Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL (24 page)

SEAL Team Four rigger straddles the deck of an underway nuclear submarine.

U.S. Navy

SEAL swim pair approaches a surface target. Note absence of bubbles. Diving rigs are Draeger LAR-V oxygen rebreathers.

U.S. Navy

Gearing up for a water drop off the coast of Honduras. Rudi (right) and Uncle Chuck trying to look fierce.

Scott Speroni

The author exits an aircraft 30,000 feet above the Sonoran desert. That’s Interstate 10 way down there.

Author’s collection

SEALs conduct VBSS (visit, board, search, and seize) exercise against the U.S.S.
Austin.
Their equipment is typical kit for shipboard CQB. Helicopters are from HCS-2 Redwolf Squadron.

U.S. Navy

The cruise ship
Achille Lauro.

Associated Press

Night-vision equipment photographs a SEAL operator conducting shipboard CQB. Note the MP-5 and the night-vision monocle attached to his helmet.

U.S. Navy

SEALs arrive aboard M/V
Cape Mohican
during a ship takedown exercise.

U.S. Navy

T
WO SIX-WHEELED
armored cars were angled into positions that faced north and south, up and down the Beirut-Sidon highway. Around each, bulldozers had pushed up six-foot piles of debris and dirt to form barriers. The Lebanese crews straddled folding chairs in the small patches of shade afforded by ponchos strung from the main gun of each car’s turret. Some of the soldiers held Belgian-made FN rifles across their laps; other weapons leaned against the tires or simply lay in the dirt at the soldiers’ feet.

All day they watched the flow of traffic down to Sidon. Trucks, cars, and buses in an endless stream between the capital and Lebanon’s second largest city. Sometimes for hours on end the soldiers would do nothing but breathe back the stale dust and wave flies away from their faces.

That was sometimes. Now and again one of the soldiers would step into the road, shoulder his weapon at the windshield of an oncoming car, and wave it over to the side of the road next to the checkpoint. Sometimes they would open the vehicle’s trunk, yank out the seats, and feel up the passengers.

Sometimes a little money changed hands, baksheesh, and the car would be allowed on its way without the indignity of a search. When you passed their position in an American jeep, they would bid you on your way in the dullest manner imaginable. Other times Lebanese soldiers would flash peace signs and call, “Hello! U.S.A. good.” On the radio antenna of the vehicle, the Lebanese flag would hang absolutely limp in the hot afternoon. It always seemed to me the sorriest and most wrung-out flag in the whole world.

Lebanon is the most beautiful and fucked-up place I have ever been. For an idea of sample geography and climate, imagine La Jolla or maybe Capri. On much of the coast, mountains plunge directly into Homer’s wine-dark sea. In winter, the mountains above the city wear a dusting of snow. The land is handsome, mountainous, and fertile. Beirut has been called the Paris of the Middle East, an epithet you can almost still believe.

The city itself is perched on a low sandstone bluff sticking like a thumb into the eastern Mediterranean. Loomed over by the Shouf Mountains, it spills away in jagged clumps to the foothills inland, and south to the camps. Beirut’s much-fought-over airport lies on a sprawling level stretch south of downtown, runways arrayed in a giant X. Around the tarmac are scattered garbage dumps, refugee camps, and teeming slums.

It was not just war that gripped Lebanon but a vicious, sectarian civil war. To be honest, to this day I have no goddamn idea what the United States of America was doing in Lebanon. It was absolute folly to think for even an instant that we would somehow do any good.

More marines would die in Beirut than at Khe Sanh. By the end of my tour, what was left of the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit (MAU) would be crushed, humiliated, and hunkered in rat-infested bunkers. Snipers would fire on anyone, anywhere, within the American positions. Twenty-four MAU was sent into half a war—the wrong half—the part that involved holding a piece of flatland against enemies with high ground and artillery to spare.

This was peacekeeping, Lebanese-style.

Almost wholly ignored by the press back home, the marines, Seabees, and sailors of 24 MAU would endure almost seven months of snipers, car bombings, rockets, mortars, and artillery attacks. These marines and sailors would sustain America’s most shameful military defeat since Pearl Harbor, the massive truck bomb that was to destroy the battalion landing team headquarters at Beirut International Airport. In one dreadful instant on an October morning, 243 men would be blown into very small pieces.

At the beginning of my tour in May 1983, that terrible Sunday morning was six months away. I have been warned against characterizing world affairs as they relate to my story. That warning is especially cogent when talking about Lebanon, whose politics are deadly, convoluted, and probably incomprehensible to an American mind. My own world politics were then coldly neutral. I was a commando. Naval special warfare was my profession. When ordered to accomplish a mission, I would plan, give my opinions on the merits of the tactical arrangements, then carry out my assignment. I cared for the safety of my men, my chances of success, and little else. SEALs are operators. Not policy makers.

We all knew our operations had political ramifications. War
is
politics. Our missions didn’t just contribute to foreign policy; sometimes they
were
foreign policy. We were all volunteers: If I was given an operation I did not want to carry out for reasons of ethics or personal safety, I could quit. We all could.

When we first received orders to Beirut, I thought only: Well, at least we’ll get some work. I could have no idea how much work we would actually get. Civil war is an almost congenital problem for Lebanon. If you were trying to design a petri dish to incubate a national self-destruction toxin, you couldn’t do better than Lebanon. The country is a lot like the cartoon character Jessica Rabbit: She’s not bad, really, she was just drawn that way.

After World War I the Ottoman Empire’s possessions were carved up by the victorious allies. The area that now comprises Lebanon and Syria fell into the possession of France. The present-day Republic of Lebanon was cobbled together from the region’s two dominant religious groups, Mar-onite Christians and Sunni Muslims. The Christians were concentrated in an area around Mount Lebanon, a bastion they shared with the Druze, a mysterious sect of Islam whose religious beliefs are a closely held secret. Sunni Muslims predominated in the coastal cities, Sidon, Tyre, Tripoli, and Beirut. A minority of Shiite Muslims were sprinkled in the countryside. Of the religious groups, the Christians and Sunnis tended to dominate economically.

By 1920 France had established a Greater Lebanon. Within this gerrymandered territory, Maronites comprised a little over 51 percent of the population. That was fine with France and fine with the Lebanese Christians. It is fair to say that the Shiites and Sunnis had been more or less dragooned into this artificial nation. Muslim allegiance and interest more naturally lay in a merger with Syria.