Word: beirutization
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...Marine messengers arrived the morning after the news from Beirut, both in Lincoln and two hours northeast at Kimm's mother's home in Atlantic, Iowa (pop. 7,789). "I think the girls are trying to block it out," says Janet Kimm, his exwife. "I've been trying to get them to break down and get it out of their systems." Kimm, a Marine cook whose chili the girls remember fondly, would have been whipping up Sunday breakfast for some 300 men when the explosion came...
...five of his siblings live in and around Atlantic. They and his mother (his father, a World War I veteran, died last year) sensed in Ed a grim apprehension when he last visited in April, before Beirut. "He didn't joke around like he normally did," says Elizabeth. "This going to Lebanon bothered him," and he was "kind of withdrawn." Says Letha Kimm, 66, "I think he had a premonition...
...quite so far. "I'm just so mad," she says. "We're all together on that." His brother Jay, 22, has written a protest manifesto ("We the people who have signed this petition feel that it was wrong that President Reagan sent the Marines to Beirut!") in longhand on a yellow tablet. If Reagan makes a condolence phone call to them, Mary Lou says, "he'll be put on hold...
Partly it is the odd nature of the Marines' mission that angers the Meurers, and that apparently galled Ronald. Until he went to Beirut, according to his mother, "he was gung-ho. He was all Marine." Explains his sister Robin: "He'd always felt like he had to prove himself, and he thought if he could make it in the Marines, he would. He just wanted his family to be proud of him." But when he returned to the States on leave this summer, his mother says, "he didn't want to go back. He said...
...wreck in July. The shock apparently sent Deborah, eight months pregnant, into labor, and Ronald arrived home on an emergency leave the day before Jennifer Meurer was born. The little family bought a trailer near Camp Lejeune; they were briefly happy. But Ronald shipped out for Beirut on Sept. 19. His tour was to have ended next week. Deborah, who had agreed to marry Ronald after a four-day, love-at-first-sight courtship, got two letters from him the day after he died. "He said he'd rather be home with his wife and little baby...