown above is now known to history as the "Marine barracks," but it was never an official barracks at all.

It was the world HQ of Middle East Airlines, and later, during the Lebanese Civil War, it served for a time as PLO HQ. (That frogman in the photo below is not me holding up the flagpole, but it could have been.) Officially, the building housed many of the BLT's daytime offices, and hosted a small number of "watch standers" for the various BLT components overnight.

Unofficially, more and more Marines and Sailors began to sleep in the dry offices overnight, instead of dispersed out in their muddy below-ground sandbagged tents, in the cold Autumn rains. Thus, the stage was set for disaster.

On October 23rd, after our platoon had rotated home, a suicide truck bomber drove right into the large, open central atrium (just past where the two jeeps are parked in the photo) and imploded the entire structure, killing 241 American servicemen, mostly Marines. Perhaps the worst single day in USMC history, and their highest one-day death toll since the Tet Offensive in Vietnam.

Please note the location of the flagpole in the sketch map below. The Marine sentries were forbidden to have loaded magazines in their rifles. Still amazing to me, three decades later. There is a decent writeup at Wikipedia here.