High Point brothers reflect on 1983 bombing in Beirut

Oct. 18—HIGH POINT — Even 40 years later, Tom Hoke still can't shake the memory of a face he never actually saw.

It happened in the early morning hours of Oct. 23, 1983, aboard the USS Iwo Jima, which was circling in waters a mile or two off the coast of Beirut, Lebanon. That's where Hoke, a 22-year-old Navy seaman from High Point, was stationed when a suicide bomber drove a truck filled with 2,000 pounds of explosives into a Marine Corps barracks in Beirut — an installation the Marines sarcastically referred to as the Beirut Hilton.

The Marines had been assigned to Beirut as part of a multinational peacekeeping force, but there would be no peace on this day. The explosion killed 241 American service members, the Marine Corps' highest single-day death toll since the Battle of Iwo Jima during World War II.

It wasn't long after the blast that helicopters began bringing bodies to Hoke's ship. The Iwo Jima, an amphibious assault ship designated as a large helicopter carrier, also served as a hospital ship.

"We had surgeons on our ship," recalls Hoke, now 62 and still living in High Point, "so just about all the dead and wounded were brought to us."

He remembers waking shortly before 6:30 a.m. to an urgent shipwide broadcast: "This is not a drill. General quarters. Mass casualties inbound."

Hoke, a Navy data processing technician, was pressed into emergency triage duty, helping sort the dead from the wounded. The dead were placed in body bags and stored in freezers aboard the ship, while the wounded — many of them horrifically disfigured — were rushed to a makeshift triage unit to see if doctors could save them.

"The bodies just kept coming for five or six hours," Hoke says, "helicopter load after helicopter load."

That's when Hoke saw the face he can't unsee.

"This one guy, he wasn't dead, but I'm sure he didn't survive," Hoke says. "His face was just melted. I could see where his mouth was moving, but there was no nose. His ears were gone, too. He was still here, but his face was gone — it was totally melted — and he was just moaning in pain."

Hoke watched as a medic gave the young soldier a shot of morphine and a couple of servicemen stretchered him to the triage unit.

"That one sticks with me," Hoke says softly. "I'll never forget him."

Four decades later — Monday will mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing — Hoke can't help but be reminded of his experience in Beirut when he sees all the violence and unrest that's dominated the Middle East the past couple of weeks.

"It's almost like reliving what happened 40 years ago, and it's very frustrating," he says.

Today, Hoke suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, struggling with anxiety, guilt, anger and a short temper. Crowds unnerve him, as do loud noises such as fireworks and unexpected booms.

Hoke isn't the only High Pointer — or even the only member of his family — with a connection to the 1983 bombing. His older brother, Mike, also has a Beirut story.

In October 1983, Mike was a 36-year-old major in the Marines, serving in the military police unit at Camp Lejeune. The deadly blast hit close to home — and not just because he knew his kid brother was on the USS Iwo Jima.

"Most of the Marines that were blown up in that building were from Camp Lejeune," Mike says, explaining that he didn't know any of the victims personally, but he knew they were from Lejeune.

"Within a few days, when I would drive home, I would drive through officer housing, and I would see six to eight cars parked in a yard, which told me there was a casualty from that family. That went on for several days."

About a week after the bombing, Mike got an unexpected call from a brigadier general who asked him point-blank, "Can you go to Beirut tomorrow?"

A team of specialists was being assembled to go to the bombing site and investigate what had happened. With Mike's military police experience — and having seen combat as an infantryman in Vietnam — he was hand-picked for the team, along with specialists in such areas as reconnaissance, explosives, terrorism and counterintelligence.

"The idea was that if we were going to stay there (in Beirut) and continue to have a presence there, they wanted some consulting from a group of specialists on how the place could be made more secure," says Mike, now 76.

Mike's team spent about a week in Beirut, investigating the blast and trying to stay out of harm's way.

"The sniper fire and rocket fire and mortar fire was continuous throughout the time we were there," Mike recalls. "At night, the rocket fire just lit up the sky like fireworks. There was a lot more ammunition in the Middle East than there was in Vietnam."

During his time there, Mike also got to visit his brother a couple of times on the USS Iwo Jima. That came as a total surprise to Tom, who had no idea Mike was coming.

Forty years later, the two brothers still talk about their experiences in Beirut. They were there for very different reasons, but there's one thing they agree on.

"It was a horrible tragedy," Mike says. "Horrible."

jtomlin@hpenews.com — 336-888-3579