Video Transcript
Robert S. Dillon—Beirut 1983:
In Lebanon at that time we were accustomed to violence. Lebanon was in the throes of the civil war. The Israelis had invaded in June of ’82 for the purpose of driving the PLO out of Lebanon. Beirut had been under siege for several months. Violence was so pervasive that, in a funny sort of way, it brought your defenses down. You were so accustomed to it. The idea that you hear an explosion or shooting or a sniper bullet hit somewhere near you, after a while it was just unremarkable.
The other thing was that even though car bombs had become commonplace – and we did not allow cars to park around, stop around the embassy – in 1983 the idea of suicide bombers, really – in a theoretical sense, of course we thought about it, but in a practical sense people were not prepared for that.
The suicide bomber drove into the middle bay. And the first two floors of the embassy were completely destroyed. All the floors above that collapsed, except the eighth floor, because it had been added later, and had been braced in a different way. I was on the eighth floor, so the eighth floor survived, but all the floors below me pancaked. The people were killed. There were other casualties, throughout the embassy from collapsing walls and flying debris and that kind of thing. When it was all over, we thought 62, we were never quite sure, and we think 62 or 63 people were killed.
I stayed up there. I had the heavy T-shirt in front of my face, I was trying to get it on. I’m facing the window, talking on the phone to a German banker in town, and all of a sudden the window blew in on me. As I said, I didn’t hear anything, but I was lifted off my feet, knocked on my back. It was almost like a dream. There was a brick wall behind my desk, and it sort of slowly collapsed on top of me.
Response
I couldn’t move. I thought my legs were gone. I’m lying there, I think cursing, because I thought I’d lost my legs. And of course I’d be angry. They came in. There was a large flagstaff lying there. The American flag had been behind my desk, and they grabbed it and they pried the brick wall off of me. And I got out. And even though I was numb, to my immense pleasure I found my legs were intact.
We got down to the second floor. We couldn’t go any farther. A woman I knew was standing there. She couldn’t see anything. Her head was badly cut. Her eyes were full of blood. I picked her up and took her over to a window, and there was somebody coming up a ladder, and I handed her out. And we still didn’t grasp the full extent of what had happened.
This apartment was right next-door, and it was intact. So I went in there and got on the telephone to Washington, to tell people in Washington what had happened. The other thing I did was – I just happened to see somebody who handled personnel in the embassy – so I got them to put together a list of everyone we thought was in the embassy at the time. Because we realized that we were not going to be giving names to Washington of the people who were killed. What we were going to be able to do was to say who was alive. So we put together a large list, and we started asking, “Where are these people?” Or if we either saw them or there was a credible report that somebody had seen them, we checked them off. And for 30-45 minutes it was fine. You’re going down the list checking names. And then all of a sudden you stop checking names. And there were these big gaps in the list.
After five hours nobody alive came out of the rubble. After five days we weren’t finding them we were finding body parts. It was very sad. The saddest thing was the Lebanese families of our employees – just standing there day after day waiting for something.
Personal Qualities
A psychologist showed up from Washington, somebody dispatched from the Department of State. And it turned out to be the same psychologist who had interviewed me after the Kuala Lumpur incident. And to my surprise the Department of State had hired this man to go out and evaluate what had happened to people and how they were reacting to it. And he had been to a number of these things. I remember sitting down with him, and he said, “How do you feel?” I said, “I feel so normal, it worries me. How could I feel normal after my friends have been killed?” He said, “That is normal, because those are your defenses. They simply go up, and that means that psychologically you are in pretty good shape.” Well, I was glad to hear that. And on the other hand it never occurred to me that that sort of more open, emotional reaction wasn’t normal in those cases. The enormity of what happened didn’t really hit me until about ten days afterwards, when I went over to the AUB chapel. And there were a couple hundred people there. And these were the families of people who had been killed and injured and so forth. And so I’m standing up there trying to say something meaningful to them. And that’s very hard. If somebody’s lost their wife or their husband, there isn’t very much meaningful that you can say. But I tried very hard. And I almost got through it. I had help from John Reid, I should say. We figured out what I was going to say. Right at the end I couldn’t finish. I just sort of gave up, and folded the little paper I had, and walked off. And I’ve always felt badly about that. I was amazed some years later when a grown man came up to me – and he had been a boy and he and his mother had been present – and he wanted to tell me how much it meant to them. I was, like, “Oh, my God” – it was one of the nicest things that ever happened to me. That actually the words I had to say meant something to these people. It was just awfully, awfully sad.
Advice
I had been through a major incident in Kuala Lumpur. I was the DCM, and in fact the Charge at the time, when the Japanese Red Army took that over. And that gave me some notion how to handle things. One of the things over the years I’ve cited to people is – during the KL incident, which ended up going for five days – none of us went to bed. By the time this thing was over, we were exhausted. I’m sure none of us were making sense. Since that time I’ve understood that, even with a minor emergency, set up a duty roster. Make sure people get some sleep, including the boss. The idea that the boss has got to be on duty 24 hours a day doesn’t work. Get some rest, get some sleep. And I did that in Beirut. We had a lot of tired people. In a place like Beirut we lived in such a state of emergency, the whole two and a half years I was there, that people were tired all the time. But not truly exhausted. And I tried very hard to make sure that people did get rest.
When you’re in these hardship situations and evacuate – and we were constantly evacuating and bringing people back in Beirut – one of the decisions I made which I honestly think was a good one, was – even though I agreed no children, no dependents could come – I said, “Let’s have adult dependents.” Speaking for myself and some of the other officers there, having our spouses was immensely helpful. In fact they were wonderful. These were the people who went to the hospital and did all the things. But I think the idea that your spouse, or in some cases your companion that is there giving you the kind of support you need is terribly important. Except in the most extreme situations, I would keep spouses together.