At 6:21 a.m. on October 23, 1983, a Hezbollah operative drove a large Mercedes-Benz truck toward a compound at Beirut's international airport that housed U.S. Marines deployed as part of a peacekeeping force in Lebanon. After crashing through a concertina-wire barrier and an open gate in a fence, the driver rammed the yellow truck over a wall of sandbags into the lobby of the four-story cement building where the Marines were sleeping. Before guards could respond, the suicide bomber detonated the huge mass of explosives in the truck – the equivalent of six tons of TNT – producing the largest nonnuclear explosion on earth in four decades (Wright 2001, 70). The ferocious blast instantly turned the building into rubble, crushing most of its occupants. The death toll was 241 U.S. servicemen, nearly all of them Marines. It remains the largest loss of American military life in a single incident since the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II (Wright 2008).

Today, when Americans think of terrorism targeted at the United States, they think of Al Qaeda and 9/11. But anti-American terrorism first became a major threat during the 1980s, when it was perpetrated primarily by Hezbollah – with support from Iran – and Libya.