In 1898, Lieutenant Khalil Aswad fought in the battle of Guanica in the Spanish American War, helping seal the U.S. victory and subsequent colonization of Puerto Rico. Most of his army salary was sent every month to his sisters and father in Brummana, located north of Beirut along Mount Lebanon. After his untimely death of a heart attack at forty-seven, Khalil was rarely brought up. When his sisters died years later, most of what was known about him went with them, although the house remained a meeting point, refuge, and symbol of home for generations to come. Khalil Aswad was my great-great uncle, who I learned about while finishing years of research on the Syrian diaspora in the United States. Through the tumultuous twentieth century, the home he built in Brummana represented belonging: first a quiet retreat from Beirut in the 1960s, and later as a place of reunion after the family scattered across the world during the Lebanese Civil War. The United States, on the other hand, was a space of unbelonginga place of alienation even as it served as refuge from that war. As an American-born product of the war diaspora, and a scholar who has spent much of my time researching and critiquing U.S. empire, how do I reckon with both Khalil’s erasure from my family history in Mt. Lebanon, and my erasure from U.S. imperial history? My presentation uses Khalil’s life and his erasure from both my family’s and U.S. history as an entry point to examine the intersections of memory and imperial histories of Mt. Lebanon over the long twentieth century. Using my great-grandfather’s personal letters, and years of archival research in the United States and Lebanon, I argue that changing imperial relations between Lebanon and the United States has erased the memory of each other in the “home,” “destination,” and in between. The notion of Mount Lebanon as refuge from imperial forces, and of U.S. empire as a solely destructive force in the Middle East, worked together to make my family history unrecognizable to me. I follow the works of Amitov Ghosh, Saidiya Hartman, and Sherene Seikaly, and use autohistory and autoethnography to understand global history on an intimate scale. I examine a family’s continual unsettling from “home,” and the limits of its memory when faced with changing relations to race and empire.