RICHMOND, Va. -- Forty years after a terror attack claimed the lives of more than 200 Marines in Beirut, Lebanon, the names of 11 Virginians whose lives were lost that day are now etched into Shrine of Memory at the Virginia War Memorial.
On Monday, Governor Glenn Youngkin addressed five of the 11 victims' families at the memorial.
"They all signed their names in the roll call of honor," Youngkin said. "To their families, I cannot begin to imagine the depths of your grief then or now and all the time between."
The pain is still palpable for Deanna Owens, sister to Joseph A. Owens of Chesterfield, who was killed in the bombing.
"It was a cold, cold, day. Went out to get firewood with my dad and my neighbor kind of yelled and said, 'Hey did you hear what happened in Beirut?' We went in and turned on the TV and that's how we learned about the Beirut bombing," Owens said.
"It was probably four to five days later that we found out he was killed. Four days of the unknown," she recounted.
Owens was influential in getting her brother's name, and the names of the 10 other Virginians killed, engraved in glass at the memorial.
To her, the names share a story of each soldier's sacrifice.
"He gave it up," Owens said. "He gave it all. You can't ask for anything else."
"It means everything to me and my family. You know, we've been waiting for this for quite some time now," said Freda Gibbs-Hutcherson, whose brother Warner Gibbs Jr. was killed in the bombing.
Gibbs-Hutcherson, who was in the Army at the time of the bombing, said he was always her hero, influencing her to join the military.
"We lay down our lives to sacrifice for our own. It's what we do. It's just part of us," Gibbs-Hutcherson said. "It's in our hearts. It's in our spirits. It's in our souls."
"This is one day that I will never forget," she said.
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