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I Laughed So Hard I Nearly Cried
By Maj P
I’m about halfway through Guests of the Ayatollah, Mark Bowden’s excellent book on the Iran hostage crisis. Being old enough to remember the event fairly well, I nevertheless knew very little detail about it. I strongly recommend the book, but be warned: it will make your blood boil.
So many things stand out, but there is one section that should make readers, Marines in particular, laugh out loud. Beginning on page 319, there is a great passage on how the Marine guards tormented their captors as only Marines can: by being deliberately and gleefully offensive.
Two Marines “kept up a constant torrent of verbal abuse.” Another Marine “had begun substituting the word ‘Khomeini’ for every foul word in the English language, and his fellow Marines adopted it with relish. When they needed to use the toilet, they would tell the guard, ‘I need to take a Khomeini.’”
“When the two Marines found a stack of the guards’ plates and eating utensils piled in the bathroom they urinated on them. One night they wrapped a butter knife in a rag [why is this so classically Marine?] and took turns poking it at the exposed wires of their lamp. It shorted out the electricity… They waited for the guards to replace the fuse and get the lights back on and then did it again.”
“When the guards installed a camera in the bathroom, after catching on that their captives were leaving notes for each other there, the Marines made a point of putting on lewd shows before it, offending their guards’ Islamic sensibilities so badly that they gave up and took it down.” Priceless!
Those are only a few humorous excerpts in an otherwise sobering book. Go read the whole thing.
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Op-For.com partially reviews (he is in the middle of the book) Guests of the Ayatollah : The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam.
This book is on my to-read list (Mark Bowden is an excellent/interesting writer).
The quote is from the ... [Read More]
Comments
I was laughing out loud reading your excerpts. I remember that incident as well - only I was a teenager, so I didn't pay as much attention as I would now.
I love our Marines, (my Daddy was a Marine). The MSM would probably accuse those guys of abusing the guards now. Headline: "Marine captives Insensitive to Ethnicity of Islamic Guards: ACLU Demands the Marines be tried and convicted for war crimes immediately upon rescue".
From a review of the book in the Wall Street Journal
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THIS IS PERHAPS the most striking and underreported part of the hostage crisis: how angry the Americans became toward their jailers. Some of the Americans were treated very roughly indeed -- periodic beatings, mock executions -- and they lived with the constant fear that in the end they were going to die. But the Iranian actions led to ever more American defiance.
John Limbert, an academically trained, Persian-speaking diplomat -- who probably has the softest heart for Iran among the hostages -- is in solitary confinement in the city of Isfahan, 200 miles from Tehran, after the failed Desert One rescue mission. (President Carter, after long delay, had sent fuel-tanker planes, gunships and helicopters to recapture the embassy; in a night-vision-goggle debacle set into motion by a sandstorm, a helicopter and a plane collided in the desert; the aborted the mission left the burnt remains to be toyed with by revolutionary clerics.) Mr. Limbert has no idea regarding the whereabouts of his compatriots until an Iranian guard, whom he is tutoring in English, asks him the meaning of the words "raghead," "bozo," "mother-" and "c-sucker." "Limbert laughed," Mr. Bowden writes. "It warmed his heart. Someplace nearby, his captors were still coping with the United States Marine Corps."
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Them was smart Marines, too. I never thought of using rags. Damn.
Semper Fi.