There's a video at the link.
Posted on 02/16/2008 3:35:35 AM PST by csvset
Chesapeake
Barbara Rockwell has a soft way about her. Light brown hair swirls around her face, adorned by oval-framed glasses and gold elephant earrings.
Her voice is comforting and doesn't become loud or sound angry when she takes delight in a certain man's death.
"The fact that he got blown up in a car," Rockwell said, pausing, "I don't know who did it, but I'd like to thank him."
The man against whom she has held this grudge for more than 24 years was a Hezbollah commander named Imad Mughniyeh. The reason she held it is that her son, Marine Cpl. Michael Caleb Sauls, along with 240 other U.S. servicemen, was killed in a barracks bombing that Mughniyeh directed on Oct. 23, 1983, in Beirut, Lebanon.
Her son was 20.
The phone in Rockwell's Virginia Beach house woke her that morning. It was her neighbors, saying they were coming over for coffee. She thought that was weird. They turned on the TV, and that's how she found out.
"Michael would be 43," Rockwell said Friday morning. "It would have been nice to see what his children would have been like, or what he would have done. He could have done anything."
In a backroom of the Southeastern Virginia Training Center, where she works with people with disabilities, Rockwell held a framed photo of Michael. He was about to board a Jeep in front of the building that served as the barracks. Even then, pockmarks dotted the outside walls. Rubble and pulverized concrete covered the sidewalk. Michael wore a camo helmet with this shirt sleeves rolled above his elbows and a whole-faced, tooth-showing smile.
That's why, when she read the news story Thursday morning that Mughniyeh had been assassinated in a car bombing, Rockwell didn't feel bad about feeling good.
"It just seemed like a special day, didn't it?" she said. "Do I feel a little vindicated that he was blown up? Oh, yeah. I hope he heard the ticking before he was blown up."
Michael's grandfather was a Marine during the 1930s, and his father was a Marine in the '60s. Michael was the oldest of Rockwell's three sons: Andrew Sauls is now 42 and lives in South Carolina, and Donald Rockwell is 28 and owns the Boar's Nest Bar Bistro in Norfolk.
It was Andrew who called his mother Thursday morning.
"Mom, did you know?"
She hurriedly flipped through the newspaper pages, caught a glimpse of something about Beirut, then came to the story with Mughniyeh's assassination.
"Oh, my God," Rockwell said, "he's finally dead."
Rockwell knows some people might think that it's been more than two decades, so she must be over her son's death.
She's not, and she doesn't apologize.
"You're never over it," she said.
Lon Wagner, (757) 446-2341, lon.lagner@pilotonline.com
There's a video at the link.
I hope the temperature is about 1500 degrees where Mugee is.
That's because SOME people are idiots. They also think we should have started getting over 9/11 while the rubble still burned underneath.
In some cultures, there was the belief that those you murdered will be on the other side to exact revenge. Whatever, God bless Mrs. Rockwell, and God rest Michael's soul.
Bump to the top.
Now that’s a Marine mother!
Semper Fi Mrs. Rockwell
I hope my son, CPL USMC, can, in some small way also help to avenge the death of your son.
It is morally wrong to allow killers to walk free. Governments have a duty to bring them to justice.
The relief this mother must feel is because justice has been served.
LLS
“elephant earrings” must be a symbol of her republicanism and elephants have long memories too. God bless this great American mom.
Good for her.
She is right.
Revenge and justice are sweet....make no mistake of it.
A reckoning.
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