Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL (32 page)

“What the hell are you talking about?” I said.

Dave’s eyes narrowed at Kelly.

“He put a fucking gun to my head!” Kelly screamed, pointing a finger at Dave.

“What happened?”

“He assaulted me.” Kelly continued to yammer, but I cut him off.

“I’m talking to Church,” I said.

Dave’s voice was tight, but he answered quietly, “This son of a bitch refused to go in.”

“Refused to go in where?”

“To get you. We could see you were getting shot at. We could see the water-skier. When Kelly heard you were in contact, he said, ‘They’re SEALs, they can get their own damn selves off the beach.’”

I looked at Kelly, then at the crewmen, still slouched by the guns. “Is that true?”

“He pulled a gun—”

“Answer my goddamn question.”

Kelly didn’t say anything. It was obviously true. The rest of the SEAL squad was now standing on the middle deck, murder in their eyes.

The Seafox crewmen were special boat unit sailors. Not SEALs. This wasn’t sitting too well with the Team guys who’d almost gotten hosed on the landing. I was seeing red, too. Dave still held his pistol, and he was staring at Kelly, but he continued evenly.

“I heard you calling, and shit bag here wouldn’t answer. I told him to man the guns and go in, and he told me to get fucked. It was his boat, he said.”

“So you drew down on him?”

“Yeah.”

“He put the gun in my face!” Kelly shrieked.

“Clamp your fucking cake hole,” I said.

There was a bond between special boat unit sailors and SEALs, or there was supposed to be. SBU crewmen were volunteers; they knew they’d be operating with the SEALs, in harm’s way, and this was the first and only time I’d ever heard of an SBU crew shirking their duty. Special boat unit crew members have distinguished themselves in every theater in which SEALs have operated. This was a frigging disgrace, and I was pissed. I got in Kelly’s face.

“Did you refuse to go in?”

“Look, man, it was hot in there. Our guns couldn’t elevate—”

“I’m not your man, fuck stick. You left us in the breeze.”

“And he assaulted me. I’m bringing charges!”

I exploded. And for the first and only time in my naval career, I grabbed an enlisted man and shoved him. I slammed Kelly against the radar mast. The platoon was shocked. They knew that I had an Irish temper, but they’d never seen me get physical with anybody.

I was at nose-biting distance from Kelly. “Listen to me, you fucking pansy.” My teeth were clenched. “You want to press charges against Church, go ahead. I’m going to press charges against you and this crew. I’m going to arrest you right here, right now, and write you up for cowardice under fire. The penalty for that is death. You got me?” I shoved Kelly to the deck. He didn’t get up. “You want to play sea lawyer, bitch, be my guest.”

Kelly was silent and furious. He was wearing a pistol and looked mad enough to use it. Mad enough, maybe; stupid enough, no.

I continued to lay in to him. “For the record, dick weed, if I’d come out onto this boat and found a bullet in your brain, I’d swear under oath that it came from the beach. You pull chickenshit on us again, and I’ll shoot you myself.”

The lads looked at me with barely concealed smirks.

“Now get us back to the goddamn bunker.”

Kelly went back into the conn and got the boat under way. The remaining crew members slunk below. The lads drifted into the back compartment, leaving me alone. I guess I still looked dangerously pissed.

The Seafox started south. I stood on the deck behind the radar mast. The wind blowing across the deck was cool heaven. I calmed down a little.

My hands were shaking as I peeled off my magazine pouches and my assault vest. My cammie blouse was plastered to my skin with sweat. I reached for my canteen. It was gone. The pouch was empty, ripped open by a bullet or a piece of shrapnel.

The juice was off, and I suddenly felt weak. Dizzy, even.

Dave walked over and handed me his canteen. “Hey, Mr. Pfarrer, I’m sorry.”

“About what?”

Dave nodded down into the conn. “That shit.”

“You did the right thing, Dave.”

His eyes narrowed and I watched him think. The right thing would have been to shoot Kelly’s sorry ass.

“You think he’s gonna press charges?” Dave asked.

“If he does, I’ll take him for a swim.” The implication was a one-way swim. Dave smiled and walked back to the troop compartment.

I poured the water over my head, washing the cement dust and rock chips from my face, neck, and ears. We rounded the peninsula and headed south. I stood alone, holding on to the mast and rolling against the swells until we arrived back at Green Beach.

Later that afternoon Frank’s squad joined us on the beach. I asked to speak to Frank alone, explained the situation, and once again he backed me up. Not just backed me up but made his own points. After we talked, I watched as Frank stormed down the causeway, boarded the Seafox, and jabbed a finger into Kelly for a while. I didn’t hear much. Occasionally words like “duty,” “relieved for cause,” and “court-martial” came up the beach. It was the only time I ever heard Frank raise his voice.

The matter was dropped. The Seafox crew would never again disappoint, and Kelly wound up getting a medal for an op we would run in the last weeks of our tour.

The sun dipped into the sea, and we sat on the bunker drinking warm Heinekens in steel cans and watched as the battle for Khalda continued. The LAF operated from the south end of the airport, spraying everything they had against the hillside town but making no effort to move infantry forward. It was a demonstration of classic Lebanese military technique, risking little and gaining nothing, and I wondered again what the fuck we were doing here.

“Hey, Mr. Pfarrer, you want some chow?” It was Doug, holding a paper plate.

“I’ll take another beer,” I said.

Doug flipped me a warm green can. I pulled the top and drank deeply. The afternoon’s fun was still clinging to me like road buzz. I thought I would feel some sort of elation, but I did not. I didn’t know what I felt. Strangely, maybe even guiltily, I felt nothing.

Everybody in the profession of arms worries about how he’ll do under fire. I’d managed to extract my force from a superior and well-positioned enemy. I hadn’t lost a man, but I had nearly lost everyone. If Dave hadn’t hijacked the Seafox, it all might have come out very differently.

I would never again leave myself and my men a single avenue of escape. My feelings pinballed around: guilt, then nothing, then anger at myself. The rush left me. Then I was afraid that I had screwed up. In contact, still thinking myself invincible, I had been almost giddy. That jacked-up, euphoric adrenaline feeling would continue almost until the end of my tour. Later, it would be replaced by a deadly, self-destructive cynicism. But all of that was months away. Now I was tired. Bone, dead, road-kill dog-tired.

I walked back through the Seabee encampment to Rancho Deluxe. It was a Sunday evening, and there had been a barbecue, hot dogs and hamburgers cooked in halves of fifty-five-gallon oil drums converted to grills, and just as the tables began to empty, the first round came down north of our position. Single explosions were so common that at first no one even paid attention. Five minutes later, another round fell, then another. Small arms and RPGs suddenly erupted to the south, and the show was back on.

Two rounds hit the water off the beach. One at a distance and the other close, fifty meters off beach center. It was clear that these rounds were being walked in on us, so we moved for the bunkers, pulling on flak jackets over bare chests.

By eight in the evening nothing else had fallen, though the sounds of small arms continued to drift down from Khalda. Over the radio we heard that there was heavy fighting outside the perimeter in Hooterville. At midnight Boeing 707s of Middle East Airlines began to scream off the runways. The evacuation of MEA equipment always foreshadowed bombardment and closure of the airport.

I drank another beer, realizing suddenly that I was sunburned and buzzing. We sat atop the bunker, waiting for the inevitable barrage, taking bets on the hour when it would start.

I
N WAR, BIGGER IS BETTER,
and the battleship
New Jersey
was both. By the end of September she had completed a transatlantic voyage and joined the squadron of warships stationed off the coast. Sixteen-inch guns, armor plate, cruise missiles—she was the big stick in a language that everybody could understand. In a chow line, someone had said to me that bringing
New Jersey
to Lebanon was like taking a bazooka to a bullfight. It was definitely a weapon that could win, but it wasn’t the
right
weapon. Looming on the horizon, the ship was an impressive sight—long, lean battle wagon—but it didn’t fool anyone.

New Jersey
’s sixteen-inch guns fired projectiles the size of Volkswagens, two thousand pounds of high explosive at ranges in excess of twenty miles. One such shell could vaporize a city block. Clearly, the devices that turned Pacific islands into lunar landscape were not the weapons of choice in a densely populated city. Firepower and brimstone had brought down the Axis, but were not applicable to the chores of hard-core peacekeeping. Bad guys here did not congregate large bodies of troops, nor did they shell us from static massed-weapon positions. They offered no targets for such a heavy hitter.

It was not merely a coincidence that when the
New Jersey
arrived, the tactics of our antagonists underwent a dramatic change. Previously, Druze and Syrian gunners set up on isolated promontories and whaled away when they felt the urge. Now the stakes were higher, and the consequences of establishing a battery in the open were 100 percent lethal. Offshore was a ship that could alter the geography of this country. Overnight, promontory shooting ended and “shoot and scoot” began. In the civilian centers there was safety, there was cover, and in the first part of October, fire came almost exclusively from the most densely populated areas of the city. Indirect fire weapons, mortars and Katyusha rockets, were brought to bear from vacant lots and roofless buildings in the heart of Hooterville. Sixteen-inch shells would take out the mortars, but they would also get everyone else in the neighborhood. Not exactly a transaction in the spirit of peacekeeping. So it went, round after round, in the early autumn.

Offshore the ships coasted silently, indifferently turning north and south into the fire-support areas and out to sea in unending circles. No one pretended to take comfort in their presence. The ships would never be used the way the grunts wanted—guns fired furiously until their magazines were exhausted, until the Shouf was ablaze and sand was all that was left of this fucking place.

Ah, fire superiority.

It was a dream, only a dream, and in hot afternoons the low shapes of the warships trundled about, sometimes close, sometimes hull down on the hazy horizon. It was not possible to look at them without tasting the bitter frustration that was starting to poison our every breath.

It could eat you up. A kind of cabin fever that arose from confinement in the compounds. Routine became an enemy, and there was nothing, nothing, except the exact same things you did every day at the exact same time. It took possession of will and reason. But we were lucky. We frequently ran operations, recons mostly, and we counted ourselves blessed. Walking patrol at night in the Shouf, even surrounded by six varieties of bad guys, was better than sweating it inside the perimeter.

It was the shellings that imparted another sensation, a very real, very opposite perception. It was the feeling that welled in your guts when you ran for cover. Ran for your fucking life in this same dusty, well-known, and now boring place. Ran in the endless shriek of falling rounds. Boredom and fear tangled themselves together in the heat of autumn, and in the end, it was boredom that was the most dangerous. A crushing tedium that removed any other emotive state, any other possible feeling. It was boredom that made you forget to close up your body armor. Boredom that made you
want
to drive the perimeter road. Now almost nothing mattered except having enough insect repellent. The heat continued, endless and maddening.

Each afternoon Lebanese armor transiting south on the coastal highway drew fire from Khalda. These attacks became so routine that the LAF simply returned fire from the road, stopping on the median strip to allow civilian traffic to pass as they let loose with .50-caliber guns. Showers of red tracers passed up the highway, exploding fiercely into the concrete sidewalls of the town. One-hundred-round bursts were aimed by the white flashes of impact and hit nothing but buildings that had been hit a million times. In this manner, fire was traded over the course of weeks.

The return fire could shift without warning onto Green Beach. Sometimes the distances were great enough to give us a few seconds’ warning. From the pillbox on left flank, binoculars brought close the damage, low-rise buildings pocked like plague victims, black streaks up their sides from smoldering fires. It ran like this for days on end.

One afternoon was memorable. There had been pitched firefights all day, and at about five o’clock, the Lebanese APCs withdrew. It was Miller time. Return fire sputtered off and finally stopped. From Hooterville in the northeast, the sounds of other, more distant firefights drifted to us on gusts of favorable wind. Our show seemed to be over.

We were not fed dinner because the perimeter remained on Condition One until 1900. On Green Beach the quiet led many to break cover, and tables in the leeside of bunkers filled with men tearing open MREs for dinner. Quite suddenly, dinner ended. A burst of 7.62 machine-gun fire spat from Khomeiniville and traveled the length of the beach. It impacted a tableful of Seabees at the north end. There were wood splinters and ricochets, MRE packets shot out of people’s hands, but incredibly, no one was hit. In the time it took to breathe, small-arms fire redoubled. Discernible were the quick bursts of M-16s and FNs, the staccato bleating of Kalashnikovs.