Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL (38 page)

Maybe he was spotting artillery. Maybe he was reconnoitering the beach, and maybe he was just a dipshit, the kind of guileless fuck who actually did drive through an artillery attack just to go catch some fish.

My thumb snicked the safety back from auto and onto safe.

I handed back the papers. “
Écoutez, monsieur, il est très dangereux içi, parce que vous êtes près de la position américaine . . .
We watch,” I said, pointing back toward the beach. “We see cars and people here, and we must check.”

“I am a fisherman only.”

“Peut-être vous êtes,”
I said.

“Can I go?”

I nodded. The man picked up his equipment and began to walk to his car. “Have a nice day,” Rudi said.

It meant nothing. The muzzle of Rudi’s M-60 was still pointed squarely at the fisherman’s belly.

I
T WAS COLD AT NIGHT NOW.
And it seemed to rain often, long and often. In pelting downpours, our bunkers sagged; dirt soaked through and dribbled out of sandbags perforated by shot and shrapnel. Repeated requests by the marine amphibious unit for concrete, timber, and building materials were, incredibly, still being refused by Washington. No permanent defenses were to be erected at BIA. Our bunkers were a scandal, the best of them only what could be lumped together, and many were without overhead cover. Structural components—wood beams, pallets, chunks of beach matting—had to be bartered for, and the better one’s ability to scrounge, the safer one slept. Now even the best of bunkers were melting away in the rain.

It was decided in November that Green Beach was no longer a safe position. I don’t know what “safe” meant, exactly. The tar-barrel and barbed-wire barricade that separated the beach from the Sidon highway was now looked on as wholly unsatisfactory. Charlie battery had been relocated to the sandstone bluff directly behind Green Beach, and it was decided to move the navy landing force components—Seabees, beachmasters, SEALs, and the marine shore party detachment—inland to the ridge. The beach would be manned during the day, but only a guard force was to remain at night.

This meant the bunkers that seven months of hard work had made deeper and sturdier would be abandoned, and the men on the beach would now be quartered on the ridge in GP tents.

It wasn’t the most popular decision of the tour.

The move required that new bunkers be constructed, and now that the rains had begun it was impossible to dig into the soft ground. Any hole deeper than three feet quickly oozed in on itself and healed like living tissue. Protection was going to be sandbags, above ground: the kind of emplacements we called “delta hotels,” or “direct hitters.”

While new bunkers were being layered together, people built sandbag walls around their cots—the ultimate short-timer’s security blanket, but they really provided insufficient cover. Mortar rounds are delicately fused; anything striking the tent roofs would detonate overhead, spraying sleeping men with molten steel. Heavier stuff, Katyushas and artillery, would blow the tent and its contents into rags. No one had to be reminded that a lot of the shit intended for the beach was sighted by impact on the very hill that we had been ordered to move to.

We learned in November that our tour had been extended. The 24th Marine Amphibious Unit had originally been due to rotate out the last week in October, but our relief had been diverted to Grenada. We wobbled on in what we came to call triple overtime. For some the extension was a punishment. There were others, officers and men, who saw the extra time as penance. The dead required an act of contrition, an atonement, an apology. That burden fell on us, the defeated. We had not been vigilant enough, valiant enough, squared away enough, and 240 had died. Guilt drifted down on us like smoke, and there were times that I felt it, too: We were still here because it was what we deserved.

I got on by telling myself that in a couple of weeks, four at the most, it would be over. For the survivors of BIA, it was a strange time, an empty time. For seven months marines had counted days, marked calendars, and dreamed of getting out, but now, with deliverance at hand, it was almost impossible to take joy in going home. It was as though we had all undergone a collective nervous collapse, fire teams, squads, platoons, and companies made into zombies, each of us with a moment seared into our brain, one second out of an entire lifetime that could never be erased. The bombing was something different to each of us. For some it was the thunderclap that heaved into the bunkers, or the shadow of an immense mushroom cloud rising behind the airport terminal. It was the first time you saw silhouettes blown into concrete—the complete stencils of human beings blasted into mist and plastered against the shattered walls of the BLT. It was the terrible minutes you watched a corpsman shoot morphine into a convulsing body, a marine impaled on rebar, trapped and hopeless of rescue.

The survivors kept to themselves; they were quiet and watched out for one another in a manner that was both forlorn and touching. If you sat down to eat, pulling open an MRE in a muddy foxhole, the marine next to you would reach into his pocket and, without a word, toss over a bottle of Tabasco. Marines you’d never met would hand you cigarettes, dips of Copenhagen, water from their canteens—precious things that were yours because you were still alive.

Twenty-four MAU hung together, and the marines who had reinforced us from Camp Lejeune were scrupulously ignored. Their fresh-issue cammies, farmers’ tans, and like-new equipment marked them out from a hundred yards away as cherries, new meat, tourists. And they knew better than to ask about anything. The place freaked them, and the survivors freaked them, too. The veterans, to a man, had eyes that would scare a crow off a phone wire.

Beirut was no longer a piece of landscape but something not of this world—a twitchy mirage, a thing between geography and nightmare. It had become, even before we left it, a memory to be suppressed, jammed into a box lined in lead and buried in a desert somewhere. We knew we could try to ignore it, but the ’Root would not be forgotten. For the rest of our lives, dreams of that Sunday morning would stalk us, relentless and scary as cancer. We had become mute, staggering battle-fatigue cases, lurching on our feet, running on autopilot, too astounded or numb or stubbornly defiant to lie down, curl up, and suck our thumbs. In the last weeks of the tour, we just functioned. Walked post. Did our jobs. There was nothing else to do.

Fifth Platoon continued to run operations across the beach and sprints north of Beirut into Juniyah, where we would link up with LAF air-assault units and patrol inland to the shattered remains of a soccer stadium that we used as a helicopter landing zone. As we covered the LZ, hulking CH-53s would blow in, the aircraft nearly as big as the soccer field itself, and their crews would push off pallets of medical supplies, food, and artillery shells that would be loaded into trucks and hauled up to LAF batteries in the Shouf. In our last missions we were reduced to feeding the machine.

These were easy ops, and we rarely had contact. We took sniper rounds now and again, and we were getting good at shutting them up with forty mike-mike. Fire was returned coolly, deliberately, and we would occasionally ignore the asshole with the rifle and fire at cars parked in front of the sniper’s hiding place. In their love for the automobile, the Lebanese are very much like Californians. In Beirut a man’s car is a statement, and we made statements of our own. At first we’d just shoot out the tires, perforate the windshields, and aim at the door handles. But later, boredom making us vicious, we used 40-millimeter grenades and API rounds to demolish Mercedeses, Fiats, and Ladas. Our vandalism was a pointed disincentive to the people who allowed the gunmen the liberty of their rooftops and balconies. It was hilarious when we first started to do it. And then it wasn’t funny anymore.

Whatever we did to them, it would never be enough.

IN THE HELICOPTER,
the howl of engines and the thump of rotor blades suppressed thought. The flight was a milk run between the ships and Landing Zone Brown at the airport. The passengers were a mixed group heading to fifteen different destinations, to ships, outposts, and the beach. Men stared out the portholes into the sea, infinite gray waves on its surface—fifteen hundred feet below they seemed like scratches on an immense smoothness. Amid the passengers were heaped yellow and red bags of mail, cargo in crates, and three boxes that said
THANK YOU FOR BUYING A PRODUCT MADE IN THE U.S.A.

My CAR-15 rested between my knees, muzzle down. I slumped forward, resting my head on the rifle butt, feeling the clatter of the aircraft through my fingers and temples, delighting in the vibration because it made me numb.

I was flying to U.S.S.
Fort Snelling,
a landing ship dock that had delivered our relief, the Second Platoon of SEAL Team Four. It was eleven in the morning, and I looked forward to lunch aboard the ship.

I was greeted on
Fort Snelling
’s flight deck by Frank Giffland, who’d touched down a moment before. We went to the wardroom and met the officers who would replace us, Mikey Walsh and Don Tollson. Their platoon had been one behind us in the training pipeline. Mikey and Don were friends, and it was good to see them. They were dressed in khakis, a uniform we hadn’t worn in months, and they looked healthy and tanned. The weekend war had agreed with them.

Mikey was a compact, muscular man with a sandy-brown mustache. Don was taller, had a wry sense of humor and the slightly asymmetrical face of a boxer. They were four or five years older than Giff and I, Mikey a lieutenant and Don a JG, and both were Mustangs. Both had served as SEAL platoon members in Vietnam, Mikey as a Stoner gunner for SEAL Team One, and Don, a member of SEAL Team Two. They shared stories from Grenada and were modest about their missions, though they included preinvasion operations, the recon of Pearls Airfield in the hours before the attack, and a fruitless chase to capture East Bloc advisers as they fled the island. The invasion had been dubbed Urgent Fury in the press, but it was known to Team guys as WWG—World War Grenada. Although SEAL Team Six had suffered casualties, Mikey and Don gave us the impression that SEAL Four’s missions had gone well.

When they asked how it was over here, Giff and I said at once, “It sucks.”

No one asked about or mentioned the bombing.

Frank arranged for a helicopter and offered to give Mikey and Don a tour of the area of operations. A storm had blown in. It was rainy, and the cloud deck was low. Don asked if we should put it off until the visibility was better.

“Today’s a good day,” Giff said. “The clouds will hide the helo.”

“Should we bring sidearms?” Mikey asked.

Frank rolled up the chart. “You need to be in full battle kit,” he said quietly.

They caught a Huey, and I was heloed back to
Iwo,
where boat crews Charlie and Delta waited as CSAR contingency. The storm had gotten worse, the sea and sky equally drab shades of gray, and it was raining hard when I jogged from the helicopter and into the island on
Iwo
’s flight deck.

I found the lads below, racked out in a borrowed berthing space, playing cards. The CSAR rotation was our last assignment; after this we would be hauled back to
Portland
and taken off the line. No one expected anything to happen. We had pizza for dinner. The movie was
Tora! Tora! Tora!,
and the evening’s entertainment turned out to be prophetic.

The following morning a marine orderly knocked on my door and informed me that my presence was requested in the Flag Plot. Flag Plot was a combat information center set up for the commodore—his war room. I figured I wasn’t being invited for coffee, and on my way up, I stuck my head into the compartment and told the lads to mount out, draw weapons, and get the gear ready to go.

“You’re fuckin’ kidding me,” Bubba said.

“I hope I am,” I answered.

A week before we were rotated onto
Iwo,
Frank’s boat crews had mounted out to provide combat search and rescue for a large American air strike. Launched from
Dwight D. Eisenhower,
the air raid was supposed to be a multisquadron attack package, Intruders, Corsairs, and Tomcats delivering a six-pack of whoop-ass called an alpha strike. The entire complement of
Eisenhower
’s combat aircraft had been loaded with ordnance, launched, and flown toward Lebanon, ready to pummel the Shouf and Bekaa valley. But the air strike never happened. At the last minute Washington pulled the plug. The planes did a U-turn, dropped their bombs into the sea, and returned to the carrier. This aborted strike was the only retribution the Reagan administration was to attempt for the bombing of the marine barracks. The averted air strike was kept secret for years. Its effect on marine morale can probably be imagined.

When I entered the Flag Plot, the chief of staff informed me that there was going to be a second air strike, not American but French. Our gallant allies were going to cash in some chips. In retaliation for the Legion’s dead, Super Etendards off the aircraft carrier
Marshal Foch
were going to destroy the Hezbollah headquarters and training facilities east of Beirut. The French did not have special operations forces to retrieve downed aircrew and had asked for a SEAL Team to provide search-and-rescue capability.

“When are they going to make the hit?” I asked.

“Two hours,” came the answer.

Once again Giff’s attention to detail would pay off. The CSAR team had already received a warning order and had been briefed previously on the type of mission, general organization, weapons, uniform, and chain of command. The platoon’s standard operating procedures made the short-notice operation possible. As I was working out the communications plan, the boat crews were gearing up, inspecting weapons and equipment; they would be good to go when I returned to the briefing spaces to finalize the orders.

The French plan was audacious. The strike package, six Super Etendards, would launch from
Foch,
group into a tight formation, and head west, away from land and into the Mediterranean. Remaining in formation, the Etendards would drop under a hundred feet, pull a 180-degree turn, and close the coast. The target was to be approached from the north, the Etendards remaining in formation and flying “nap of the earth,” or treetop level—make that
goat-
top level—flying down canyons and valleys and using terrain, whenever possible, to shield the formation from radar.