By Allison Chaney, as told by Tina Rios 

Forty-two years after Beirut, a trunk of letters reopens the love and legacy of a young Fort Worth hero… Lucky Mike 

*~* 

“Tina. Hello. How are you doing? Good, I hope. As for me, things could be better.”  

Michael Fulton wrote those words to Tina Garza on July 22, 1983. He was in Beirut. She was in Texas. For Michael and everyone around him, the city that seemed a whole other world away for his loved ones, was being unmade in real time. Shells went off in the streets. Buildings that stood for generations turned to rubble. The Marines had been sent there as peacekeepers into a place where peace had long since stopped being an option, up against forces that outnumbered them and answered to no one. Every night brought the question of whether the next shell had your name on it. 

Michael Scott Fulton saw all of it. He was 21 years old, a Lance Corporal from Fort Worth, Texas, stationed in Beirut as part of the multinational peacekeeping force, working communications, keeping the lines open for men who needed to reach each other in a city that was trying to make that impossible. 

He was also, in whatever hours Beirut allowed him, writing letters to a girl back home. 

*~* 

Michael had not always been a soldier in a war zone. He’d been a kid in Fort Worth, a Chicago boy transplanted south at ten, who found his footing at Diamond Hill-Jarvis High School. He played football there for four years. His jersey number read 66. “Everyone knew and loved Michael,” his mother, Bessie Fulton, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1983. “He was a good kid. He never really gave us any trouble. He had tons of friends. He was a high school football player. He was tough.” 

Michael graduated and enlisted at 17, two weeks shy of his 18th birthday, young enough that his parents had to sign the paperwork. Michael was not the kind of kid who made decisions lightly, and thus, in 1980, he joined the Marines and was sent to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.  

Michael trained, bonded with friends who would remember him for life. Then he returned home on leave.  

*~* 

Michael met Tina Garza at the Daily Double in Fort Worth in 1981. A night on the steps of the disco club most simply called “the Double” turned into young love. She was eighteen, a free spirit. He was nineteen and a Marine home on leave. They talked for hours “about anything” and everything. Two years later, writing to Tina from Beirut, he told her how often his mind returned to that moment, admitting it had been the “happiest he’d been in a long time.” 

After that first night, they were inseparable until Michael had to return to base. He promised to write. And he did – from Camp Lejeune, and then from Beirut – on United States Marine Corps letterhead, on notebook paper, on whatever he had. About six days after landing in Lebanon, he worried he hadn’t heard from her. He wanted to “know the deal.” But Tina did write. Tina called. Tina was still his girl. 

She’d known that since the night she’d nearly let him go. Just before he left for Beirut, Tina had begun to feel suffocated. Time had passed. She was nineteen. Her family had bought into the idea of her marrying Michael. But Tina had parties to go to. She’d just graduated. She made up her mind. He was home on leave again, and she was going to break it off. 

His sister answered the door. She could hear Michael and his friends in the back, splashing around in the pool. He came in through the archway – no shirt, barefoot, gray Marine Corps shorts. That face. Those eyes. “Give me just a second,” he said. “I’m gonna tell my friends that you’re here, so they can all go home.” All her doubts melted away. 

They went to his room and talked. Hours passed. The streetlights shone through the window. “I’m gonna be home soon,” he told her. The reason she’d come hung in the air, but there would be no one else for her, no one else like Michael. 

*~* 

July 22, 1983. “I’m not going to lie about anything,” Michael wrote to Tina. “There isn’t a time that goes by without me thinking about you.”  From Beirut, he told her how much he wanted to come home but knew they had to stay and defend their country.   

He was living in a four-story building that had been “bombed to hell” before they got there. They slept on the floor. Conditions were near-unbearable – bad wiring, creatures scurrying. But he kept his wits about him. He always did. 

September 3, 1983. Michael was lying on the ground, pen in hand, as shells and bullets were “going all over the place. But don’t worry, babe, I got my head together… The bastards ain’t going to get me.” He had been smoking about three packs of cigarettes a day since the fighting broke out. There were already two dead Marines, God bless them, and twenty-four injured. 

“I’m tired of seeing dead children in the streets, blown all to hell for no reason at all. Do you know how it is going around for weeks at a time feeling sad, cause there ain’t a damn thing over here to be happy about? Do you know what it’s like to go to sleep at night… when you can sleep… wondering if the next shell that hits got your name on it?” 

Then: We have more incoming, and I have to man my gun. Take care. God bless. Love always, Michael. P.S. I am thinking of you. I love you. 

He drew a little face at the bottom of the page. He always drew a little face. 

*~* 

To understand what Michael Fulton was standing in the middle of, it helps to hear it from someone who was on the other side of it. 

Capt. Alex Norling of the U.S. Marine Corps is 29 years old, Lebanese-American, and the son of a woman who was 13 when the Marines arrived in Beirut in 1982. His grandmother, Antoinette Mallouhi, was a celebrated figure in Lebanese children’s media – the voice of beloved programs including Arabian Nights: Sinbad’s Adventures – and a single mother raising three children in a city that had become, in her grandson’s words, “true anarchy.” 

“Politicians were assassinated. People were abducted, tortured. The Marines were the only protection average citizens had.” 

His mother contracted a strep infection that spread to her heart. The Marines brought medicine. She survived. 

“Neither my mom nor I think our lives are worth even one name on that burial wall,” Norling said. “There are 273 names on that wall.” 

One of them is Michael Scott Fulton. 

*~* 

On October 23, 1983, a suicide bomber drove a truck carrying an estimated 12,000 pounds of explosives into the Marine barracks at the Beirut airport. The four-story building collapsed in seconds. Two hundred and forty-one American servicemen were killed. It remains the deadliest single day for the Marine Corps since Iwo Jima. 

Michael Scott Fulton, 21 years old, was on the third floor. He’d told his loved ones earlier that month he’d be home in just 42 days. “Hey, don’t worry. There ain’t nothing going to happen to me.” 

“It was agonizing,” Tina said. “Those two weeks we didn’t hear anything.” She had been riding her bike to the church every day, praying, talking to his mom. Then one day she walked to the payphone she always used to call Michael. Someone picked up. “Yeah, I’ve heard Michael talk about you before,” he told her. She pushed. “No news is good news,” he said. But she begged him to tell her the truth. He did. Michael had been in the building. 

“My knees felt weak.” She called his mother, but the family was still holding out hope. 

Then came the next morning. “I had his pictures in the kitchen on a pinboard.” Her grandmother had the early shift, came by to check on her. “It was still dark. I was asleep on the sofa.” She heard her mother and grandmother saying she was just going to have to get over it and move on. She questioned their meaning, and when they finally told her, she broke. “I started tearing all his pictures off the wall. I didn’t want to believe it. I collapsed.” Her mother held her as she cried, “Mom, Mom, no, no, no.” She’d been sure he would come back to her. “You just don’t think something like that is real.” 

Tina rode to Michael’s service with his family. She mourned next to his grandmother. And then she walked away and didn’t look back for forty-two years. 

“I thought of him often, but I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to handle him being gone. I started moving really fast. My daughter says, ‘Now I know why you’ve lived the life that you’ve lived. You’re in constant survival mode, Mom.'” 

*~* 

Tina Garza Rios’ mother died in April of 2025. Tina’s daughter and granddaughter opened a trunk and cried. Inside: Michael’s letters, perfectly preserved. The Marine Corps letterhead. The notebook pages. The smiley faces. The three a.m. postscripts. The love declared from the ground while shells came in overhead. 

Tina came back to tell the story she had put away for a very long time. At the annual commemoration in North Carolina at the Beirut Memorial wall, she met the men who served alongside Michael — like George Thompson, who was on the same floor when it happened. Thompson is still here. He still carries cement from the collapsed barracks embedded in his back. Thompson and so many others are Tina’s Marine brothers now.  

They all loved Michael, too. Lucky Mike, they called him.  

“When they mentioned his name and my granddaughter was crying,” Tina said, recalling the ceremony, “it was like a sword stabbing me in my heart.” 

“Michael was a man that knew what he wanted. He knew he had to serve his country. He was proud of that. He was a man, a true grown man at such a young age.” 

“The Marines paid a price for our freedom,” Norling said. 

Michael Scott Fulton. Fort Worth, Texas. Number 66. Lucky Mike. 

“There was a man here named Michael Fulton. He was an angel. He was a hero.” 

*~* 

Lance Cpl. Michael Scott Fulton, USMC. Born June 15, 1962, Chicago, Illinois. Raised in Fort Worth, Texas. Diamond Hill-Jarvis High School. Joined the Marines, 1980. Killed in action, Beirut, Lebanon, October 23, 1983. Age 21. Buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery, Fort Worth, Texas, with full military honors.  

All rights to this story, including derivative works, belong to Tina Garza Rios.  

© 2026 Tina Garza Rios. All rights reserved. Written by Allison Chaney. 

Allison Chaney is a screenwriter / writer-researcher from Los Angeles. This intellectual property is a work-made-for-hire and fully owned by Tina Rios. No claims on the property will be made by Allison Chaney. 

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