Forty-one years ago, Richard French of Gloucester was a young Navy sailor serving aboard the USS Iwo Jima stationed in the Mediterranean off the coast of Lebanon when one of the most horrific events in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps took place—the bombing of the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut.
At Sunday’s Veterans Day program in Gloucester, French recounted the sad events of Oct. 23, 1983, when 241 U.S. servicemen, many of them Marines, lost their lives.
French was the guest speaker at the program that was hosted by the Middle Peninsula Detachment #1317 of the Marine Corps League at the Gloucester Veterans Memorial. Sunday, Nov. 10, was also the Marine Corps’ 249th birthday.
“I was too green to see what I saw,” he said, as the USS Iwo Jima responded to the tragedy. “That day completely shaped me in a different way.” French was one of those who were ordered to aid in offloading the wounded and dead Marines from the incoming helicopters into the makeshift hospital on the hangar de...