Helping to Hold the Line

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Again and again the big 5-in. naval guns roared with the sound of 70-lb. shells being dispatched toward shore. Steaming to within two miles of the Lebanese coast, the U.S. destroyer John Rodgers and the nuclear-powered cruiser Virginia, part of an American flotilla that had grown to more than a dozen vessels with the arrival of the battleship New Jersey late last week, hurled some 600 rounds into the wooded hills above Beirut. For residents of the Lebanese capital, the shells zooming overhead produced a piercing whistle that sounded at first like some strange aircraft preparing for a landing. But moments later, the hills shuddered and burst into flame. Along the ridge that ascends abruptly behind Beirut, columns of smoke rose into the clear autumn sky.

To help the U.S. ships spot their targets, Navy officers ventured into the hills alongside the Lebanese Army. At one point, the situation became so tense that A-6 fighter bombers equipped with 1,000-lb. laser-guided bombs took off from the aircraft carrier Eisenhower and prepared to join the action. At the last minute, when U.S. officers diplomatically suggested to the Lebanese that the naval guns had done the job, the jets were called back. Concerned that the Lebanese Army command had overestimated the danger, some U.S. officers went to the front lines the next day to get first-hand information. At about the same time, a Soviet-made SA-7 missile was fired at a U.S. Navy plane flying over the region but missed its target. Four more U.S. Marines were wounded during the week, and on Saturday a Marine helicopter came under ground fire but was not hit.

For the first time, U.S. military force was being used in direct support of the Lebanese Army rather than in retaliation for attacks on U.S. personnel. The Reagan Administration argued that to protect the 1,200 U.S. Marines headquartered at Beirut International Airport, as well as U.S. diplomats in the capital, American forces had to help the inexperienced but determined Lebanese Army hold on to Suq al Gharb. The mountain village had taken on enormous symbolic importance for the Christian-dominated government of President Amin Gemayel. If the army failed at Suq al Gharb, the Syrian-backed forces might be in a position to replace Gemayel's government with a regime that would be more to Syria's liking. Inevitably, such a regime would be receptive to Soviet influence and hostile to Western interests in the region. Thus the crisis in Lebanon is almost certainly the most daunting foreign policy challenge that the Reagan Administration has yet faced.