As a hushed crowd milled around him early Thursday, Jeff Nashton’s mind went back to a morning in Beirut 20 years earlier. He was a Marine lance corporal assigned to the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines. The day began with a horrific jolt: “Just a big red flash and darkness.” Nashton was lucky — he survived a terrorist truck bomb that killed 241 Marine, Navy and Army service members. On the 20th anniversary of the attack, Nashton, of Rome, N.Y., joined hundreds of survivors, relatives and other veterans and friends to honor the victims and other U.S. service members who died in peacekeeping efforts in Beirut in the 1980s. Nashton, now 44, had been on the ground floor, in the northeast corner of a barracks housing members of his unit, when a truck full of explosives exploded Oct. 23, 1983, tearing open the barracks and causing the building to collapse. Full Story
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