Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL (28 page)

OUR TACTICS EVOLVED
as the summer progressed. As militias coalesced in Hooterville, marine combat posts outside the perimeter came under increasingly frequent attack, and the slums surrounding the Beirut airport became deadly with concealed shooting positions and ambush sites prepared by an ever expanding coterie of bad guys: Druze, PLO, Hezbollah, and Amal. The marine CPs (combat posts) offered fixed targets the militias could fire on when their mood suited. By the end of August these attacks happened several times a week.

A sign was posted at the main entrance to the airport, a blue-and-gold-stenciled piece of plywood autographed by the cast of the television show
Hill Street Blues.
It said:
HEY, BE CAREFUL OUT THERE.
It was right next to the checkpoint where a marine sentry made sure your weapons were
unloaded
before you left the American sector. When we passed the sentries, holding back the charging handles of our weapons to show we were in compliance, they would pass us a look like “You guys are unloaded, right?” I always smiled back as vapidly as I could. I was not about to write a letter to the mother of one of my SEALs, explaining that I was the officer who got her son killed riding around West Beirut with an unloaded rifle. Multinational force regulations to the contrary, our standing orders were for SEALs to show empty at the checkpoints, drive around the first corner, and put one in the chamber. Locked and cocked, fuckin’ A.

Intelligence reports indicated that Hezbollah surveillance posts and bunkers were being built inside houses, making them both difficult to detect and harder to attack. Snipers often engaged marine targets from the windows of occupied buildings, trusting that American peacekeepers would be reluctant to fire back at an apartment block filled with women and children. As the attacks on the CPs picked up, foot patrols were very often curtailed or canceled, and vehicle patrols became the norm. Our routes through town varied; and in unpredictability there was safety.

One of the principal tenants of naval special warfare is that SEALs pick the time and place of combat. We engage the enemy on our terms and in the place of our choosing, or not at all. But this was peacekeeping, and we found ourselves increasingly the hunted, not the hunters. Adhering to the rules of engagement meant we were not free to ply our trade as we wanted, so we maximized what tools we had: surprise, deception, and firepower.

We varied our routes and the time of patrols, daylight and predawn, and moved in convoys of two or three jeeps (not Humvees). Jeeps were everywhere, and heaped with equipment. A dirty American jeep looked pretty much like a dirty Druze jeep.

SEALs are given wide latitude in the selection of weapons and equipment. In short, we use what works, no matter who made it. American weapons, particularly the M-16, have a distinctive outline. When Russian-made AK-47s and RPGs, or rocket-propelled grenades, came into our possession, we carried them on patrol. Packing the weapons of the bad guys was one way to lower our profile in town. Our woodland-pattern cammies were also distinctively Yankee. Instead of out-of-the-bag American uniforms, we often wore a mixture of desert and woodland patterns, blue jeans, and camouflage smocks from Czechoslovakia and East Germany. Our Mad Max outfits were less obvious for being eclectic, and made us look like generic Beiruti militiamen; American flags Velcroed to our shoulders kept us within the Geneva rules governing combatants and uniforms. Arab headdresses rounded out our attire. We wore the black and white Palestinian
kufiyah,
or the red and white Arab
shumagg,
depending on the neighborhood. Most often we wore the cloths tied around our necks or tucked into the collars of our cammie blouses. Occasionally, we wore them in high style, snugged down on our heads with black ropelike Ogal, very T. E. Lawrence. The purpose of the costumes was to buy us time. To anyone bumping into us, we’d look, at least at a distance, like an indigenous patrol. Even a ten-second delay by our enemies was sufficient time for us to react. Sometimes the props and costumes worked, sometimes they did not.

We had flexibility in our selection of weapons, and we generally carried heavy. The ability to lay down a withering counterbarrage, what we called a “base of fire,” was the only tactic that would allow us to extract from an ambush. Each four-man boat crew deployed at least one M-60 machine gun or a Russian-made RPK-squad automatic rifle. We each carried a minimum of ten thirty-round magazines for our M-16s. In addition, my CAR-15 was fitted with an M-203 40-millimeter grenade launcher. The 203 was capable of lobbing HE/DP grenades (high-explosive/dual-purpose fragmentation and antiarmor projectiles) to a range of four hundred yards. I patrolled with a round of “beehive” chambered in my grenade launcher, a specially designed round that turned the 203 into an extremely large shotgun. Instead of buckshot, the beehive round was filled with two hundred finned nails called “fléchettes.” At the press of the trigger, the beehive would deliver a cloud of nails traveling at five hundred feet per second. It could be extremely persuasive at close range.

To designate targets for helicopter gunships, I also carried a magazine containing thirty rounds of red tracer, the color used by NATO forces. It is the wise operator who remembers that tracers work both ways. Thirty red fireballs would clearly indicate what I wanted the gunships to shoot at, and just as plainly the location from which I was shooting. I carried a second magazine filled with green tracer, the preferred color of our enemies. More than once, booger eaters stopped firing when they thought the green tracer flying back at them meant they’d opened up on friends. In addition to our combat loads, we carried radios, aircraft ID panels, smoke, frag and stun grenades, water, and first-aid kits. The weight, all told, amounted to about forty pounds per man.

As ambush attacks and vehicle bombings became more frequent, we relied increasingly on the Seafox and helicopters to insert into and extract from the city. By the last weeks in August, we stopped jeep patrols entirely but continued to visit allied positions, particularly the French.

In the French sector, a battalion of
Legion Etranger
(foreign legionnaires) kept the hammer down. The Legion battalion was comprised mostly of Eastern Europeans, Cambodians, and Vietnamese. There were some Germans, principally escaped East Germans, and at least one American, who translated for us. Their officers were, to a man, Saint Cyr–educated. The discipline of the outfit was strict; the troopers were professional and squared away. The French forces were augmented by a detachment of Commando Hubert, French naval commandos, and we were often the recipients of their gracious hospitality.

At Green Beach we subsisted on a fairly steady diet of MREs. Only when the chow truck was able to negotiate the perimeter road did we eat hot food. Dining with the French was an enchantment. One afternoon, after conducting a harbor sweep with the Commando Hubert, we were treated to rabbit, haricots verts, green salad, fresh-baked bread, and strawberry crepes. After dinner the corporal chef apologized to me, saying they would have had something better if they’d known we were coming. American MREs consisted of squeeze packets of chicken à la king and worse. French rations looked like they’d been put together by Martha Stewart—one I ate contained canned pâté, potted mushrooms, preserved pears, and a flavor-locked package of Gruyère cheese. In each French ration box were small bottles of red and white wine and a fortifying shot-bottle of cognac. Vive la France.

One afternoon boat crews Alpha and Charlie combined with members of the Commando Hubert to run an antisniper room-clearance operation against the demolished Holiday Inn downtown. Together with the Legion’s Night Movement Company, we conducted a floor-by-floor search of fifteen stories of smoke-blackened, gutted rooms. We had no contact, but the event was a nail-biter not made any easier by the copious amounts of wine the French had served with lunch.

EACH NIGHT THE THUD
of artillery fire would tumble down from the hills and drift across the outposts by the perimeter road. “Stray rounds,” we were told. Rounds “unintentionally” fired in our direction crashed into the fields around us on a regular basis. Occasionally they fell on Green Beach itself. These were reportedly accidents, the gratuitous leavings of someone else’s fight. It was a common bitch that this didn’t get us hostile-fire pay. Across polished tables in Washington it had been decided that this was not hostile fire; it was somehow more benign, gentle, unintentional. Half a world away, premeditation was figured into the Druze firing solutions.

Cease-fires came and went, and rounds fell with increasing frequency onto the American positions. Apparently, what occurred beyond the wire was not our concern, and that which fell into our sector was taken in the magnanimous spirit of peacekeeping.

In a hole along the perimeter, “stray rounds” were perceived in an entirely less forbearing way. There would be a red, silent flash in the hills, a small blink sometimes among many others, but it was a sight that the wise and the living learned quickly to recognize. It meant that a rocket-propelled grenade had been fired, and you watched for the telltale red glow of the traveling round. When the RPG was fired across your field of vision, intended for someone else, it seemed to move slowly, a red dot crawling across the sky, limping like an incredibly deadly fat man toward its target. Even when it was fired directly at you, it was sometimes possible to see it coming. When it was about halfway between the fuckers who shot it and you, the sound of the launch, a kind of
bumpfff,
would drift down from the hills. If you had seen it fired, there would be time to get down. If you hadn’t seen or heard, there would be only the consuming red blast of its detonation.

While you’re waiting, sweating the incoming round in the bottom of your emplacement, time seems to dilate. The sound rolls away, and the night twists silence into the beating of your heart and the dry sounds of breathing. Sometimes there was no explosion; sometimes the RPGs hit cement taxiways and skipped off. Sometimes they thumped into dirt embankments and failed to detonate. Then there would be nothing, like a switch had been thrown. Slowly, you would open your eyes. Your senses would assemble themselves in a stammering swirl, and you would realize that you were alive. The hills would then be still, and the dust would drift away into a single thought that seeped into cognition from the lower centers of your brain:
stray rounds.

Before we knew the names of the players, the bad guys were a faceless lot, any of the nearly half-dozen militia organizations fighting against the Lebanese armed forces. When we were fired on, the joke was that the perps were Jake and Abdul, the Druze Brothers. But now, the summer half over, things were different. We knew somebody up there in the hills, a name, and “Wally” was always watching. The head of the Druze militia was Walid Jumblat, and it wasn’t hard to imagine his hypothalamic eyes constantly watching, round like an owl’s, noting our movements, shelling us, shifting fire, hitting us again. It was his game, and we were made to play it.

The Police song “Every Breath You Take” became something of an anthem for us. When it was played on the local stations or broadcast from the navy mobile detachment station at the airport, people would sing along, changing the words just slightly to fit this very peculiar summer affair:

Every move you make

Every shit you take

The bunkers you create

Wally’s watching you.

Oh, can’t you see

He’s got the RPGs

And when you hear that sound

Here comes another round

Wally’s watching you . . .

The little white jets of envoys came and went from the airport and, in the Shouf artillery, beat out a tempo. I bought a book of stamps, intending to write anonymous letters to my congressman, but for no reason at all I changed my mind. It became difficult to write at all. My letters from this place were a study in the descent of consciousness into sunstroke. I had written often this summer to Margot, and less often to my parents. To them all, I wrote only about the weather and the bad food, idiotic travelogue. I never mentioned the shellings, our missions, or how fucked up the place was becoming.

I am certain the inanity of my letters was a tip-off. My dad sent me long missives telling me to be careful, take care of my feet, and not to be afraid to call bullshit on stupid orders. Sage advice that served me well. My mother sent tin cylinders of Danish butter cookies and gift boxes from Hickory Farm: wax-wrapped lumps of cheddar, saltine crackers, and gelatinous canned hams. Normally, these were Christmas gifts you sent to people you didn’t like. In Beirut they were delicacies devoured at once. Margot sent a picture of herself in a blue string bikini, sitting on a towel in Virginia Beach. “Hurry home,” she scribbled on the back. “I have a surprise for you.”

I had a surprise for her, too, believe me.

BY MID-AUGUST THE IDF
had nearly completed the readjustment of their line. Forces were redeployed from the Shouf, south to the city of Sidon into a long oblique that was to form a new buffer between the borders of Lebanon and Israel. On the promontories above Green Beach, columns of smoke loomed over their burning supply dumps as IDF convoys rolled south. In the city their barracks and depots had all been abandoned. Only armor and a rear guard of infantry remained to cover the withdrawal and to work the checkpoint on the coastal highway.

The last remaining IDF position occupied a slight hillock two hundred meters south of the Lebanese university in the Shuafat. The Star of David fluttered from a staff atop a two-story building that was surrounded by bunkers, foxholes, tanks, and armored personnel carriers. The marines referred to the Israeli position as “Fort Apache,” and it looked like the sandbag capital of the world.