Blog Posts tagged with "evacuation"

MC2 Dana Clark is the Web Content Manager for Social Media at U.S. European Command

I just returned from an interesting seminar given by Christopher Murray who is the Deputy Chief of Mission. The subject was the Beirut evacuation during the summer 2006 war in Lebanon. When I read the invitation that came out, I began to reflect on where I was when this evacuation took place. At the time I was working at the Defense Media Activity (formerly the Naval Media Center Headquarters) in Washington, DC. I do remember us deploying a Navy/Marine Corps TV crew to provide coverage on what was happening, but I wasn’t part of that team and to be completely honest, I continued living my life, completely ignorant on what was actually taking place in Lebanon in July of 2006.

I’m a pretty seasoned sailor; however, until I got to EUCOM in the summer of 2007, I had always worked at a base level, never quite understanding the big picture. Since being here, I’ve learned quite a bit about how the military works with the Department of State and other Non-Governmental Organizations in order to help in assistance efforts. But until I sat through the seminar today, I had no idea what all of these organizations have to go through to “get on the same page."

Today, I got to hear a firsthand account of what has been pegged as the “Israel Second War.” I am sure most of you have heard of the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine Barracks in Lebanon as well as the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in downtown Beirut, and I am sure some of you participated in the 2006 evacuation effort to some extent, or know someone who did, and what happened.

The embassy in Beirut sits on 17 acres and at the time of the conflict there were about 60 Americans and 350 Lebanese workers. Rockets had been being fired between Hezbollah and Israel for quite some time and eventually, Israel took military action. The 33-day conflict, which began July 12, 2006, caused an instant reaction from the U.S. Embassy – obviously not a military action, rather they were focused on how they were going to evacuate the American citizens who were in Lebanon – whether they worked there, were tourists, or in the country for some other reason.

Two platoons from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit were the first to arrive in Lebanon; their missions were to protect the embassy and to provide security for the evacuations.

The primary concern was obviously the safety of the American citizens. One of the largest obstacles was that most of the Americans who were in the country occupied south Lebanon, which is where a majority of the conflict was taking place. There was a naval blockade and the airport had been shut down – so the questions that first needed answered were: How to get American citizens out safely and where to evacuate them to. Through VTC’s (video teleconferences) between the Embassy, former Secretary of State, Ms. Condoleezza Rice and the DoS team, the U.S. Central Command, Navy 5th Fleet Headquarters in Bahrain, and the Department of Defense it was determined that Cyprus would be the evacuation point; Cyprus is about 120 km from Lebanon. The military chartered civilian aircraft, used military helicopters, as well as U.S. Navy ships to get all of the Americans to Cyprus safely.

In order to plan logistics for this type of event, the DoD and DoS needed to know an estimate of American citizens who were in Lebanon – the first estimate was 3,000-5,000 personnel who needed to be evacuated, the second question was how long is the conflict going to last? Unfortunately, there was no answer to the second question at the time.

The U.S. Navy sent ships that were operating in the area to help in the evacuation efforts; however, due to the distance, it took them six-days to arrive. The military, working with the Dept. of State were evacuating about 1,000 people per day … but according to leadership – that was not enough, so they were given the order to double the amount of American citizens that they were evacuating per day to 2,000 people – the Combined Joint Task-Force, which consisted of DoD and DoS personnel, began evacuations at 9am and worked until 8pm and they met the goal. The next day, the CJTF was told to again double that number – the teams pulled together and worked from 5am until midnight and they evacuated 4,000 people.

The evacuations did not go as smoothly as one would have liked; there were several obstacles that stood in the way … the communications were almost completely shut down because cell phone towers had been knocked down, most places did not have electricity, and due to the naval blockade and instability of Lebanon, no fuel was coming in. The goal remained to get all of the American citizens to safety as soon as possible. Luckily the diplomatic negotions were successful and they were able to secure no fire zones, which helped the evacuation efforts.

One interesting note is that the amount of U.S. citizens in Lebanon was grossly underestimated, there were actually about 15,000, and with the joint effort of the Embassy, DoS, and DoD each and every American citizen was safely evacuated without any casualties or injuries.

A few of the lessons that the DoS and DoD learned were that sometimes you have to “throw out the rulebook” in order to complete the mission; in the military, that is known as ask for forgiveness instead of permission. Now, that is not to say that it’s alright to go rogue and do whatever you want to do, but rather, sometimes you have to use your best judgment and common sense, especially when lives are at stake. Also, it’s imperative to keep the same leadership in charge. When operations such as this occur, most offices are operating 24/7 and people work in shifts. This was no exception; however, shift change was occurring before the second VTC of the day, so it was hard to keep everyone up to speed on the events that had happened earlier and were happening at the time.

All-in-all, this is a combined success for all of the agencies involved. They took immediate action and ensured the safety of everyone who they took an oath to protect and serve. Unfortunately, in this line of work – nothing is perfect, things can come up at any given time and we all know that it is our job to work as a team and complete the mission – no matter what it is. In this case, that is what these brave individuals did and for that, I personally thank them. Because of their teamwork, motivation, and actions, 15,000 Americans were able to be evacuated from a war zone and brought back safely to their family in the United States.

I appreciate the fact that the EUCOM Interagency group hosted this seminar. I feel like I gained a lot of knowledge, not only on what happened in Lebanon, but also, how to more effectively work as a team and do my job in order to uphold my oath to the American people

MC2 Dana M. Clark
Public Affairs
U.S. European Command