Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL (16 page)

But I didn’t come back on Monday. I went to Panama instead.

Two days after I’d made an ass out of myself, Fifth Platoon was parachuted into the Gulf of Panama, and we established a forward operating base on an island in the Archipelago de las Perlas. Our mission was to again play OPFOR, opposing forces, this time in a joint American-Panamanian military exercise called Kindle Liberty. This was seven years before America would depose Manuel Noriega, and relations with the Panamanians were cordial, if a bit tense at the top. Also deployed to Las Perlas were the XO, a group from the operations office, and a scratch operational force from the cadre, including John Jaeger. We were to conduct a series of across-the-beach operations against the canal and its infrastructure. Our missions were intended to assess the response of U.S. Army and the PDF, the Panama defense forces. It would be their job to protect the canal and our job to try to break it.

Somewhere in Washington the decision was taken that our operations were to be conducted with units of the
Gardia Nacional,
Manuel Noriega’s personal gang of thugs. A group of ten
comandos
joined us in Las Perlas and were integrated into our platoons. What they learned would serve them well and do us little good. In a macabre twist of fate, our same Team, SEAL Team Four, would suffer cruelly in the coming invasion of Panama, Operation Just Cause, in December 1989. A SEAL platoon sent to Patilla Airfield to disable Noriega’s Learjet would be ambushed and sustain four killed and a number wounded. I am probably not the first person to wonder if the
Gardias
we trained at Las Perlas were the same men who waited for the SEALs on the runway at Patilla.

That disagreeable evening was far in the future, and to us unknowable, if not unimaginable. Not one of us on the island thought our collaboration was a good idea, but we followed orders, and the Panamanians keenly attended our planning and accompanied us as we ran successful ops against the Gatun Locks, the Summit electrical substation, key pumping facilities, and the liquid-oxygen storage tanks on Howard Air Force Base. The only operation from which they were excluded was the capture and simulated sinking of U.S.S.
Spiegel Grove
as she transited the canal. This operation, carried out by all SEAL Team Four elements, was the crowning evolution of the exercise. For obvious reasons, I won’t go into the nuts and bolts of a warship takedown, but my assault element operated with John Jaeger’s, and the action cemented our friendship.

A few days later, we were cooling our heels in the departure lounge at Howard Air Force Base, waiting for an airplane. Our flight was delayed twice, and finally, Senior Chief Jaeger wandered over and sat down next to me.

“Hey, Mr. Pfarrer.” He had a sly look on his face, and I knew it meant he wanted something. Probably permission for something he’d already done or would soon do anyway.

“How’s about I let the lads go across the street to the enlisted club and have a few beers,
or so,
before we get on the plane?”

I knew the guys would get as drunk as they could as fast as they could, and that might be a problem. The one thing guaranteeing their good behavior was the fact that no one, including me, had much money. I’d parachuted in with a fortune, fifty bucks, and I doubted all the lads together had even half that much.

“Sure, Senior Chief,” I said. “Tell ’em to keep it within the pale of acceptable human conduct.”

The guys clomped across the street. John Jaeger grinned, and for a while we sat together in an empty departure lounge.

“Hey, sir?”

“Yes, Senior Chief?”

“You got any money,
or so
?”

“I’ve got a little,” I said.

“How’s about you and me slide on over to the club and have a couple of cold pops?
Or so.
”

Now would come a major episode in my education as a junior officer. The E club was for enlisted men. Officers had their own clubs, and chief petty officers had chiefs’ clubs. Neither the senior chief nor I was supposed to drink at an enlisted club.

I sat there quietly and thought about this, and John looked at me like I was a moron. “Let’s go,” he said. He stood and removed the golden anchors from the collars of his cammies. Before I could think better of it, I stood and took off the gold bars that marked me as an ensign. I’d been in the jungle for the better part of two weeks, and I was thirsty. Without our rank devices, we were transformed instantly from an E-8 and an O-1 to a pair of E-1 no-count snuffies, slick-sleeves, military nonentities. I followed John across the street and into the dark, smoky confines of the club.

The joint was wound up. ZZ Top was playing. Pushed up against the bar was the most explosive mixture of men known to mankind. At one end were about twenty marines, recon dudes with high-and-tight haircuts; in the middle were the SEALs; and on the far end were about an equal number of Green Berets. All had played in the exercise, and the SEALs had operated against both groups. I sipped my beer like a Baptist. The insults were already flying, along with small items: rolled-up napkins, twist tops from beer bottles, and the occasional drink thrown whole. I knew it was only a matter of time until the place exploded. The senior chief and I would be doubly damned if it did. We would be dinged first for not stopping the riot from happening, and then we would be gigged for being here in the first place.

An empty shot glass bounced off the bar in front of John.

“Getting a little hairy in here,
or so,
” he said calmly.

I was just about to say “Let’s get the hell out of here” when John picked up the glass from the bar. He stood on his bar stool and banged the glass off his beer mug.
Ding ding ding ding.

“All right, you assholes,” he bellowed, “pipe down!” The crowd quieted a little. The senior chief yelled again. “I’m telling you assholes to shut the fuck up! AT EASE!”

The bar quieted. It was a sullen, tense silence, and every eye in the place was on John, balanced on his bar stool. I wanted the world to open up and swallow me, but the senior chief was in his glory. He stepped onto the bar and walked its entire length.

“All right,” he growled. “Who’s the roughest, toughest motherfucker in the bar?”

A gigantic Green Beret stood up. This guy was six-five and looked about 250. “I am,” he said.

John looked him over. “You’re the toughest motherfucker in this bar?”

“That’s what I said, old man,” the Green Beret answered.

“Good,” John said. “You take over. I gotta take a piss.”

The place exploded in laughter, the tension broken forever. John jumped down off the bar and gave me a wink. It was an epic stunt, and one I have never had the courage to repeat. I’d just watched a master in action.

FRIDAY WAS NEW YEAR’S EVE,
and I’d been operational for a year and a half. Holiday leave had been granted in two sections: Half the command received a week off at Christmas, and the other half was allowed liberty the week of New Year’s. I’d taken neither this year. I was a bachelor, and although I would have liked to see my parents back in Mississippi, I’d been able to get home for a weekend at Thanksgiving. I volunteered to take the watch on Christmas Eve and again during the New Year’s leave section. The duty was easy, and apart from the two nights I spent in the Team area, it was like another week off. I was happy to let the guys who had families spend time at home.

I’d been invited to a New Year’s party by a pilot friend who flew for the Red Wolves, an aviator with the redoubtable name of Wilbur. The bash was to be at Wilbur’s house, on the north end of Virginia Beach, a neighborhood to which I am still partial. Wilbur’s crowd was mostly airdales, and they called themselves the Fifty-eighth Street Beach Bullies. I was delighted to be invited, as I did not think a punch-up at the Casino would be the best way to start my year.

Wilbur’s place was on the sand, a ramshackle three-story 1920s vintage beach palace. The wind was blowing hard and cold off the surf when I arrived. It was crowded and warm inside. I stashed my coat, thanked the host, and somebody mixed me a very large drink. A woman I didn’t know came up, kissed me, and gave me a pointed hat that said
BETTER LUCK NEXT YEAR.

Three minutes later, I ran into the woman I would later marry.

Margot Attman was blond, striking, six feet tall, and always had a wry smile crinkling the corner of her mouth. She looked vaguely like Faye Dunaway. Where the movie star seemed ephemeral, Margot was athletic and direct. She had a biting wit. When I first saw her, she was standing against a door leading out to the porch, one foot on the ground, the other tucked back, almost under her thigh. Her legs were extraordinarily long. She held a drink in one hand and had her other thumbed through a belt loop, like a cowboy. Her head was down, and her blue eyes were half closed; she was listening to, or ignoring, a small, balding man telling her a joke.

Our eyes met as I walked past. I am hardly a pickup artist, but as soon as the bald man walked off, I walked over.

“Thank God,” she said. “They invited somebody tall.”

I was smitten.

We talked and danced, and her friends watched us and asked one another who I was. Margot played them, and played me as well. She told her friend Wanda that I was her stepbrother. She told someone else I was her pool boy.

She was a teacher from upstate New York, in the country between Buffalo and Niagara. Her father was the postmaster of a small town called Hamlin. She asked what I did in the navy, and I said I was an astronaut. When pressed, I admitted that I was actually only a payload specialist.

“I just work the big arm,” I said.

“Bullshit,” she said. “Wilbur says you’re a SEAL and I should keep away from you.”

“Wilbur is a dangerous man,” I said. “I’ve flown with him.”

At midnight she said, “Come over here and kiss me.”

I stood where I was. I said finally, “Come over here. I’m worth it.”

She did, and I pulled her close, and I kissed her long and deeply, and when I let her up for air, I kissed the front of her throat twice. Lightly. And then I whispered into her ear, “When I kiss ’em, they
stay
kissed.” It was the corniest line I knew, and it made her laugh brightly.

We left her car parked where it was and drove in mine to her place, a bungalow on the beach maybe a dozen blocks south. We were buzzed and happy and glad to be alone. I had come recently from the tropics; my skin was red, and I delighted in the cold wind that ripped into me. My heart was pounding as we climbed the wooden stairs to her apartment; inside, it was cool and drafty. I lit a fire, and she literally said she was going to slip into something more comfortable. I laughed and poured her a drink.

The wind blew in great gusts, and the little house occasionally shook as huge waves thundered down on the sand. In a few moments Margot came out of the bedroom nude, and the fire played on her skin.

“I forgot my pajamas,” she said.

My eyes rolled over her hungrily. Her body was long, her breasts perfect and round. She had the light traces of a suntan marking out a bikini line. I took her into my arms. We went to bed and made love all night.

We were not apart much after that evening. I was deployed often, but Margot was always there when I got back, always droll, always unimpressed with the SEAL Team bullshit. And always her body was mine, and she would sleep in my arms, warm in my arms, and I started slowly and inexorably to need her in my life.

I am sorry to say that I wish I had been able to love her better.

I
N THE EARLY
1980s, Puerto Lempira, Honduras, was a settlement of about five hundred people and half as many chickens. The lempira is the national currency of Honduras, and the name of the town was a bit of wishful thinking. Hard currency is in scarce supply in eastern Honduras.

The town is perched on a wisp of swampland jutting into Laguna de Caratasca, a broad, shallow bay on the Mosquito Coast. Puerto Lempira’s citizens eked a precarious living from the fish of the Caribbean Sea and a handful of skinny cattle that wandered the dirt streets. The place was remarkable only for its small discotheque, the sole nightspot for a hundred kilometers. Plunked down in the maw of poverty was a joint that had frozen margaritas, a five-hundred-watt sound system, and a lighted
Saturday Night Fever
dance floor—all powered by a ten-horsepower portable generator.

La vida loca,
writ large.

Puerto Lempira is the capital of the Honduran province, or
departmento,
of Gracias a Dios. Bordered to the south by the Coco River and Nicaragua, the
departmento
comprises the easternmost section of the country. It is the only Honduran provincial seat not connected to the rest of the nation by road. The sole land access is a rude dirt track meandering southwest to the town of Ausabila, on the border with El Salvador. No roads link Puerto Lempira, directly or indirectly, with the capital of Tegucigalpa over two hundred miles to the west.

Puerto Lempira’s isolation from the rest of the nation is extreme. The Mosquito Coast is an almost wholly undeveloped stretch of mangrove spreading southeast to Cabo Gracias a Dios. Nearly everything, and everybody, comes and goes by boat. There was a dirt airstrip just outside of town, but back then the arrival of an airplane was an event of almost biblical proportion. Near the airfield stood a two-story cinder-block building painted in the national colors, powder blue and white. The building, without doors or windows, was the home of a company of Honduran infantry and the seat of government. Sorry as it may have been, in 1982, Puerto Lempira was about to become a very important place.

Two years before, the revolution had triumphed in Nicaragua. A handful of opposition groups, dominated by the Sandinista National Liberation Front, had toppled the U.S.-backed dictator, Anastasio Samosa. After Samosa’s fall and exile, land was redistributed, the banks were nationalized, and education and health care were improved. But the people of Nicaragua had traded one despot for another.