Word: truckfuls
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...highly critical reports added fuel to the intensifying national debate on the Marine deployment. Both spoke of the lax security around the Marine compound at the Beirut airport before it was blown up by a suicidal truck driver on Oct. 23, killing 241 U.S. servicemen (see following story). Republican Congressman Larry Hopkins, one of the authors of a report by a House subcommittee, went beyond the security question to criticize the "peacekeeping" role of the Marines. Said he: "The people in the Mideast have been fighting since the days of Abraham. Asking our Marines to stop the fighting there...
...training and tradition, the U.S. Marines prefer going over the top to hunkering down in the trenches. Their indifference to digging in may have proved fatal, however, when a terrorist truck bomb blew apart Marine headquarters in Beirut on Oct. 23, killing 241 men. So concluded a highly critical report last week by the Investigations Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. The hawkish subcommittee, in a document approved by a vote of 9 to 3, charged the Marines with slack security and inadequate intelligence gathering, and accused the entire military chain of command of "very serious errors in judgment...
...Reagan Administration had at first pictured the tragedy as unavoidable. Four days after the bombing, President Reagan said in a televised speech that the truck "crashed through a series of barriers, including a chain-link fence and barbed-wire entanglements. Guards opened fire, but it was too late." A week later, Marine Commandant General Paul X. Kelley asserted that the truck slammed through the barbed wire at 60 m.p.h., sped past two armed sentries, burst through an iron gate and jumped over an 18-in. pipe before exploding...
...facts laid out last week in the congressional subcommittee's 78-page report were much different-and much less excusable. At 5 a.m., an hour and 20 minutes before the attack, a truck-possibly the one used in the bombing-circled with its lights off in the parking lot outside Marine headquarters. Only five minutes before the attack, a car pulled up and its driver began taking pictures of the building; one guard later pronounced this "kind of strange." Finally, the red Mercedes truck with the fatal bomb rumbled through an iron gate left "invitingly" open, cruised at about...
...detonated 12,000 Ibs. of explosives. The explosives had been wrapped around gas cylinders and placed on a 7-in. floor of concrete covered with an inch-thick slab of solid marble in order to direct the intensity of the blast upward. Even so, the explosive force drove the truck bed 8 ft. down into the earth...