Hometown Heroes: U.S. Marine Major William E. Winter
Oct. 22—Monday, Oct. 23, will mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the Marine barracks for the 1st Battalion 8th Marines (Battalion Landing Team- BLT 1/8) in Beirut, Lebanon. The 1983 suicide attack killed 307 people, including 241 U.S. military personnel, 58 French military personnel and six civilians. Among those killed in the attack was U.S. Marine Capt. William Ellis Winter of Athens.
Winter had been in Beirut since May 1983 as part of the Multinational Peacekeeping Force. He was scheduled to return to Camp Lejeune, N.C., in early November 1983. For his wife Melia, and their two young children Amanda, 3, and Michael, 6, that day would never come.
At 6:22 a.m. Sunday morning, Oct. 23, 1983, a 19-ton Mercedes-Benz truck driven by Iranian national Ismail Ascari passed between two sentry posts, passed through an open vehicle gate in the perimeter of chain-link fence, crashed through a guard shack in front of the building serving as the barracks and crashed into the building's entry way where they detonated 21,000 pounds of TNT.
It was the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States Marine Corps since the 1945 Battle of Iwo Jima, the largest single-day death toll for the U.S. military since the first day of the Vietnam War's Tet Offensive and the deadliest single attack on Americans overseas since World War II.
The bombing was traced to Hezbollah, a militant and political group that originated in Lebanon in 1982. Iranian and Syrian involvement was also suspected.
Winter's room was directly above the denotation point. He was among the first to be identified after the attack. He was posthumously promoted to major. His dress uniform and clippings are on permanent exhibit at the Alabama Veterans Museum and Archives on Pryor Street.
Among the collection is a letter to Winter's wife from President Ronald Reagan.
"Dear Mrs. Winter: Nancy and I send our deepest condolences on the death of your husband in Beirut. My heart is heavy with grief at the loss of life in that troubled land. No one feels the burden more painfully than the families of our servicemen. I realize nothing can make up for your loss. Yet I pray that you will be comforted in the knowledge that your husband was a man of high honor who answered his country's call generously, bravely and with unswerving fidelity."
The News Courier's Karen Middleton interviewed daughter Amanda Winter Moore in 2013. She explained that although her father was eligible for burial at Arlington, the family chose to have him interred at the Athens City Cemetery.
"My mother said it was important for his family to be able to visit his gravesite whenever they wanted," Moore said. "What I would like to say is we must keep their memories alive — these men made a great sacrifice for peace, but so did their families."
