“No other president has ever held them accountable,” Dawn Woody said, recalling that her husband, Airman First Class Joshua Woody, was among 19 U.S. airmen killed in the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing organized by Iran and carried out by an Iranian proxy.
Families of the victims of the 1996 bombing, as well as a survivor of the attack, have described the current U.S.-Israel campaign against the Islamic Republic as justice belatedly being served.
“I’m so emotional, because watching this Iran thing unfold is so different for me,” Woody said. “I’ve waited 30 years to watch the leaders finally be held accountable for what they did. No other president has ever held them accountable.”
Dawn and Joshua Woody had only been married a few months when Joshua deployed to Saudi Arabia with the Air Force to provide support services to Operation Southern Watch in the aftermath of the Gulf War. He and the other airmen stationed in Saudi Arabia were living in the Khobar Towers, where Iran targeted them.
“His specific job was a ‘weapons jammer,'” Woody recalled. “He basically loaded the bombs on F-15s. He was so proud of what he was doing and would have been a career military man. That was the plan, anyway.”
A day before Joshua Woody was set to return home, a truck bomb exploded at the Khobar Towers complex, killing him, 18 other Americans, and wounding nearly 500 more people. The U.S. government eventually identified Hezbollah Al-Hejaz, an Iranian proxy then operating in Saudi Arabia, as responsible for the attack. By 2006, a federal judge ruled that the Islamic Republic itself was directly involved in the planning and execution of the attack.
Woody spent a decade in the Secret Service, where she witnessed how presidents handled Tehran.
“I worked when Obama sent, literally, a pallet full of cash back to Iran,” Woody said, referencing the infamous payments tied to former president Barack Obama’s Iran deal. “[It was] a hard day for me, knowing that they were giving money back to the people that murdered my husband.”
The Islamic Republic’s continued attacks against U.S. service members—often carried out through its various proxy groups in the Middle East—were cited by President Donald Trump as justification for his decision to launch the ongoing operation against Iran.
“Iranian forces killed and maimed hundreds of American service members in Iraq,” Trump stated early Saturday morning. “The regime’s proxies have continued to launch countless attacks against American forces stationed in the Middle East in recent years, as well as U.S. naval and commercial vessels in international shipping lanes. It’s been mass terror, and we’re not going to put up with it any longer.”
Herman Charles Marthaler, a retired postal worker who lost his son, Airman First Class Brent E. Marthaler, in the Khobar attack, expressed strong support for Trump’s move to strike the Iranian regime.
“I just hope we never quit until it’s all done,” Marthaler said. “Well, I want to get rid of all the bad actors in Iran so that the people there can form their own government. We got people all over the world cheering for what we’re doing over there, all Iranians.”
Brent Marthaler was known for his “great attitude” and for “keeping spirits high” among his fellow airmen, according to an Air Force biographical sketch compiled after the bombing. He also taught Sunday school classes at the base chapel.
“I support the president 1,000 percent,” Marthaler said. “I think he’s trying to make America better for everybody.”
Michael Harner, then a first lieutenant in the Air Force who was wounded in the bombing, recalled watching a truck pull up to the towers as he stood on his balcony.
“There was no shooting, no crashing into the fence, nothing threatening while I stood there watching,” Harner said. “However, something didn’t feel right about the situation. … I sat down to stretch some more in front of a sliding glass door. Within a minute or two, the loudest explosion I have ever heard went off. Praise God I had closed the curtains when I came inside, because I was sitting three feet from the plate glass door leading to the balcony. Still, glass from the door exploded into the room and into my body. The whole event only lasted approximately 15 seconds, but time stood still during the explosion.”
Harner, like the families of the airmen killed in the attack, has waited decades for the Islamic Republic to be brought to justice.
“I am a Christian, and I believe in forgiving others for what they’ve done,” Harner said. “But I do believe in justice and that this has been a long time coming. I am actually very pleased to see this is going on, and I feel like it should have been done a while ago.”