Prefatory

RICHARD SOMERS AND THE BARBARY PIRATES
– 200 YEARS FROM THE POINT – A Biography of America’s Forgotten Hero

The outline of the walls and watchtowers of the old castle fort were the last thing Richard Somers saw before the explosion of the USS Intrepid in Tripoli harbor.

The fort stood out above the waterline just as it does today over two hundred years later.

In Tripoli, two centuries is like yesterday, as Roman emperors walked through the same ancient arches two thousand years ago, when the fort’s foundations were already a thousand years old.

It was from the fort’s ramparts that many battles were fought, including the US Navy’s attacks against the tyrant of Tripoli, Yousef Karamnali, who was defeated in battle but permitted to remain in power by a treaty that he repeatedly broke.

A hundred and fifty years later Benito Musellini gave speeches from the same ramparts of the fort and Nazi general Irwin Rommel plotted his North African strategy in the shadows of its walls.

Master Commandant Richard Somers and the 12 officers and men of the USS Intrepid are buried outside those same walls in a grave that was partially disrupted by an Italian army road work crew in 1930. They discovered the remains of five of the men and reburied them in crypts at a nearby walled enclosure they call Old Protestant Cemetery.

In 1949, when the USS Spokane put into Tripoli, they honored these men by conducting a ceremony at the cemetery that included the mayor of Tripoli, Yousef Karamanli, a direct descendent and namesake of the pirate king who Somers had fought a hundred and fifty years previous.

As the walls of the old red castle fort are now on the horizon again, ground zero in the revolutionary battle of Tripoli in 2011, we are reminded that Richard Somers and the men of the Intrepid are buried there, in the square outside the walls of the fort that is the epicenter of the revolution, Martyr’s Square.

The only martyrs actually buried there are Somers and the US Navy heroes who once fought for the same ideals that the Libyan revolutionaries say they are now fighting for – liberty, freedom, justice and democracy.