SIEGE OF BEIRUT 1982
In June of 1982, I was a newly hired staff photographer at U.S. News & World Report. My days were spent covering the White House and Capitol Hill, assignments that should have felt exciting to someone early in his career. Instead, I found myself restless and bored. Politics was theater of a different kind, scripted and predictable, and I was eager to get out of town.
One afternoon my editor stepped into the photo department and asked for a volunteer for what was described as a four-day assignment to photograph the Marines landing in Beirut. The objective seemed straightforward: photograph the arrival of the U.S. Marines as part of a multinational peacekeeping force.
I raised my hand without hesitation. Another day on Capitol Hill and I would have resigned.
I assumed it would be a quick trip and a welcome break from Washington. Four days turned into ten weeks.
Over the course of that assignment, I worked throughout Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and the West Bank. I photographed soldiers, refugees, diplomats, militiamen, and civilians trying to survive . Nearly forty-four years later, the names, alliances, and uniforms may have shifted, but the underlying story feels remarkably unchanged. Those old "Masters of War" are at work and we should look into the enormous profit from these ventures.
Recently, while sorting through old hard drives and boxes of negatives, I came across these images. The scans are imperfect because, after returning home, I shoved the photographs into a drawer and rarely looked at them again. I have used AI tools to clean up dust and scratches, but not to alter the content.
At the time, I told my editor I would get around to writing captions. That was forty-four years ago.
I came home from that assignment deeply disillusioned—with what I had witnessed and with the way governments justified it. I also returned persona non grata in Israel, a status with which I remain entirely comfortable.
For weeks in Beirut, I waited for the arrival of the multinational forces and pursued what became an obsession with finding and photographing Yasser Arafat. Rumors about the arrival of the US Matines as a peacekeeping force circulated through the press corps every day. Every photographer wanted the same image: the first American boots touching the beach in Beirut but they landed on a dock ...but they landed and time to get the film back to DC. You'll notice that the first ten thousand covers of the final cover had three "s" in Mission. This made up for my failure to write captions. As the cover began rolling (and I think U S News and World Report had a couple of million readers) one of the printers caught it while on a smoke break.
This was long before satellite phones, laptops, or digital transmission. We shot film. We carried multiple camera bodies, lenses, and rolls of Kodachrome and Tri-X. Once you exposed the film, there was no instant review. You had to trust your eye, your experience, and your instincts. Getting the picture meant physically being there, often with no certainty that anything would happen at all. To say that I was a rookie or unprepared is to understate the case. The legendary Dirck Halstead took me under his wing and shipped my film. War photography is often imagined as constant action, but in truth much of it is waiting. and planning.
I had already photographed the French and Italian peacekeepers. Finally, the American Marines arrived.
They came ashore in full combat gear under the bright Mediterranean sun. They looked impossibly young. Focused and disciplined, they scanned rooftops, balconies, and shattered windows. Some stared toward the shoreline; others kept their attention on the city rising behind it. From the water, Beirut was almost breathtaking. The sea sparkled. The mountains rose in the distance. In another context, it might have looked like a resort city. But beauty in the Middle East often exists side by side with violence, and no outsider truly understands all the forces at work there--certainly not me.
The United States was stepping directly into one of the world’s most complicated conflicts—a tangle of religion, ideology, nationalism, foreign intervention, and vengeance stretching back generations. To those of us photographing the scene, the importance was immediately obvious. We knew these images would circle the world and help shape public understanding of America’s role in Lebanon.
What none of us understood was how tragic the story would become.
On October 23, 1983, a suicide bomber drove a truck packed with explosives into the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American service members. It remains one of the deadliest attacks on U.S. forces prior to September 11.
After that, the photographs changed for me.
The faces I had captured on the beach were no longer simply strong compositions or historical records. Many belonged to young men who would soon be dead. The pictures became something heavier—evidence of how idealism and duty can be consumed by conflicts driven by absolutism and faith.
When I revisit the negatives and prints from Beirut, I remember more than the explosions and headlines, the exhaustion, the relentless heart, the smell of diesel fuel, cordite, and salt air.
The Commodore Hotel, where journalists from around the world traded rumors, filed stories, and drank late into the night while waiting for the next round of shelling. For many correspondents, the Commodore was both office and refuge, a place where gallows humor masked fear and fatigue. A parrot would mimic the sound of incoming artillery and we were happy to see newccomers hit the floor. Peter Arnett (CNN) waxed poetic after a good day of filming and the resident parrot was able to imitate incoming artillery.
When they landed, the Marines were disciplined, professional, and extraordinarily young—many barely old enough to shave. Yet they carried themselves with a calm confidence that seemed beyond their years. In the photographs from that shoreline, you can see both strength and innocence at once.
Six months after photographing those young men arriving in Beirut, I stood at Dover Air Force Base and photographed the return of many of their bodies.
The images from Beirut are historical documents, but they are also deeply personal. They remind me how fragile life is, how quickly youth can be extinguished, and how photography preserves moments long after the people in them are gone. Forty four years later, this conflict is still going on and we have gone from"peace keepers" to combatants. When bombs manufactured in the U.S. are dropped, the bomb casings still say U.S. Navy on the fragments. It's the kind of advertising we don't need.
This photo of me is my daily scouting of where anything was going to happen.
Pictures outlive politics, rhetoric, and official explanations.
Looks to me like history is a lesson we refuse to learn.
Keywords: beirut, dc photo book, memorial, photography, travel