DOB/DOD: July 29, 1947 (New Haven, CT) – October 23, 1983; 36 years old
MARITAL STATUS: Married Jacquelyn Blackledge
CHILDREN: One son, Samuel S. [USMC]
LOCAL ADDRESS: 50 Bellevue Road, New Haven
ENLISTMENT: November 16, 1973
MILITARY OCCUPATIONAL SPECIALTY: 302, Infantry Officer
UNIT: 1st Battalion, 8th Marines
FAMILY: Born to Frank [Army veteran; 1943-1946] (1914-2008) and Helene Dicerbo Scialabba (1916-1997). Peter was their only child.
Hillhouse High School (New Haven, Connecticut) Class of 1965
1971 Mississippi University yearbook
From The Hartford Courant on October 31, 1983
By Stephanie Della Cagna | Courant Staff Writer
TEARFUL, PROUD NEW HAVEN FAMILY REMEMBERS A SON LOST IN BEIRUT
“Things here are going well, in spite of the escalating attacks on Marines, but we’re holding our own. Please don’t worry about me, as we are taking all the necessary security measures to ensure our safety,” Captain Peter J. Scialabba wrote in his last letter, October 20, to his parents.
Sunday, sadness shrouded the New Haven home of Frank and Helene Scialabba. Their only child, whom they call Pete, was killed last week in Beirut.
His mother, a diminutive woman, talks incessantly about her son – always using the present tense. His father, who owns Comet Printing on Ferry Street in New Haven, doesn’t say much at all.
The couple had to wait nearly a week to find out if their son was dead or alive. Saturday, their daughter-in-law, Jacquelyn, who lives with their grandson, Scott, near Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, called.
Now the couple is waiting for their son to come home to New Haven, where he will be buried.
Sorry it took so long to write. (It’s been) busy over the last few weeks. I missed selection for Major before I left,” their son wrote July 19.
His aunt, Connie, Concetta Panza, tries to console her younger sister as she covers the brocaded living room couch with letters and photographs of her son to show a visitor.
“I think he always wanted to be a Marine,” his mother says. “All his letters indicated we had every right to be there.”
The 36-year-old company commander was given a six-month assignment to Lebanon in June, ten years after he joined the Marines.
He grew up in New Haven, attended St. Brendan’s grammar school, and Hillhouse High School. He graduated in 1965. He graduated from the University of Mississippi, where he met his wife. Later, he went to The Citadel, a military college in South Carolina, where he earned a master’s degree in military history.
“Words can’t express the job these young kids are doing over here,” their son wrote of the enlisted Marines in August. “I feel we’re serving a good purpose, and the people really need us. There is no stability here.”
As his mother takes out a Boy Scouts of America merit badge sash, she recalls the Marine’s youth. “Look here, he was just one badge shy of becoming a Life Scout,” she says with pride.
“I remember the time we went on vacation to Montreal. Pete was about 5 years old. He’d come down with measles. His temperature got to 104. I rubbed him with alcohol to keep the fever down,” she said.
Peter Scialabba’s ability was noticed by Colonel Donald A Hodgen, director of the Marine Amphibious Warfare School. “He is a dynamic, intensely aggressive officer. Meticulously accurate and well-organized. … He possesses a quick wit and uncompromising integrity. He is well-respected by his and seniors alike… I would actively seek the services of this officer under any condition,” the colonel wrote.
From Beirut-memorial.org
By Diane D’Abruzzo | Daily News Staff
Jackie Scialabba keeps her husband’s wedding ring on a wooden shelf in her Jacksonville home.
Fingering the golden band, she shows a tiny black indentation where it was damaged in the Beirut bombing 15 years ago.
Jackie Scialabba retrieved the ring weeks after her husband, Pete, died in the October 23, 1983, explosion. She remembers the massive pile of jewelry—watches, chains, and rings—that was brought back from Beirut for the families of victims to claim.
The simple band matched the one on Jackie’s finger, and her heart told her it was the one—the one she had put on Pete’s finger on their wedding day in 1973.
“I knew it was his,” she said. “I just knew.”
Ready to come home
Pete and Jackie met in Mississippi in the 1970s. She was working in her hometown. A native of New Haven, Connecticut, he was a student at the University of Mississippi on a law enforcement scholarship. They married in 1973.
“Pete was an extraordinary person,” Jackie remembered. “He just loved life and was one of the most positive people. Give him a steak and a baked potato, and he was happy.”
Pete entered the Marine Corps after graduation, and the family traveled from the deep South to Quantico, Virginia, to Camp Lejeune to Okinawa, Japan, to Charleston, S.C., to Quantico, and back to Camp Lejeune in 1982. There, Pete was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines.
He was a 36-year-old captain in the Marine Corps when he left Camp Lejeune on float to Beirut, Lebanon, in May 1983.
“Pete had been on float before, and it seemed like a normal thing,” Jackie said. “The only concern I had was when they started receiving sniper fire, and some people in his unit were killed. But in his letters, he’d write, ‘Gee, everything is OK, I’m ready to come home.’ I was not all that concerned.”
Jackie was visiting a friend in New Hampshire on October 23, 1983. It was a Sunday, and the two had gone to Catholic services that morning. They had plans to tour New England after church. “At the end of the Mass, the priest said, “Let us pray for the 72 soldiers killed in Lebanon.”
Not sure if the “soldiers” were Marines, Jackie told her friend that she wanted to stop off at her house and call home. Finding the TV set blaring with the news that the headquarters building for 1st Battalion, 8th Marines, in Beirut had been bombed, the fear started setting in.
Jackie’s teenage son, Scott, was home in Emerald Isle with a military friend. When Jackie called home, the friend told her, “It doesn’t look good.”
The next few days were numbing. Jackie couldn’t get a plane back to North Carolina until Tuesday and spent every minute watching the TV news and making phone calls, desperate for information on her husband.
“I really didn’t want to come back,” she said. “I knew it would get more real the closer I got to it.”
Once home, she remained glued to the TV and phone.
“The TV was scrolling the names of those who had been identified as killed in action,” she said. “I’d watch the TV, hoping to see him walking around, but also reading the names and wondering if his was going to be on the list.”
Name after name on the killed in action list was from Pete’s unit. Jackie personally knew 39 Marines who died in the blast.
On the following Wednesday, October 26, Jackie was greeted at her front door in Emerald Isle by a Casualty Assistance and Care Officer, who told her that Pete was missing in action.
Day after day, she held on to the hope.” I was holding out, hoping that, number one, he had survived but hadn’t been found yet, or that he had been injured and was in some hospital somewhere and not conscious.”
For the most part, those days of waiting are a blur to Jackie. She remembers that Scott went back to classes at White Oak Elementary, where he was in the eighth grade, but didn’t stay.
“He just couldn’t concentrate,” she said. ” How do you concentrate on your studies when you don’t know if your father is dead or alive?”
She remained at home, waiting for word. “There’s nothing worse than waiting. When you know, you can start dealing with grieving. But to wait and wait is extremely difficult. What emotion do I pick? Joy because he’s all right? Sadness?”
In the early-morning hours of October 29, that decision was made for her. It was still dark outside, probably around 6 a.m., when a car pulled into her driveway. Looking out her bedroom window, she saw the Casualty Assistance and Care officer and a Navy chaplain get out of the car and walk to her front door.
Absolute fear sets in.
After six grueling days of waiting, Jackie was told that Pete had been killed.
Later that same day, she received a call notifying her that Scott’s grandfather was killed in Grenada.
“I don’t remember anything after when we were told on Saturday,” she said. “It’s all a blank to me. I’m sure I made calls and received calls. I remember going to a lot of memorial services at Camp Lejeune—one for Pete and one for all of them.”
Peter J. Scialabba was buried in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 10, 1983—the day Scott turned 14 years old. It was the only day available, and it was either that or wait another three days.
“I need to have closure,” Jackie said.
A new normal
Being a military wife for 10 years, Jackie was used to Pete being gone for weeks or months at a time. And that made his death so much harder to absorb.
“They have been away for five months, and then someone tells you that you’re never going to see them again,” she said. “It was hard to deal that they’re gone and they’re going to stay gone and they are never going to come back.”
Once a strong, independent woman who took care of her family while Pete was away on float, Jackie began to crumble once his death set in. “Suddenly it was, ‘I can’t do all this.’ There was a strength I had in knowing it was a temporary situation, and when it became a permanent situation, it was paralyzing,” she said. ” It was very hard realizing that my life was never going to be the same.”
Every second of every minute was filled with grief. Letters continued to arrive from Pete, one postmarked Oct. 22, and they still resounded with phrases of “I’m OK” and “Hope to see you soon.” A care package she had sent prior to the explosion was returned.
Jackie yearned for nightfall because only through sleep was she relieved of the pain.
Unlike many of the grieving wives, Jackie wasn’t exposed to the sometimes-harassing national media because she lived in Emerald Isle. She does remember a TV crew filming Pete’s funeral service in New Haven.
And she also remembers the overwhelming national support — scholarship foundations set up to support the children: a Christmas tree decorated with 241 ornaments, each marked with a different name; the tree her son’s school planted in memory of Pete; a scholarship set up in New Haven in honor of Pete; and a number of letters from school children.
“I got letters from first- and third-grade classes from children who wrote in their cute little writing, ‘I’m sorry about your husband,’ or ‘I’m sorry about your son.’ Some of them got confused,” she said with a smile.
For a year after Pete’s death, Jackie tried to keep normalcy in her and Scott’s lives. But with time, she learned that the life she knew as “normal” was gone. “I had to find normal for my life,” she said. “And that’s not easy to do.”
She stayed in Emerald Isle for a year and a half after Pete’s death, then she and Scott moved to Charleston, South Carolina.
“I had two goals,” she said. “One was my son’s education, and one was a good career for me.”
Jackie enrolled Scott in a private Catholic high school, and she began working in a hospital lab as a supervisor. After Scott graduated, he entered the Naval Academy, and Jackie’s career took her to Atlanta.
In 1996, following a career change, Jackie returned to Eastern North Carolina. She is a representative for USPA & IRA, an agency that helps military families become financially independent. She lives in a house in Jacksonville, minutes away from her office on Western Boulevard.
And Scott’s not far away, stationed at New River Air Station. “He’s a captain in the Marine Corps like his father, and he’s flying Cobras like his godfather.”
Fifteen years later, time has healed much of the pain. Jackie still thinks of Pete every day, almost every hour. But her thoughts don’t consume her; they don’t eat away at her. She keeps pictures of Pete on her mantel, his diplomas on the wall, and his wedding band on her shelf.
When she’s contemplating a decision, she’ll think, “What would Pete do?” Her faith has also gotten her through the hard times. Though she was raised a Southern Baptist, she was baptized Catholic in January 1983. After reading up on her husband’s faith, she decided to make the switch.
In May 1983, right after Pete left for Beirut, Jackie was confirmed. “That’s what ended up getting me through,” she said. “The strength and newness of my faith played an incredible role.”
Moving back to Jacksonville years later was also healing. Unlike anywhere else, Jacksonville remembers. It remembers the 241 servicemen who died. It pays tribute to them every day with the Beirut Memorial and the trees lining N.C. 24 and U.S. 17.
“No one remembers like Jacksonville remembers,” she said.
About Pete, she added, “I think my life is more enriched because I knew Pete. I think I am a better person. I think I have learned to prioritize better, and I know what is important and what really isn’t.
“I have good, solid memories of him. Some are painful and some are humorous, and I don’t know which ones are going to come out. Sometimes I can’t even get his name out, and sometimes I’m laughing so hard that tears are streaming down my face.
“He taught me how to appreciate life, how to hold on to good relationships, and appreciate the special people in my life,” she said. “And that is a very positive thing—because it’s a gift I’ve received from Pete.”
Interred in Saint Lawrence Cemetery, 280 Derby Avenue, West Haven, Connecticut; Mausoleum Level 4, number S17. Photo by Jeff DeWitt.
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