Stone Mountain veteran receives medal 27 years late
Circling down toward the airport runway in Beirut, Air Force Col. Alfred W. Studwell and the rest of the flight crew expected to hear the routine message that they had been “cleared to land”.
Instead, the air traffic controller reported “sniper and mortar fire” in the area and warned pilots Joe Bunker and Fred Barton to “land at your own risk.”
“Maj. Barton, the pilot, was a crusty old Vietnam veteran,” said Bunker, then a lieutenant and the co-pilot. “He looked over at his green co-pilot, me, and simply said, ‘That means we’re cleared to land.’”
It was early morning on Oct. 23, 1983, and terrorists only hours earlier had blown up the concrete barracks where hundreds of American peacekeepers were still asleep — killing 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three Army soldiers in what is now considered the opening salvo in today’s War on Terror.
For Studwell, 79, of Stone Mountain, the shock wasn’t hearing that the plane was in danger, but when he and other members of the crew saw the dead and injured lying mangled and bleeding near the runway.
“I was mortified,” said Studwell. “I was angry.”
Twenty-four badly-injured Marines were loaded aboard the C-9 aircraft, and Studwell, the only doctor on board, was credited with saving many lives on the emergency flight to trauma hospitals in Germany.
He was commander of the U.S. Regional Hospital in Incirlik, Turkey, and the Bunker-Barton plane had been diverted there to pick up Studwell and two other physicians, Lt. Col. Warren Everett and Capt. Alex Limanni.
Everett and Limanni were sent to the USS Iwo Jima nearby, leaving Studwell as the only doctor on the plane to Germany. Mike Towe, now an engineer in Florida, credits Studwell with saving his life.
Randy Gaddo, then a young Marine but now retired and living in Peachtree City, recalls the horror of that morning, when a truck laden with 12,000 pounds of explosives rumbled into the Marine barracks near the airport. Gaddo had gotten up early for coffee, which saved his life.
The building crumbled, and all medical personnel had been killed, so Studwell and the other doctors had to leave Turkey on short notice for the hop to Beirut to triage the survivors.
Marines in the worst shape were sent to Germany, and Studwell supervised a crew of 10, working on injured Marines stacked floor to ceiling.
Without Studwell, Towe says, “many more would have perished.”
In 2008, at what has become an annual ceremony of the Beirut Veterans of America in Jacksonville, N.C., Bunker, by then a pilot for United Airlines, was baffled when he learned that Studwell was the only crewman on the flight to Germany who hadn’t received the prestigious Air Medal for extraordinary conduct.
He mentioned the mistake to Marine Col. Tim Geraghty, who had been the commander in Beirut, and the two vowed to correct the error. It took a while, but recently, 27 years after the Beirut bombing, Studwell finally received his Air Medal in a spit-and-polish ceremony at Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Marietta.
“I never thought about it,” he said one recent day in his white-brick home, airplanes pictures on most every wall. “I didn’t do anything special. I was just doing my job.”
