They were boxers. That was one thing they had in common.

Now in their 40s, they will return to the ring.

But not to fight.

April 22, at the Western Pennsylvania finals of the state Golden Gloves tournament, the four will be honored by the Police Athletic League for something that happened 25 years ago.

That's the other thing the four share -- the memory of the start of something sinister.

Thomas Reiser, a captain with the city firefighters, Station 8 in East Liberty, was there.

So was Chris Deasy, West Homestead chief of police.

And Jeff Roscoe, a heavy equipment operator from Greenfield.

And Kenneth Farnan, a Zone 2 city police officer.

All were Marines. All trained as boxers at some point and saw some ring action while they served. All needed every bit of their training a quarter century ago.

Despite being local, they didn't know each other in 1983, when they were all part of a peacekeeping mission in Beirut, Lebanon.

April 18 that year, a suicide bomber in a van flattened part of the United States embassy in Beirut, killing 63, including 17 Americans.

Reiser was serving in Beirut then. It was the day before his 21st birthday.

He spent that birthday and days after escorting members of the Red Cross and others as they recovered bodies from the horseshoe-shaped embassy.

"I think that's what started the terrorism that we know today," Reiser said. "We'd never heard of suicide bombs and things of that nature."

Reiser, after leaving Beirut and the Marines that summer, took up boxing and advanced as far as the Golden Gloves state final at 156 pounds.

"When I came home, I didn't have a job, so [boxing] gave me something to do and kept me out of trouble, off the street," said Reiser, who found similarities between his training as a Marine and as a boxer. "It's a lot of discipline, working out. It kept you in shape.

"The physical part is similar. I was in real good shape when I came out of the Marine Corps. I guess the mental part of it, too, but with boxing you just focus on one man in front of you."

Unlike what he had seen in Beirut, well before anyone in this country talked about a war on terror.

"I've seen a lot of bad things over the years, even in the fire department, but that was crazy," Reiser said. "It was the closest I could come to a war without actually being in one."

And that was just the start.

On Oct. 23 that year, the Marine barracks near the Beirut airport was leveled when another suicide bomber plowed an explosives-packed truck into the four-story building. The blast killed 220 Marines and 21 other U.S. service members.

Roscoe, who credited his pre-military Golden Gloves boxing experience with helping to make him a better Marine, was on duty guarding the perimeter of the airport, standing in a bunker a mile or two from the barracks.

"We had been shelled that whole night, so it was a pretty rough night," Roscoe said.

It got a lot rougher around 6 a.m.

Roscoe tried to call command to see what the explosion was, and when there wasn't a connection, he knew something awful had happened.

"It's a faceless enemy," Roscoe said. "That was kind of new -- our first American taste of that kind of terrorism."

Deasy and Farnan can tell you what that kind of terrorism is like. They were at the barracks and received shrapnel wounds.

"I was with a reconnaissance outfit, and my platoon was in the building," Farnan said. "I lost 15, plus six wounded."

Deasy was resting on a cot in a tent outside the building and got blown 30 or 40 feet by the blast.

"It took a few seconds to get oriented," he said. "You could see smoke coming from the building. I started running over toward the building. The first person I encountered had half a face. He was running and screaming.

"It was total chaos. The second or third person I encountered bled to death from where his arm was gone below the elbow.

"For the next week to nine days, all we did was pull out bodies."

In 2003, U.S. District Judge Royce Lambert ruled the attack on the barracks was carried out by Iran-backed Hezbollah.

Deasy's earlier training as a boxer couldn't have prepared him for such gruesome duty -- especially when he was on a peacekeeping mission. But the sport did help in certain ways.

"Confidence was the main factor," he said of boxing's affect on his life. "You felt more confident in anything that you chose to do."

They didn't choose to witness the birth of horrific terrorist acts against their country, but it's fitting that the four former strangers will be recognized for their heroism 25 years later at a boxing event.