When it comes to the American military, you rarely see an image of a US Army, Navy, Marine, or Air Force officer in a blue beret. To be sure, in the Army there are different colored headgear, as we would say, including some berets. Maroon for the Airborne, tan for Rangers, green for Special Forces, and black for other soldiers. I was never a fan of berets; the good old cap with a brim on it was sufficient for me. Plus, it kept the sun off my face. Yet in 1981-82, I donned the sky-blue beret of a United Nations Military Observer (UNMO).
In those years I was assigned as an unarmed military observer—one of 36 US officers and a host of other nationalities—in the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) based in Jerusalem. UNMOs were dispatched from there to observer groups in Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon to observe and report violations of ceasefires that had in principle been agreed to between Israel and its neighboring states.
The Army’s original plan did not have me reporting to UNTSO. My graduate studies focused on Comparative Governments of the Middle East and Soviet Foreign Policy, topics very important to the US in the 1980s and the reason the Army sent me to graduate school at the University of Virginia. There I focused on Iran and was programmed to report to the US Embassy in Tehran, until the Iranian revolution erupted before I graduated. I was quickly reprogrammed to report to UNTSO.
The Army’s decision made sense. UNTSO was a good alternative because of my general background in the Middle East and Soviet foreign policy studies. So, when I reported to UNTSO, my senior officer dispatched me to Damascus, Syria where I would support the observer group overseeing the armistice on the Golan Heights between Israel and Syria. There I would be assigned with another US officer and 18 Russian officers who were part of the “Superpower” contingency of the observer group. Why so many Russians? Because only Syria and Egypt would allow them into their countries, whereas Americans were welcomed in any nation where UNTSO had observer groups. Therefore, the 36 Russians—the same number as the US—were split between Egypt and Syria. It was an oddity of the Cold War then, but that’s the reason for the disparity.
Most of the Americans, however, were assigned to southern Lebanon where peace was rarely seen in those days. Indeed, as I write in my new book Yanks in Blue Berets: American UN Peacekeepers in the Middle East, southern Lebanon was “the wild west without a good saloon.” Nevertheless, as a young and eager captain, I wanted to get there quickly to be part of the action and leave the babysitting of 18 Russians to others.
After arriving for duty in Lebanon, I found it to be a very dangerous place. In Yanks I describe just how dangerous it was to be a soldier trained for combat yet thrust into the role of an unarmed UN peacekeeper. We were unprepared for what we encountered but adapted quickly.
I’ve based my book on not only my notes from that experience and my understanding of what it was like to deal with the discord in the Middle East, but also on the diaries, interviews, and stories of many other US and international officers, who like me were, for a season, “sentinels of peace.”
I hope you will enjoy this book when it comes out in just two weeks. I have attempted not only to tell a story few Americans are aware of, but also to explain what it was like to be wedged between sworn enemies trying our best to encourage peace. It was not duty for the faint of heart.
There are lessons to be drawn from this experience that could be instructive in future peacekeeping efforts, hopefully one that will emerge in Ukraine. Why is that important? Because in the 40-plus years that Americans participated honorably in UNTSO to encourage peace in the Middle East, we learned a lot. So, how will what we learned be applied in the future? Was the experience all for better or worse?
I answer these questions and others as we take a deep dive into one of the most interesting and untold stories of America’s participation in international peacekeeping. The stories in this book are interesting, riveting, humorous, dangerous, happy, sad, painful, and hopeful, yet all very germane to our world today.
“Yanks in Blue Berets” is a story of how American officers who dared think the cynics wrong and made every effort day and night to bring peace to a war-weary world. And that is a story worth reading. I hope you will!
1 Comment
Judith Glick-Smith · June 26, 2023 at 12:25 pm
I love that you are recording this history, Scott. I wish more would do this from their POVs. Otherwise, 100 years from now, all this knowledge and lessons learned will be lost. I can’t wait to read the book.