Rescuing the last survivor of the Beirut bombing

The morning of Oct. 23, 1983, pastor Danny Wheeler “woke up in a nightmare.”

Wheeler, the Lutheran chaplain for the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines, was trapped in a tiny space amid the rubble of the barracks bombing in Beirut, Lebanon. He had been sleeping in his bed on the top floor of the four-story building. Now his head was resting on a cement block.

His spit-shined boots from his Vietnam War service were gone. He called out names of other Marines. They were already dead.

“I couldn't move; I was stuck,” Wheeler recalls, noting that when the debris shifted, breathing became more difficult. “I realized I was in serious trouble. Something terrible had happened. I realized that I can't panic. I panicked for a bit on and off, but I had to keep my head.”

He thought of his wife, Brenda, who had sent a large collection of Louis L'Amour books. “When I was buried alive they kept me alive because I started living the hero, imagining anyway. What would the cowboy do in Louis L'Amour?”

Wheeler continued to call for help. He shouted for his friends. He yelled for rescuers. He summoned God.

"God help me. God help me," he recalls saying. “I heard voices from others who were still alive. I hollered the same, ‘God help me,’ because nobody else could help us. After a while, the voices faded.”

But Wheeler continued to speak.

“I began to talk to God,” he says. “We had a long conversation. I said, ‘I'm not going to die.’ I told the Lord that too. I said, ‘I'm Danny G. Wheeler and I'm alive,’ and I kept saying that. I said that as loud as I could so many times that I began to lose my voice.”

Trapped amid the rubble, Wheeler experienced mood swings. He was anxious, scared, angry.

“I thought, ‘OK, God. This is what you called me to do, to come here to die. Thank you,’” he recalls. “I started worrying about my family. I didn't know what was going to happen to them. But then I started praying, seriously praying.”

Then a calmness came over Wheeler. “Something started happening,” he says. “They say the peace that passes all understanding. Well that happened to me there in that moment. It was like God said to me, ‘Danny, your family's going to be alright. Danny, I've got you. You're OK, just rest. Lean back.’ I felt God close by. I felt his touch. I felt his comfort, his assurance. Everything's going to be alright.”

About five and a half hours after the terrorist attack, Wheeler was rescued. He was the last survivor to be pulled from the bombed barracks that killed 241 Marines and Navy personnel, 58 French peacekeepers and a half-dozen civilians.

Today, Wheeler is a pastor at Yellow Lake Lutheran Church in rural Danbury, Wis.

“The bombing will always have an effect on me to this day,” says Wheeler, a member of American Legion Post 254 in Milltown. “I love Marines and I loved the people I served with. They were my parish on the move.”

A sign of life

Back in the United States, Brenda Wheeler was watching CNN broadcast the destruction from Beirut. As their kids — ages 7, 5 and 2 ½ — woke up on the otherwise peaceful Sunday morning, Brenda told them what had happened.

“We pretty much stayed glued to the TV,” Brenda says. “Then the pastor from the church came over after church that day. Of course they'd heard what happened, and saw our absence at church and Sunday School. We just kind of hunkered down.”

Throughout the day, Brenda recalls, she played an old hymn on the piano loudly — “All Things Work Out For Good.”

After “the longest eight hours of my life,” Brenda finally received a call from a pastor in Italy, confirming that Danny was alive. The Wheelers talked on the phone that night, and Brenda took the boys out to Hardee’s the next day to celebrate.

Today, the Wheelers still have a couple of religious mementoes that survived the attack: a purple stole and a chalice.

Months before the terrorist strike, Brenda knew that her husband would be in Beirut long enough that he would need his advent stole. “I brought it when we went to Greece,” she recalls. “I gave it to him, and it ended up saving his life.”

As Wheeler’s voice weakened to a whisper after hours of yelling in the rubble, the stole spoke for him.

His fellow chaplain, the Rev. George "Pooch" Pucciarelli, a Catholic priest, was walking with some Marines. They were looking for signs of life amid the debris when they noticed something purple waving in the wind.

“They didn't know how they were going to tell Brenda, tell my family because they couldn't find me,” Wheeler says. “The Marines asked Chaplain Pucciarelli, ‘What is that purple cloth hanging over there?’ Pooch recognized it as my stole, probably because that's the reason he was a good priest. He dusted it off and it was my pillow on the stretcher. That's how he found me. It was by the grace of God, by that stole.”

Today, the stole remains in perfect condition. “It was the light that shined in the darkness," Wheeler says.

A life of service

Decades before counseling Marines in Lebanon, Wheeler was running out of funds while attending college so he volunteered for Vietnam. “I also felt it was my calling to do something,” he remembers. “And not to stand by and let is pass. I did it for the GI Bill and also because I had a patriotic duty. I didn’t let anyone know that I signed up except for my fiancé at the time.”

He found himself in a unique position — going off to war so that he could attend college to become a pastor. “I did everything I could to avoid the infantry,” explains Wheeler, who was a postal clerk in the Army. “But I was also prepared to take up arms. I didn’t have to — or want to — but I knew what to do to protect my comrades. And they protected me.”

After Vietnam, he returned to school and became a Lutheran pastor. Years later he received another call while serving a parish in rural Wisconsin.

Wheeler remembers feeling very concerned about news from the Mideast. “My heart went out to the soldiers, sailors and Marines who were serving at that time. So, I said a prayer, ‘God, if you want me there, send me a sign.’ I believe that God answered that prayer and pointed me in the right direction.”

As a Lutheran pastor, Wheeler would need an endorsing agent to serve in the military. A call from Vic Schroeder would be his sign. Over the next several days, Wheeler discussed and prayed with Brenda about the assignment to Camp LeJeune in Jacksonville, N.C.

“Before I knew it, I was leaving my family of Brenda and three little boys and the parish,” he says. “I didn’t know what I was getting myself into but I knew it was what God wanted. I supported them with my whole heart and soul. I prayed for their safety.”

God’s practical joke

Wheeler arrived in Beirut on May 29, 1983 — his 35th birthday. He was the only battalion chaplain with the infantry. “I don’t know if God was playing a practical joke. I had done all I could to stay out of the infantry in Vietnam.”

There were other pastors including Puccirelli. “We worked very closely together,” Wheeler says. “We would visit and plan how to help each other.”

They even performed joint services. “We all said the Lord’s prayer together,” he recalls of a funeral at the Beirut base. “I held this Marine in my arms as he died. He was shot by a sniper; he was one of the first casualties we had. It was the hardest thing to do in the world.

“We did hard work together that caused us to grieve as well.”

All the chaplains performed various services, sometimes as a team, sometimes individually. Their worship ceremonies were very well attended, Wheeler recalls. Often the altar was a pile of sand bags. Even amid the war zone, they offered communion each time.

The Navy chaplain loved comforting, supporting and counseling his Marines. “I loved being a pastor in uniform,” he says. “I loved that I didn’t have to carry weapons. All I had to do is be with my Marines, my sailors, and be there with the word, the gospel and sacrament. To be there with to listen to them when they needed to talk. And when they were homesick and to be their ‘adult’ when they needed it.”

Wheeler remembers a particular service he provided on Oct. 21 — two days before the bombing. He baptized 1st Sgt. David Battle, a close friend who requested Wheeler perform the service a day earlier.

The two Vietnam War veterans had bonded in Beirut. They had planned to go shrimping, eat good food and enjoy life away from the war zone once they left Lebanon.

“We knew that it was going to get darker before the light came again,” Wheeler recalls. “We were deep into the woods and we weren't going to get out. We set up the baptism for Oct. 21, not knowing what was coming down the pipe. It was getting serious.”

Wheeler says it was a simple service, conducted in Battle’s room. For the first time, he said his friend’s full name, “David Lee Battle, I baptize you in the name of the Father ...’”

Still healing

After he was pulled from the wreckage, Wheeler asked for the casualty report. Every name hurt. But he struggled especially with one in particular: David Lee Battle.

Rescuers freed Battle from the rubble. “They took him on a stretcher and laid him on a cot,” Wheeler says. “He was sitting up, giving directions and then he died all of a sudden. He wasn't stopping even at that point, to try to help.”

Reflecting back, Wheeler says he believes Battle asked for the baptism because somehow he knew something big was coming. “You have a sense,” he says. “We were in our 30s, so we knew. But we didn't really realize how bad it was going to get.”

Those five months in Beirut shaped the lives of Wheeler, his family and all the survivors. They rendezvous every year on the anniversary to remember those killed.

“It affected all of us deeply because they were a part of us,” Wheeler says. “To this day we're still recovering. To this day we're still trying to put the pieces back together again because it hurt. We couldn't put the pieces together ourselves. It won't work that way. Slowly, God worked in our midst. How has it shaped me? Well, it made me awful homesick for my shipmates who left. Awful pain still exists as if yesterday. I can't talk about certain things without tears yet.”