What was going on when I was born?

The Secretary of the Navy has recommended that military officers be reprimanded for command failures associated with the Oct. 23 truck-bombing of the Marine compound in Beirut, Reagan Administration officials said today. They said the recommendation, which was submitted to Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger today, called for the issuance of disciplinary letters. The officials said more severe forms of punishment, including courts-martial, were precluded by President Reagan last month. The officials declined to say whether the recommendation by the Secretary, John F. Lehman Jr., covered both Navy and Marine officers or how high in the chain of command the reprimands might reach.

Administration officials said today that, while President Reagan remained opposed to increasing taxes to shrink budget deficits, his top aides were deeply divided on what course should be taken. This situation emerged from a luncheon today of the President with his top advisers. Officials said no final decision was made at the luncheon about proposing a tax increase, and they would not speculate whether the final decision would be for or against tax increases. ''There are a number of decisions on the table, a number of options and a number of extremely held views,'' Larry Speakes, the White House spokesman, said at his daily briefing. ''The tax decision has not been made; it will be made this week.''

Efforts to separate factions in Lebanon appeared to have bogged down, and Government officials expressed pessimism over the chances of reaching an agreement soon. Syria, which had indicated it favored the proposed accord, appeared to have reversed itself. Also in Beirut, a French paratrooper was killed and two others were wounded in an attack by gunmen. (Page A1, Column 1.) Officers should be reprimanded for command failures associated with the Oct. 23 truck-bombing of the Marine compound in Beirut, according to a recommendation of Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr., Reagan Administration officials said. They said the recommendation, which was submitted to Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, called for the issuance of disciplinary letters. (A1:1-2.)

The feeling this week at the Consumer Electronics Show here appears to be relief that the video game and home computer industry - in which some companies lost hundreds of millions of dollars during 1983 - still exists. Said William Grubb, chairman of Imagic: ''For this industry, 1983 was the year of humility.'' ''The phenomenon is over,'' said Roger Sharpe, the editor of Video Games magazine. ''The industry dug its own grave by thinking that all you had to do was put something in a box and the public would buy it. The question is where the industry will stabilize.''

Mayor Koch, declaring that his policies during the last six years had put ''the city back on its feet,'' said yesterday that no new taxes would be included in his preliminary budget for the next fiscal year. He also said that he would not seek to extend a two-year surcharge, scheduled to expire December 1984, on the city's income tax for residents and that he planned to overhaul municipal energy and financial taxes so the city could better compete with other localities for businesses. Mr. Koch also announced that he would support a City Council proposal to commit up to $100 million over the next four or five years for new housing for low- and middle-income families. Regarding education, Mr. Koch said he would decline the request of Schools Chancellor Anthony J. Alvarado that the Board of Education's $3.5 billion budget be increased by $440 million. Instead the Mayor criticized the cost of special education - now at $770 million. Budget aides said they would meet today with school officials to draw up unspecified reductions in the special education budget, which contains programs for handicapped pupils.

WHEN a human fetus is about three months old, a strange and vital migration of cells begins: Cells in the liver and spleen, which have been manufacturing blood, are believed to travel to the skeleton, where related cells carve out a safe new home for them inside the bones. A few months before the baby is born, the resulting bone marrow tissue has become the source of blood cells and a major source of cells of the body's immune defense system. The crucial roles played by the marrow may be the reason why it is lodged where it is - inside the main bones of the skeleton, one of the most protected places in the human body. Much has been learned in recent years about this vital tissue and ways of treating its life-threatening disorders, and marrow transplantation has become increasingly valuable for such treatments. Among the most dramatic cases affected by recent bone-marrow research is that of a 12-year-old Texas boy, identified to the public only as David. Since birth he has lived inside plastic and glass isolation chambers. He has had to be shielded from the outside world because he was born with a defect of bone marrow cells that has rendered him immunologically helpless against even the mildest infections.

''Yonkers seems to survive on crisis,'' said John Zakian, a former assistant to the City Manager and a Yonkers native who has spent much of his 33 years in city politics. ''We always seem to be teetering on the brink of disaster,'' he added. ''But we've been able to bounce back in the past and we'll do it again.'' Yonkers is facing many serious problems these days, but Mr. Zakian's optimism is felt by many of the 195,000 people who live in this aging Westchester city overlooking the Hudson River. For every resident who complains about the infighting that has often dominated Yonkers politics - and that helped place the city on the brink of bankruptcy in 1975 - there are those like Nortrud Spero, a real estate broker, who remains optimistic about the city's future and says she ''wouldn't live anywhere else.''

The Ford Motor Company is expected to announce on Tuesday that it will build a plant in Hermosillo, Mexico, to assemble a Japanese-designed car primarily for sale in the United States. According to industry sources, the plant will represent a $400 million investment by Ford and will have a capacity of 200,000 cars a year. About 3,100 people would be employed at the plant, in the capital of Sonora state, about 200 miles south of Tucson, Ariz.

An article in Metropolitan Report on Saturday about visits by playwrights to city schools misidentified a coming Broadway musical for which Terrence McNally wrote the book. It is ''The Rink.''

Coleco Industries said today that it would report a loss for the fourth quarter because of production problems with its Adam home computer system. Coleco's financial health and its ability to turn a profit on the Adam computer have been a topic of much speculation at the International Winter Consumer Electronics Show here, because many experts consider the system a bellwether for the home computer business this year. A fourth-quarter loss was expected, but for all of 1983, Coleco expects to make money, Morton Handel, its executive vice president, said at an analysts meeting at the show. And he predicted that ''we should see a quick return to profitability in the first quarter of 1984.''

A report in New York Day by Day on Thursday about the Omni Park Central misstated the hotel's former name. It was the New York Sheraton.

''Cierre los libros, por favor,'' said Ann Volkman, the Spanish teacher at Wapello High School. Six miles away, all alone in a classroom, Julie Byers closed her book, sat up straight, kept her eye on a television screen and waited for the first question of the quiz. Without the video monitors and the small television camera staring at her, Miss Byers could not have taken Spanish at all at Morning Sun High School, where she is one of only 11 students in the senior class. But through a small, experimental two-way television network devised by Iowa schools to bring classrooms across the airwaves, she and about 2,000 other rural students can take precalculus courses in schools where mathematics stops at algebra, study anatomy where the local science teacher is swamped by biology classes, or learn Spanish in schools whose teachers do not speak the language.