Excerpt:

The parking lot had become a morgue. Unrecognizable pieces of what had once been United States Marines lay on stretchers lined up on the rubble-strewn tarmac. There was no time for the niceties of body bags or blankets.

Those would come later. The living took priority now, God only knew how many were still buried under there.

Scores of Marines, some in the red gym shorts they slept in, others wearing camouflage pants and T-shirts, scrambled over the smoking wreckage, prying at the broken concrete with shovels, picks, and their bare hands, desperately trying to reach the buddies they could hear pleading for help below.

Italian peacekeepers, Lebanese troops, and teenagers clad in the white aprons of the local rescue squads, oiled beside them. As the survivors were dug out, stretcher-bearers rushed them to hastily set up first aid stations or waiting ambulances.

The roof of the four-story Battalion Landing Team (BLT) headquarters now stood at eye level. The phenomenal force of the blast had literally lifted the building from its foundation, sheared off concrete columns 15 feet around, blown out the lower walls, and caused the structure to collapse onto itself.

The wail of sirens was deafening. Ambulances raced in and out of the compound, some heading for local hospitals, others for helicopters waiting to shuttle the wounded out to hospital facilities aboard the USS Iwo Jima offshore. The only medical officer on the beach and most of the hospital corpsmen had been in the BLT. They were dead or wounded. The battalion aid station had been in the basement. It was buried under tons of debris. The surviving medics and ordinary Marines frantically applied first aid to the wounded waiting to be loaded onto ambulances, treating the worst cases first, putting to one side those whose injuries were not going to kill them immediately and those who were beyond help.

Jumpy Marines, some fighting back tears, took up positions along the fence facing the road that flanked the wrecked building. Eyes shifting nervously over the crowds of Lebanese soldiers and rescue workers who rushed past their posts, it was clear the American boys didn’t know who or what they were guarding against. Some of the ambulances were from the militias they had been fighting for months. Whose side were they on now? Later, there would be intelligence reports that the rescue teams had been infiltrated by more terrorists. No one was ever sure if the stories were true. How could the Marines tell who among the scores of Arabs was "good" and who was "bad"?