Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL (33 page)

I took cover in the rifle pits attached to Rancho Deluxe. Doc was sitting in the bottom of the hole, leisurely shaking Tabasco onto a dehydrated pork patty. He was eating it dry, without water, crunching on it like a candy bar.

“Getting a little hot out there?” he asked, continuing to munch the freeze-dried pig rectangle. Doc was utterly unruffled, like he always was. As though it were perfectly appropriate to be ducking machine-gun fire at dinner.

“I’m gonna see if I can get a shot at the snipers,” I said.

“Waste of time,” Doc answered. We’d been shot at so much recently that tonight’s shenanigans hardly rated a response. “The marines aren’t gonna want you to start a war,” Doc said.

“It’s already a war, Doc,” I answered.

“It’s just fucking Wallys. They’ll mellow out when the sun goes down.”

He was right, but I was no longer in a peacekeeping mood.

“I’m bored. I’m gonna try,” I said.

Doc continued to chew. “Nothing too heroic,
Diawi,
” he said.

I ducked into the bunker to get my CAR-15. The rest of Delta and Charlie were sprawled on their cots, reading or sleeping. Another burst of fire skipped over the top of the bunker and banged into the vehicle barricade with the crisp sound of hammer strikes. No one even looked up. In the bunker, the guys were as blasé as if this were a thunderstorm.

Cheese peered at me from over the top of a comic book about naked vampire chicks. “You want some help, Uncle Chuck?” he asked casually, as if I were carrying two bags of groceries.

Since the extraction on the corniche, the platoon had taken to calling me “Uncle”: Frank was the old man; I was the old man’s kid brother. With the exception of Doc, Stan, and Tim, none of the platoon was older than twenty-two. I was twenty-six, and I was an uncle.

“You want to see if we can shut that guy up?” I asked.

“Sure,” Cheese said, “I’m game.”

He got his rifle and combat vest as I took down a pair of binoculars hanging from a nail over my rack. I grabbed the poodle shooter, a clip-on plastic bipod, and my shooting vest.

We waited for a lull and ran to the machine-gun position at left flank. Crouching against the side of the emplacement were the marine shore party OIC, a nice guy named Leo, and an army warrant officer who was trying to get to some other position, Charlie battery, I think. He was forced to remain here when the position went to Condition One. There were others about, sprawled against low cover, strangely inhuman shapes in helmets and Kevlar armor.

Cheese and I took cover, shifting our legs awkwardly, lazily trying to keep our weapons from touching the dirt.

“What the hell’s going on?” Leo asked.

“I thought you knew,” I said.

Leo spit a wad of tobacco. “It looks like Wally’s between the runway and Khomeiniville.” He pushed back his helmet with a thumb. “I told Battalion we were taking direct fire. We have permission to engage.”

That was mighty nice of them, I thought.

Two marines sprawled behind the M-60 in the pillbox, and maybe half a dozen more marines were aiming across the open stretch of beach toward Khomeiniville. No one was firing.

“Why haven’t you gone hot?” I asked.

“I can’t see the shooters. I’ve been calling ‘no joy,’ and Battalion said the LAF is going to send somebody to handle it.”

“Who are they gonna send,” Cheese sneered, “Batman and Robin?”

I lifted my binoculars and peered through the rifle slit. I saw only a jumble of houses. Leo told his radio operator to find out if Alpha Company was shooting. Some of the weapons we heard were American-made, M-60s and 40-millimeter grenade launchers, but these were also used by the bad guys, so it wasn’t possible to really tell. Long bursts of machine-gun fire passed over our heads and spattered the pavement behind us. We all tried to look cool as we kept down.

After about five minutes there had been no answer from Alpha Company, and Leo peered for a brief second over the top of the bunker. “Not enough fire for Alpha Company.” He spit again. “They’ve been taking a lot of shit lately. If they were under orders to return fire, they’d be raising hell.”

I agreed, but I didn’t feel like looking over the top of the bunker to prove it to myself.

“Somebody’s raising hell,” the warrant officer said.

There came the sudden whistling of falling artillery, then nothing. We had time only to screw up our faces in anticipation of the impact.

“They miss?” the warrant officer asked.

“They suck,” Cheese answered.

“I hate that sound,” I said.

In an earnest and perturbed way, Leo said, “Fuck these people.”

The sun was slipping down. We were losing the light. I put my binoculars on the jumble of houses, scanning carefully. I saw nothing. Leo got on a field telephone to Battalion and told them he was still taking sporadic fire but was unable to pinpoint the source. We spoke about guard rotation, placing additional men, his and mine, on the perimeter that night.

A runner came panting up and dived into the bunker. “Sir, there’s a whole mess of troops on the highway south of right flank,” he puffed.

“Bad guys?”

“We don’t know who they are.”

Fucking brilliant, I thought. We’re being surrounded.

“Well, that’s it,” Leo said, brushing the dirt off his shirtfront. “I’ll go take a look.” He crouched to his feet and prepared to leave.

“I’m going to stay here,” I said. “You mind if we take a crack at the machine gun?”

“Your guys?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“How many?” Leo looked concerned.

I smiled. “Afraid we’re gonna wake the neighbors?”

“Fuck the neighbors,” he said. “Do me a favor. Let me know if you’re gonna fire any antiarmor stuff.”

“Nothing nuclear, I promise. Just me and Cheese,” I said. I didn’t need his permission to engage, but we were neighbors, and seeking a consensus was considered polite.

“Knock yourself out,” Leo said. He waited for a lull, then ran back to the pillbox at right flank. His marines followed.

Cheese and I snuggled down into the bunker. I handed him the bipod. He clipped it to the gas tube of his M-14 and steadied it against the sandbagged rampart. I laid my CAR-15 next to it and scanned with the binoculars as Cheese settled in behind his rifle. Small arms and artillery continued to pass overhead. In the still evening, the bullets and shells sounded exactly like the war movies I had seen as a kid. The sun was almost completely submerged in the Med. The sky at zenith was becoming a deep shade of cobalt, the horizon powder blue and dappled with clouds turning orange.

Half a dozen bullets and a couple of tracers hit the side of our pillbox. Half a second later came the sound of the weapon, a rattling echo out of Khomeiniville. It was probably an RPK machine gun.

“I can’t see shit,” Cheese said, sighting down his rifle.

I couldn’t see anything, either. The snipers were getting better. When we first arrived, Khomeini cowboys would hang out of windows or shoot from backlit rooms. These operational procedures did not lengthen their careers as snipers. Darwinism functioned, and soon the snipers who remained learned to stay in shadow and fire three or four feet back from the window.

Actually, it was a stretch to call these guys snipers. My friends in the British Special Air Service had told me about monthlong countersniper operations against the IRA in Belfast. SAS marksmen would be smuggled into buildings in steamer trunks and spend a week drilling a hole out under the eaves of a building, all the while setting up on an IRA shooter doing the same thing four hundred yards away. A sniper duel. That was craftsmanship. What we had tonight was a booger eater with a machine gun.

“Watch for muzzle flashes,” I said. I kept the binoculars on the row of houses. The sun was down now, but the sky continued luminous. It was nautical twilight and still too bright to use the NVGs. We had fifteen or twenty minutes until dark.

The RPK fired again, missing our sandbags and striking the pavement just short of us. Ricocheting tracers wobbled into the sky, burning out at low altitudes. I hoped the RPK’s muzzle blasts would give him away as the sun slipped lower.

From the Lebanese checkpoint south of the beach, a pickup truck loaded with LAF soldiers screamed past us, heading north with its lights on. There was no way to warn them or tell them to stop. As they headed for Kho-meiniville and the line of houses, I could see troopers charging their weapons in the back of the truck.

“Oh, fuck,” Cheese said.

When the truck was two hundred meters north, the RPK opened fire. Taillights flared, wavered, and were extinguished. The fire reached a crescendo; the truck had driven into the teeth of an ambush, and rounds skidded down the road in weird whistles. They’d been hammered.

The RPK kept firing long bursts as the soldiers sought cover behind their vehicle. As the tracers poured out of Khomeiniville, the window of the shooting position blinked white, a perfect strobed rectangle against the line of houses.

“I got the shooter,” I said. I kept the binoculars to my eyes. The RPK fired again. “Second row of buildings, middle of the block.”

Cheese had him, too. Pressing his cheek against the stock, Cheese drew a breath and exhaled slowly, then fired a single round. In the bunker, the report of the weapon was a deep, chest-pounding
thud.
His ejected round bounced off the ceiling. SEALs don’t often fight from underground bunkers. As my head pounded with three more shots, I made a mental note: Shooting from pillboxes can give you a migraine.

Cheese fired half a dozen more rounds on semiauto as I watched. The first two struck the building low. The last four made no sparks. They went into the window. For a few seconds there was silence. Then four or five shots rang out from the wrecked LAF truck. There was still someone alive.

The RPK opened up from a different window. He fired maybe twenty rounds in a long burst. As the light continued to fade, his muzzle flashes were plainly visible. The first rounds hit the sand in front of us, and we both ducked. The bullets thumped the bunker, then ripped into the vehicle barricade. Some pretty fair shooting.

I opened the M-203 grenade launcher slung under the foregrip of my rifle, slid out the beehive round, and dropped it into the cargo pocket on my cammies. From my vest I took out an HE/DP round. “How far do you think it is to the houses?”

“Too far for forty mike-mike,” Cheese said.

The max range of the grenade launcher was approximately four hundred meters. I figured the house was almost that far. I hoped it was a little closer.

“I thought all you officers played golf,” Cheese said.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“You know, man, estimating range.”

“I don’t play golf,” I said. Another note to self: Join a country club when I get home.

To fire the 203 to maximum range, I’d have to point my weapon up at an angle of approximately 45 degrees, something I couldn’t do from inside the bunker. I locked the round into the tube. Cheese changed magazines, then scrambled out of the pillbox after me. We took cover again outside as another long burst flew over us—tracers, beautiful as they flew over our heads.

I rolled the quadrant sight on the side of my CAR-15, setting it to maximum range. In more ways than one, this was going to be a long shot. Cheese watched me as I snicked the safety forward on the M-203. “Say when,” he said.

We popped over the top of the bunker, Cheese holding his rifle offhand and firing steadily in semiautomatic. I saw the window, pointed the sights, and awkwardly angled the 203 up. I pulled the trigger, and the grenade launcher fired with a hollow, loud
pop.
Cheese ducked back immediately, but I crouched above the bunker to see where the round fell. The grenade lobbed through the air, traveling, incidentally, about as fast as Tiger Woods can hit a golf ball. The light from the sunset made the grenade glow coppery as it flew. I watched the projectile slam into the roof of the sniper’s building. Sparks swarmed from a dirty puff of smoke. Three quarters of a second later, the report came to us:
crack-bang.

“Too high.”

The RPK fired again, this time at the truck. It apparently didn’t occur to Wally that we might be lobbing grenades, and he kept shooting the soldiers pressed low under their vehicle. Tucked behind the bunker, I ejected the spent round and pushed another of the fat 40-millimeter grenades into the launcher.

We popped over the top of the bunker again, Cheese laying down cover while I aimed and shot. The RPK was silent this time, and we watched the grenade slam into the wall to the right of the sniper’s perch. The armor-piercing round blew a fist-sized hole into the cinder blocks. Cheese and I remained standing as we reloaded. I took long, careful aim and squeezed the trigger. Again a deadly copper-colored golf ball sailed through the air. When the grenade was halfway to the houses, the RPK opened up again, right at us. He was shooting fast and high.

I don’t know why, but I just stood there watching as the tracers flew at me. The grenade pitched for the building, and Cheese ducked, like a rational person, but I stood there as the tracers sizzled over my head. I watched the grenade until I lost the small glint of the flying projectile and it found impact. This time it passed through the black space of the window and detonated inside the building. The explosion was muffled by the walls and came to us as a ringing
thud.
Cheese and I crouched and waited. Nothing. The silence lengthened.

Cheese grinned. “You got him.”

There was no more firing. I watched the LAF soldiers from the truck emerge from cover and pull a dead body from the cab. The sun was down now, and the gathering darkness was made sinister by a translucent haze of dust and fire smoke. Set alight by tracer and grenade fire, one of the buildings was starting to burn.

As we walked back to Rancho Deluxe, a Lebanese APC clanked past us on the highway, heading for the ambushed truck. From the top hatch, one of the crew casually fired a big .50-cal machine gun, aiming at a zip code, just hosing bullets as they closed in on the ambushed vehicle. I turned around and looked north. Jagged white explosions bloomed all at once across the buildings. Explosions like raindrops tore the city block from where the sniper had fired. Half-inch bullets ripping into rooftops windows and stairwells—a cyclone of lead.