It was the eerie quiet that Randy Gaddo recalls now, a rarity for the U.S. Marines deployed to war-ravaged Beirut, Lebanon, as part of a multinational peacekeeping force.

"It was a beautiful morning," said Gaddo, then a staff sergeant serving as a combat correspondent and photojournalist. "It was very cool, the birds were singing and there was no shooting. In hindsight, it was too quiet."

Rich Addicks/AJC (ENLARGE)

Former US Marine Randy Gaddo stands among a flag reflection at the front door of his home in Peachtree City, where he is the city's director of leisure services.

Photo courtesy of Randy Gaddo (ENLARGE)

Randy Gaddo (third from left) stands with other Marines in Beirut. When the U.S. sent peacekeepers to Lebanon a quarter-century ago, virtually no one guessed it would be so dangerous.

Photo courtesy of Randy Gaddo (ENLARGE)

A shot of the Oct. 23, 1983 barracks explosion taken from one of the 1/8 line companies across the runway from the barracks.

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The serenity of that early morning of Oct. 23, 1983, quickly turned to horror as a truck laden with 12,000 pounds of gas-enhanced, military-grade explosives barreled into the Marine barracks at the city's airport and exploded, killing 241 unsuspecting U.S. servicemen, including 220 Marines.

The loss of life was the largest in a single day for the Marine Corps since the fight for the Japanese island of Iwo Jima (about 2,500) in World War II.

Now, 25 years later, Gaddo and others hope to make sure Americans remember their ultimate sacrifice on behalf of their country.

Gaddo will be today's featured speaker at Peachtree City's 10th annual Memorial Day festivities, in his role as the national president of the Beirut Veterans Association (BVA).

Gaddo, who works in Peachtree City as the city's director of leisure services, also seeks to tell the public about what he sees as a direct line from that Beirut bombing to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States.

"The Beirut bombing was the first major shot fired in the global war on terror," Gaddo said.

His former boss held a similar view.

"I characterize it as the first skirmish," said Bob Jordan, the retired major who headed the Marines' Public Affairs Office in Beirut, "and the men who died there as the vanguard of the war on terror."

Gaddo said he could never forget the many comrades he lost that day.

He had become close to many of them in the four months since he'd joined the Multinational Force in Beirut after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Fateful cup of coffee

Gaddo might have easily been another casualty had he not chosen to stop for a cup of coffee in the minutes preceding the blast.

The makeshift photo lab he normally used was on the third floor of the doomed barracks that was home to 400 sleeping troops.

Gaddo had just finished his coffee at 6:20 a.m. and was getting ready to make his way over to the barracks 150 yards away with the eight rolls of film in his pocket when he heard two rounds fired from an American M-16 rifle. It turned out to be an unsuccessful attempt by a Marine sentry to stop the fast-charging suicide bomber.

A massive blast followed seconds later, tossing Gaddo into the air and carrying him eight feet before slamming him down.

Only after making his way outside the airport coffee shop did he realize the extent of the damage.

A one-story high sea of debris, steel rods and large blocks of concrete were all that remained of the four-story building.

Gaddo soon spied a boot in the wreckage and bent over to pick it up before realizing there was still a leg in it. As he uncovered the leg, he saw that it was connected to a torso, but nothing else.

"It kind of shocked me into reality," he said.

'We knew that wasn't end'

FBI investigators would later call the blast the largest non-nuclear one they'd ever studied at the time.

Gaddo and other Marines assisted in the grim recovery over the next few hours, amid a palpable sense of anger, frustration and loss.

"We all wanted revenge," said Gaddo, 55, "but we had no idea at that time who to take revenge out on."

Terrorists had also committed a nearly simultaneous suicide attack against a nearby French barracks, killing 58 of that country's soldiers.

President Ronald Reagan called the attack "a despicable act," but withdrew the Marines to ships offshore a few months later.

Gaddo believes that decision only further emboldened various Islamic extremists, eventually leading to the Sept. 11 attacks on America by al-Qaida operatives, which claimed nearly 3,000 lives.

"In their minds that tactic worked well," he said. "So we knew [the Beirut bombing] was significant. If they could hit us in an environment like that, then, in our open society, terrorists can hit anywhere. We knew that back then. We knew that wasn't the end of things."

Craig Renshaw, a member of the BVA Board of Directors, echoed those thoughts.

"Everything we encountered back then when we were there, we're dealing with that today," said Renshaw, a former Marine machine gunner in Beirut now working as a firefighter in Glynn County. "It all stems from that."

Imad Mughniyah, a senior member of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorist organization, which is now the dominant group in Lebanon, is thought to be responsible for the Beirut bombing and for some other attacks on Americans in the 1980s and '90s.

Mughniyah himself was killed by a car bomb in Syria in February. That proved small consolation for Gaddo, who rarely goes a day without thinking of that "life-defining" experience in Beirut 25 years ago.

The BVA was created in 1992 to help America remember the sacrifices of those servicemen in Beirut.

The organization consists of more than 1,000 service members and surviving families of the 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three army soldiers and the 29 other servicemen killed in Lebanon during the multi-national peacekeeping mission from 1982 to 1994.

"We feel drawn to making sure people don't forget," Gaddo said. "For us, every day is Memorial Day."