Ultimate sacrifice by local Marine lives on

LYNN – The painted lettering is fading on the sign honoring Bradley Campus, but the ultimate sacrifice paid by the Lynn Marine 30 years ago in Lebanon is not forgotten by comrades and other veterans.”It’s the guys who are gone that I think about,” said Lynn resident Darryl Bradley Sr., who served two tours of duty in the Lebanese capital of Beirut before and after the Oct. 23, 1983 truck bomb attack that killed Campus and 240 other Marines.The suicide attack succeeded in breaching security measures around a four-story airport building where many Marines were sleeping at the time of the bombing. Campus, a 21-year-old Marine lance corporal, was buried with military honors in Pine Grove Cemetery on Nov. 8, 1983 and the sign honoring his memory was installed at Clark Street playground in June 1984.Bradley escorted Campus’ late mother, Clare, to a ceremony held two years ago at the Boston memorial honoring Campus and eight other Massachusetts Marines killed in the Beirut bombing.The men spent their boyhoods in opposite ends of Lynn, but shared more in common than service to their country.”We never bumped into each other, but I came to find out we knew everybody who knew us,” Bradley said.Clare Campus recalled in a 1983 Item interview how joining the Marine Corps gave her son direction he lacked after graduating from English High School in 1981. Darryl Bradley graduated from Lynn Vocational and Technical Institute and said conversations with police officers Glen Deveau and James Carroll inspired him to enlist in the Marine Corps.”Before they knew it, I was in boot camp,” he said.Marines in Battalion Landing Team 2/6, including 19-year-old Bradley, received orders to head to the embattled Mideast and arrived in February 1983. The building destroyed in the bombing eight months later became their home.”I’d never heard of Beirut, Lebanon,” he said.The Marines found themselves in a once-thriving city where armed factions battled for supremacy and America’s uneasy allies, including Israel, could not find an easy way out of the fighting.Trained as a radio operator, Bradley – like all Marines – stood guard with unloaded weapons: Standing orders required magazines containing bullets for the weapons to be stored in equipment pouches.”Cars used to pull up and turn off their lights just to screw with us,” he recalled.Marines hungry for home spray painted walls inside the airport building-turned-barracks with familiar slogans and names of place from their hometowns. They practiced rappelling by rope from the building’s top floor.Bradley finished his first Beirut tour in May 1983 as Campus and his fellow Marines rolled into the city to take up their posts in the airport building. A member of an anti-armor missile section, Campus patrolled Beirut’s streets but rarely, according to the Item interview with his mother, shared details of the Lebanese capital’s dangers with his Clare Campus and his sisters.Darryl Bradley sent his mother cassette recordings detailing his daily routine as a Marine – his voice only partly muffling the background noise of exploding shells and gunfire rippling across the city.Bradley said the attacker who bombed the Marines’ airport outpost could not have failed to carefully assess security measures around the building or determine the best way to direct the high explosive blast upward into the concrete building.”It was a sneak attack – cowardly,” he said.Bradley said he knew at least 10 of the Marines killed in the attack. His unit returned to Beirut after the bombing to find a heightened security presence surrounding Marine positions. After returning home, Bradley struggled emotionally and found himself recalling the sounds and smells of death.”I knew exactly how Korean War and Vietnam veterans felt,” he said.He credited his wife, Denise, with helping him recover “little by little.” His introductions to other Beirut Marines like Revere Police Chief Joseph Cafarelli helped Bradley replace dejection and pain with pride and