This short study of the role of the U.S. Marines in Operation Urgent Fury is in some ways an experiment in the writing of contemporary military history. The near-coincident Beirut deployment and Grenada intervention presented us with the problem and opportunity of collecting operational history in real time. The historical effort of the Marine Corps had not been thus challenged since the end of the Vietnam War. Grenada was barely underway when we were directed to send an oral historian to the scene to collect operationally oriented interviews from the participants.