Adventuresome U.S. Marine Colonel Is Advocate For the Arabs

By Richard H. Curtiss

The U.S. Marines who guard American embassies and consulates have been too often in the news in recent months, suffering casualties and helping restore order in the Nairobi and Dar Es-Salaam bombings and protecting embassy staff and families from angry demonstrators in Damascus and elsewhere. The Marines don’t make the U.S. policy decisions that result in such tragedies, but it’s up to them to minimize the ugly consequences of official arrogance and stupidity.

Reading the 1998 headlines made me think of my friend, Marine Col. Forest J. (Joe) Hunt, who once commanded all the Marine guards at U.S. embassies around the globe, and the school that trained them in Virginia.

I first met Joe Hunt in late 1973 in Beirut, where both he and I had served previously. I could see, however, that things had changed considerably from what friends I’d made on my two previous Lebanese tours now fondly called “the good old days.” There were too many people carrying guns, and not enough personal security.

The “country team,” meaning the ambassador, his deputy, the embassy section heads and the dozen or more regional attachés, was huge. We met weekly in “the tank,” which supposedly was insulated against any kind of eavesdroping from outside.

I noticed first that Joe, the defense attaché whose subordinates included all the army, navy and air force personnel assigned to the embassy, was brief and to the point and that he generally delivered his observations with a twinkle in his eye. To my surprise, I noted also that when the meetings turned boring, he doodled in Arabic.

As counselor for public affairs, my “representational entertaining” was supposed to encompass the journalists, who seemed to me to be about half the population of Lebanon. Joe’s representational responsibilities included the Lebanese officer corps and the dozens of military attachés from other countries who were based in Beirut. He and his pretty and vivacious wife, Ethel, entertained often and with great flair and my wife and I enjoyed their parties, at which we met people from their military world.

Joe and I also served on an embassy committee charged with ruling on applications for U.S. citizenship from local employees who had served the U.S. government for at least 13 years. I was particularly concerned at the plight of Iraqis I had known during my three years as press attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. These former U.S. government employees, who were frequently jailed by the Ba’athist government which, then as now, was in power in Baghdad, were appearing in Beirut looking for green cards even though some hadn’t completed 13 years’ service before the U.S. Embassy in Iraq was closed in 1967. Some of the other members of the committee could be sticklers for the letter of the law, but an assurance to Joe before a meeting that a particular applicant was a deserving person always elicited a favorable vote from this clearly compassionate as well as likeable Marine officer.

Early in 1975 things began to go very badly in Lebanon as a whole and in the American Embassy in particular. It was situated on the left flank of the Muslim/Palestinian/Leftist front line in what eventually became the 15-year Lebanese civil war. By the end of the first year of civil war American Embassy families had been evacuated, and we no longer met in “the tank” because it was on the top floor of the embassy building and vulnerable to mortar shells. We no longer needed the space since the country team gradually diminished to eight as first the regional officers and then all “non-essential American staff” were evacuated.

Unfortunately, two American staff members we couldn’t evacuate were the director and assistant director of the USIA regional printing plant. They had been kidnapped in October 1975 while traveling between their homes in the Muslim sector and the plant in the Christian sector, and still were missing.

I’d promised their wives, who obviously didn’t want to leave their missing husbands behind in a country at war, that if they would go to Athens with the other embassy evacuees, I would communicate with them daily to pass on every scrap of news we could turn up about their husbands. It wasn’t an easy promise to keep, but I had unlimited support from the ambassador and two other embassy “old timers,” Joe Hunt who had arrived two years earlier, and economic officer Bob Waring who predated him by a year.

A lot of rumors came to me via the journalists. But it was Joe, with excellent contacts among both the Muslim and Christian officers of the Lebanese army (which had split right down the middle of the religious fault line) who was best able to check out all reports. I have no idea how many times he drove through extremely perilous streets to follow up stories that the hostages were held by this or that militia, were in the cellar of this or that building, or had been buried in this or that cemetery.

Lebanese Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt, political leader of the leftist coalition, once asked in exasperation at Joe’s persistence, “What’s so important about a couple of American printers?” Eventually, however, he summoned Joe and Bob Waring to make the extremely dangerous drive to his home in the mountains. They then spent a surreal hour or two listening to small talk, which included discussion of whether or not a rose had a soul. The pleasant chat was interrupted by a fiery argument at Mr. Jumblatt’s front door between his bodyguards and the kidnappers, who had been summoned to return the Americans or have their own heads blown off.

The happy ending to the story was that although each of the kidnapped USIA officers had lost 40 pounds, both were released alive in February 1976 to Joe Hunt and Bob Waring. A day or two later I was flying back to the U.S. with the hostages and their wives and children, who had been waiting in Athens.

There also were unhappy endings. Kamal Jumblattt eventually was killed. Well before that, however, in June 1976, Bob Waring, newly arrived U.S. Ambassador Francis (Frank) Melloy, and veteran U.S. Embassy driver Zuhair Mograbi had themselves been kidnapped and killed while crossing in their armored sedan between the Muslim and Christian confrontation lines.

My tour of duty in Beirut had ended three weeks before that tragedy, which served as the catalyst for Joe Hunt’s own dramatic departure when the embassy was ordered to reduce its total staff to one helicopter load of 14 people. Colonel Hunt and Ethel, who somehow had returned to the city from which American dependents had been evacuated, rustled up an invitation from Muslim officers to visit the military beach club, which by then was also the Muslim army’s artillery base in West Beirut. While Ethel chatted with their hosts, Joe snorkeled around the rocks checking for hidden obstructions. Then, on July 26, 1976, with the Muslim Lebanese army and its Palestine Liberation Organization allies providing security, Colonel Hunt supervised the evacuation of 307 other Americans and himself on a landing craft from the U.S. Sixth Fleet, which was standing offshore.

A couple of weeks later we had a reunion at the Northern Virginia home of one of the two released USIA hostages, where I was able to tell their wives that their husbands owed their lives to Joe’s contacts and his persistence in following up every lead, despite extraordinarily hazardous conditions, until the prisoners were located and released.

In September 1976, Joe Hunt retired from the Marine Corps after 31 years of active duty, and he and Ethel returned to California, where they went into the travel business. But since they kept their close connections to the Middle East, our paths frequently crossed. Despite his reluctance to talk about himself, I gradually realized that in addition to being extraordinarily effective under fire in Beirut, Joe Hunt had had a lifetime of similar adventures.

A Lifetime of Adventures

Born in Fort Smith, Arkansas, he was adopted by a family that moved to a ranch in New Mexico where, when he was only four, his adoptive mother died. After his father remarried, Joe grew up in Arizona and California. He turned 17 on Jan. 17, 1944, as World War II was entering its last full year. His parents had agreed to let him enlist when he finished secondary school, probably not realizing that he was accelerating his courses so that he could graduate early.

He enlisted as a naval aviation cadet, but as the war wound down the Navy reduced its pilot training and he was sent to the Navy’s university degree program at the University of California in Berkeley. In June 1946, he was discharged from active duty and re-enrolled as a naval ROTC student. He graduated in June 1947 at age 20 with both a university degree and a commission as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps.

While at the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, he met Ethel Brown, a Pan American stewardess based in New York, on a blind date. In the summer of 1948 he received orders for Guam and proposed to Ethel, who said she preferred to continue flying around the world with Pan American to waiting for years in the U.S. for him to come home again.

From Guam, in September 1948, his Marine unit was ordered to Tsingtao, China, to protect and evacuate foreigners trapped in North China by the rapidly expanding Chinese civil war. The Marines took everyone who wanted to go, regardless of nationality, which may be when young Lieutenant Hunt learned to interpret orders creatively in emergency situations.

In November, his unit moved to Shanghai to evacuate foreigners from the path of the oncoming Chinese communist forces. Then, in January 1949, Joe was put in command of a platoon of Marines sent up the Yangtze River to become the Marine guard unit for the American Embassy in Nanking. When Chinese communist forces crossed the Yangtze River, the Marines and their charges were evacuated by air to Shanghai and, with no more foreigners in mainland China to guard or evacuate, Joe’s unit returned to Camp Pendleton, California.

This time when he proposed to Ethel she accepted, and shortly after that he was assigned to study Arabic at the Navy language school in Monterey, California. Joe’s Arabic training was followed by assignments to Fort Riley, Kansas, and then to the intelligence section of the Second Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, where the first of their three children was born, and then to Camp Pendleton, California, where they bought a house.

In 1952 Joe was assigned to the First Marine Division, which was fighting in the Korean war. There he served as an intelligence officer and as an adviser to a combat unit of the Korean Marine Corps. Then he took command of a Marine infantry company in the fighting that preceded the truce in July 1953.

In December 1953 he returned to the U.S. for a two-year assignment to Quantico, VA, where the last of the Hunt’s three children (two daughters, one son) was born. Finally, in March 1955, Joe Hunt got a chance to use his Arabic when he was assigned to Cairo to take command of all the Marine security guards assigned to embassies in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. He was on travel status for 22 of the 24 months he served in the job.

He was in Afghanistan when Israel invaded Egypt in the 1956 Suez War and American Embassy families were evacuated from Cairo. Ethel and the three Hunt children found themselves living in cramped quarters in both Athens and Naples before the family was reunited at the American Embassy in Beirut, where Joe finished his tour as regional commander of the Marine security guard units.

Then came assignments to Quantico, Washington state, the Command and Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and then Okinawa and Japan in 1964 and 1965. In late 1965 Joe took command of the battalion in Arlington, Virginia which selects and trains Marine security guards for U.S. embassies worldwide.

Three years later he became chief of intelligence for the amphibious warfare school educational center in Quantico, and in July 1970 it was time to go to war again—in Vietnam. After serving until June 1971 as intelligence officer with a Marine amphibious force in Danang, South Vietnam, Joe spent a year at Camp Pendleton, another year at the Naval War College in Newport, RI, and then five months in the Defense Attaché Course with the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington, DC.

In December 1973 this brought the Hunts full circle back to Beirut. There he arranged for the landing in Beirut of U.S. naval ships evacuating civilians from Cyprus, during the 1974 war between Greek Cypriots and Turkey. Then it turned out that the Turkish military commander in Cyprus, like Joe, was a graduate of the U.S. Army Command and Staff college in Kansas. So Joe was often the only official American allowed to cross the lines to the Turkish side to report back on conditions there to the U.S. Embassy in Nicosia.

The fact that Joe and Ethel had invited two of Joe’s Lebanese classmates at Naval War College for “a home-cooked Lebanese meal” in Newport, RI a couple of years earlier didn’t hurt Joe’s work in Lebanon either. By then one of his former classmates was aide-de-camp to the president of Lebanon and the other was the Lebanese chief of staff. Now the latter, Gen. Emile Lahoud, is Lebanon’s president.

Joe’s 1976 retirement from the Marines with a bronze star, three legions of merit, a Navy commendation medal and the Korean Chung Mu medal with silver star should be the end of this story. But instead, after two years in the travel business, in which the Hunts took several group tours from California to the Middle East, Joe accepted an assignment in Riyadh from 1980 to 1982 as resident director of JECOR, the Saudi-funded U.S. Treasury Department operation to recruit American technicians to help in Saudi Arabia’s crash program to build a modern infrastructure to link the cities of that vast country.

That was followed by two more years in Al Khobar from 1982 to 1984 as general manager of three U.S.-Saudi engineering and construction joint venture companies. From Al Khobar the Hunts moved to London, where he spent a year as vice president for business development for Santa Fe International, a Southern California-based petroleum exploration and drilling company. Then, when Joe and Ethel wanted to return to their Southern California home in San Juan Capistrano, the company brought the position back with him. After a few months, however, Joe decided it was time to retire, again.

Since his second retirement Joe Hunt has been chairman of the Newport Center for the Study of Major Economic Issues and also president of the International Visitors and Protocol Foundation of Orange County, California. At present he is vice chairman of the World Affairs Council of Orange County, on the board of directors of the Orange County Arab-American Republican Club, and on the national board of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington, DC-based organization founded by former Congressmen Paul Findley and Pete McCloskey to restore even-handedness to U.S. Middle East policy.

Joe and Ethel also are partners, along with two Nepalese and a former USAID and Peace Corps official, in a company called Temple Tiger. It administers a privatized wildlife resort within a royal national park in Southern Nepal. The object is to bring in camera-toting tourists to help fund Nepal’s wildlife conservation program.

I recalled just how persuasive Joe Hunt can be one evening immediately after I declined an invitation on extremely short notice to help fill in after Hanan Ashrawi, then the Palestinian minister of education, was forced to cancel a speaking engagement before the Orange County World Affairs Council. Less than an hour after I regretfully explained to the chairman that my magazine faced a printing deadline that couldn’t be ignored, Joe Hunt was on the phone, with an offer he knew I couldn’t refuse.

“There are some people here who didn’t want to invite Hanan Ashrawi at all,” he told me. “Now if no one shows up to explain the Palestinian viewpoint, they’ll win.” The next afternoon and evening I was speaking twice in California, 3,000 miles away, and the following day we were taking the magazine, on time, to the printer in Washington, DC.

They say “old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” After watching Joe Hunt, intrepid veteran of three wars and innumerable military “sideshows” that probably put him in even greater danger, it’s clear that some old soldiers also refuse to fade away.

Like so many Americans who have been exposed at first hand to the Middle East, he and Ethel just won’t quit until American Middle East policy becomes truly even-handed and the Palestinians get the state the U.N. promised them more than half a century ago. Someday all the Arabs are going to realize how many informed, articulate and sincere friends, like Joe and Ethel Hunt, they have all over the United States, and start using them to help bring back “the good old days” to U.S.-Arab relations. God willing, it won’t be too late.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report.