June 21, 2009 would have been George’s 53rd birthday. It’s impossible for me to picture what he would have looked like all these years later, how he would have aged, what he might have accomplished with his life. It’s almost as impossible to accept that he’s been gone for 26 years, except that I have the newspaper story to remind myself of the fact.
George was a Marine officer with the U.S. forces in Lebanon in 1983, stationed with his men to guard the airport in Beirut. A Shiite mortar was fired into the compound toward the end of August 1983, killing two Marines – and George was one of those two. These were the first casualties of that U.S. peace-keeping mission in the Middle East, but nobody remembers it now. If anything, people only remember that a full month later the embassy in Beirut was bombed and several hundred Marines living there were killed or wounded.
