Beirut Welcomes Marines; Second Contingent Ashore; Beirut Receives US Marines from 6th Fleet Ships Quietly
Beirut Lebanon July 15 1958. Special to the New York Times. United States Marines landed in Beirut today at 3pm to back up the Lebanese government of Camille Chamoun against rebels or outsiders. The Beirut public received them like a circus coming to town..During the afternoon, formations of US jets shrieked over Beirut to the delight of small boys who shrieked back in excitement… Within five minutes the Marines were pouring across the beach flanked by crowds of admiring Lebanese…Difficulties arose because many Lebanese could not understand what the Marines said…
In February 1984 I was along the Nubian Reach of the Nile having dinner in the home of Hajj Hassan Sayyid in Farka Dal, near the Batan al Hagar, the Belly of Stone, where the Nile breaks through its granite shield to make one hell of a long cataract. It was just the local men folk and me and David, and one was the Hajj’s son Ahmad Hassan, who showed me his wooden leg and said it was a gift from America.
What did he mean, I asked. He told me that when the Marines came ashore in Beirut in 1958, he was a student sitting in a corniche cafe watching all the action. A gunfight broke out between rival Christian militias, in a sideshow to the international crisis involving Moscow and Washington, Communists and Capitalists. But the NY Times got it right, from the Lebanese perspective it was just a circus.
But Ahmad took a bullet that day and the doctors said they had to amputate. So he had to come home to Nubia where the electrical generators cut off at 9pm, hobbling from house to house, drinking tea and remembering the day the US Marines landed, and wishing he had not been there.
BEIRUT — For more than 150 news correspondents covering the Lebanese landings here, this has become the "taxicab war."
Newsmen use taxicabs to race from one sudden and unexpected development to another. Military officials, on non-tactical errands, take taxis to surmount the shortage of official vehicles, and diplomats, rushing from conference to crisis, hail a cab to keep their appointments.
The taxicab drivers are having a picnic and are among the very few in this "Paris of the Middle East" who do not miss the foreign money lost by the sudden decline in paying tourists.
