Rest easy, old friend

GOD WILLING, they never knew what hit them. God willing, they never felt pain as death claimed them in the dawning light. I hope God was especially merciful that day as the lives of 241 Marines were obliterated in an instant. And I especially hope my friend Mike was a recipient of that mercy when he, too, perished in Beirut, on that long ago Sunday at 6.22 a.m., October 23, 1983.

My friend was Captain Michael S. “Iron Mike” Haskell. That's his mug on the left. Mike had been an enlisted man, a staff sergeant, before joining the Corps’ officer ranks after college. To us newly commissioned lieutenants at Quantico, VA, that made Mike a god-like “Marine’s Marine.” He already knew what he was doing.

As young officers, Mike and I trained together, sweated together, played softball together and drank together. We even served together as platoon leaders at the famous Marines Barracks in Washington DC. Another Marine who knew him, retired Chief Warrant Officer Charles Henderson poignantly made tribute to Mike this way: “He kissed his kids. He hugged his fellow Marines. He wept, sitting on an ammunition box one evening in Beirut, because he missed his wife, back home in Virginia.”

Yes, that’s the Mike I knew. And I remember his sensitivity well. It marked him as a real man. October 23 marks the 27th anniversary of his death at the Marine Barrack in Beirut, Lebanon. The tragedy occurred when a suicide bomber drove a truck laden with explosives into the Marine compound at Beirut International Airport, killing the Marines (and about 100 others) as they slept. The blast then was the biggest non-nuclear explosion in history.

Mike’s premature passing, along with the others, is the reason the name Ronald Reagan sticks in my craw, even now. The deaths were unnecessary. And I've never been able to forgive Reagan for it. At the time, even I knew that the deployment of our Marines to Lebanon was a fool’s errand. Reagan’s well-known biographer, Lou Canon, put it best in The Role of a Lifetime: “The story of the Reagan administration’s involvement in Lebanon is a case study of foreign policy calamity.” Canon concluded that it was the “greatest disaster of the Reagan presidency.” He’s still right.

I had intended to delve deeper into Reagan and the Marines in ‘83. But a peculiar quote from a brilliantly absurd film character sprang to mind. Narrating, Forrest Gump said, “She had got the cancer and died on a Tuesday. I bought her a new hat with little flowers on it. And that's all I have to say about that.”

My good friend Mike Haskell died in a violent explosion in Beirut. He was sent there by “wise men” with little knowledge of the world. And that's all I have to say about that.