Marine reinforcements arrived on the 25th. A Marine sergeant said to us, “Thanks for help. We’re okay here now. Just make sure you watch your asses.”
Sixty-three people died in the bombing, including seventeen Americans, thirty-two Lebanese employees, and fourteen visitors applying for visas to go to the States. Of the Americans killed, eight worked for the CIA. Among them was Station Chief Kenneth Haas and Near East Director Robert Ames, later the subject of the book The Good Spy by Kai Bird.
Investigators learned that the bombing had been carried out by the Hezbollah terrorist group and approved and financed by senior Iranian officials. It was one of the first major suicide attacks in the Middle East.
Sadly, many more would follow, including a much bigger and deadlier explosion at the US Marine Corps barracks in Beirut six months later that would kill 220 Marines from the 1st Battalion, eighteen sailors, and three soldiers—making it the largest single-day death toll of US Marines since the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.
The second bombing would also be the dirty work of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorist group. I watched in trepidation as the Islamic fundamentalism I had seen in Iran spread its religious poison throughout the Middle East.
5
GRENADA
It was two weeks after the US Embassy bombing, and I was with nine of my SF colleagues on a night patrol with twenty members of the Lebanese army. The air was warm and a half-moon hung low in the sky and cast eerie shadows across the landscape. We walked down a street in formation on the western outskirts of Beirut that had been the scene of recent fighting. Lebanese army intel had identified a Hezbollah safe house in the area.
The street was paved and houses were scattered on either side. In the moonlight I saw the scars of bullet holes on many of them. Most looked like they’d been abandoned.
We proceeded in full combat gear, fingers on triggers, muzzles down. SF guys spread to the front, center, left, and right. I was the next to the last in line, scanning left and right.
I saw flashes of discharges from a house to my right, and shouted, “Enemy right! Two o’clock!”
Bullets whizzed past as I went to my belly and sought cover behind one of the few cars parked on the street. Adrenaline slammed into my system. I took some quick deep breaths to remain calm. Tracers flew at us from the direction of the roof, which was flat and made of concrete.
“Enemy on the roof! Return fire!”
My mind quickly calculated that we faced four to six enemy fighters. They were shooting bursts from automatic rifles and single shots. No grenades or rockets, which was good because we wore no armor.
I got up from my belly to my knee, aimed my M16, and squeezed off a flurry of rounds that tore into the lip of the roof. As I went back down to change my mag, an enemy bullet ricocheted off the pavement in front of me and struck me in the knee. It felt like a bee sting.
I wasn’t even sure it was a bullet wound at first. But when I reached down, I felt blood and called to our medic, Patrick, who was fifteen feet to my left. “Patrick, I’m hit!”
The big man scurried over and examined my knee in the moonlight as I cursed my bad luck.
“Calm down, Changiz,” he said. “It’s not bad.”
I’d been trained just like he had to reassure a trauma victim to prevent panic. Hundreds of thoughts coursed through my head. I’ll never walk again. I’ll have to leave the service.
Patrick wrapped bandages tight over my knee without bothering to cut away my uniform. He said, “Wait here. We’ll get you out of here soon.”
I was so focused on the firing that I forgot the pain. I sat with my back against the side of the car with my M16 ready as Lebanese soldiers and guys in my rear kicked in the front door of the house the rounds had come from. As they climbed the steps to the roof, the firing stopped.
Minutes later, our guys returned, breathless. One of my buddies leaned over me.
“You okay, Changiz?”
“Got nicked in the knee. You find anyone?” I asked back.
“Lots of brass casings, that’s all.”
“No people? No blood?”
“Negative. We’re gonna check the rest of the houses on the street. You okay to wait?” he asked.
“Yeah. No problem. Do what you gotta do.”
I dragged myself over to the front of the house and leaned my back against it so I could get a better view of the street. It felt weird sitting there, thinking of my family in California and my father in Iran, wondering what they were doing while I bled onto some unnamed street in Lebanon.
I felt bad for the families who had once lived in the houses, and wondered where they were now.
War fucked up everything. The moon shone an ominous shade of yellow.
My teammates returned. The Lebanese driver backed our APC (armored personnel carrier) up to the house and Patrick and another colleague loaded me in. My knee throbbed, but the pain was bearable.
Back at the base, Patrick cleaned the wound, wrapped it, and gave me a couple shots of penicillin. He said, “It looks like a glancing wound. It’s superficial. You want to see a doc?”
“No. I’ll be fine.”
“You sure, Changiz?”
“Fuck, yeah.”
I spent the next two days at the safe house reading a Robert Ludlum thriller, playing solitaire, and resting. Patrick stopped by each night to check my knee and redress the bandages. He also brought lamb sharwarna sandwiches from a local vendor.
Day three, when he arrived, he found me on my feet doing chores around the house.
When Patrick saw me, he asked, “What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m good to go, man.”
“You sure?” Patrick asked. “Don’t you want to report the injury?”
“Report what?” I answered. “I’m fine.”
By filing a report about the bullet wound I would have been eligible to receive a Purple Heart. Never one to be impressed with medals, ribbons, or ceremonies, I passed. A week later, I was back on night patrol with Lebanese soldiers in a different part of the city. The moon was fuller this time, and no one was shot.
Despite the horrific embassy bombing and getting injured in the knee, I generally enjoyed my time in Beirut and came to admire the joie de vivre of the Lebanese people. Nights when we didn’t patrol, I accompanied friends I’d made among the soldiers and Christian militiamen to clubs and cafés on the western side of town. We were in a war-ravaged city with active fighting, so I expected to find only a few foolish souls out at night, and most of them drowning their sorrows.
What I discovered instead were clubs packed with young men and beautiful women, laughing, dancing, singing, and clapping their hands in unison to the movement of belly dancers. The food and wine were delicious and abundant, and everyone seemed to be having a good time. I enthusiastically joined in.
No one mistook me for an American with my swarthy looks and beard, but I carried a concealed weapon just in case. It was never needed. And no one I encountered in the clubs ever asked if I was Christian or Muslim, Shiite or Sunni—religious distinctions that had inspired the fighting around us.
What did it really matter? Who cared if you considered yourself a Sunni and believed that the first four caliphs were the legitimate successors to the Prophet Muhammad or a Shiite who accepted only the fourth caliph, Ali, as your religious leader? Was this really a disagreement that warranted spilling blood?
And what was wrong with accepting Zarathustra, Jesus Christ, Muhammad, and others as prophets? Didn’t they all preach about the sovereignty of one God and the values of honesty, charity, kindness, forgiveness, humility, and sacrifice?
In 1983, I was still a relatively young man and far from a scholar, but even then it struck me that religion divided people more than it united them.
* * *
June ’83, I was back at Fort Bragg, following a familiar routine—up at 0500 hours, at 0600 report to Information for company head count, then an hour of PT. That usually invol
ved crunches, pull-ups, push-ups, and a biweekly five-mile run with a rucksack through the woods. At 0730 we were back at the barracks to shower and dress, and then we humped to the mess for breakfast—scrambled eggs, hash browns, bacon, coffee. After breakfast we’d break into training sessions based on our MOS (military occupation specialty). I was a Bravo 11 weapons man, so mine could involve advanced weapons school both in the classroom and on the firing range.
Following a noon break for lunch, MOS training continued until 5 P.M. Generally after dinner was free time. I spent mine taking classes in American history, chemistry, and physics at Campbell University so I could earn my BA.
Weekends, I might go out to the movies with friends—Return of the Jedi and Flashdance were some favorites—or lounge at nearby Myrtle Beach, depending on the weather.
After six weeks of the old routine, I was itching to return to the field. The opportunity came in early August, in the worst of the summer heat, when my team, ODA 564, was selected to go to Egypt to participate in a joint US-Egyptian military exercise called Operation Bright Star.
Bright Star was an outgrowth of the historic Camp David Accords signed by Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin after twelve days of secret negotiations organized and moderated by President Jimmy Carter. The accords set forth a political framework for the peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian issue and called for, among other things, the Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula, the normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and Egypt, and a commitment from the United States of several billions of dollars of subsidies to both governments, including money and training to help modernize the Egyptian military. All positive developments in my mind.
Operation Bright Star was conceived of as a biennial training mission to strengthen military ties between the US and Egypt, improve readiness, build key leader engagements, and foster cooperation. The first Bright Star had taken place in 1981.
On a hot afternoon in August our C-141 touched down at Cairo West Military Airport, which had been bombed by the Israelis during the 1967 Six-Day War, when the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) defeated the armed forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and occupied the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank, Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem—thus tripling the area under Israel’s control and building its military prestige.
Israel’s opening air strike of the Six-Day War, known as Operation Moked, launched the morning of June 5, 1967, had crippled Egypt’s air force, destroying eleven air bases and nearly 500 combat aircraft in a matter of hours. We could still see the devastation sixteen years later. The control tower, barracks, and hangars at Cairo West Military Airport lay in ruins.
With no standing buildings to speak of, we slept in bunkers that had been dug parallel to the main runway and lived on sea rations, bottled water, and reconstituted milk. Our mission was to train three squads of Egyptian rangers in the desert heat that generally rose into the mid-90s and sometimes hit the 100s. Joining us was the 2nd Ranger Battalion based at Fort Lewis, Washington, which included jovial Staff Sergeant Joe Campbell, who became my friend.
Our training group amounted to roughly sixty-five Egyptians and forty-five Americans. The Egyptian rangers were a sad-looking corps with plastic and foam helmets, old weapons, and no parachutes. Many of them lacked shoes. Our first order of business was to outfit them with new weapons and equipment and show them how to line up properly for inspection. From the basics we continued through our order of training that concluded with five HALO jumps in the desert.
While we Green Berets ran exercises on the ground, US Navy aircraft did air maneuvers with the Egyptian air force. Overhead passed a strange mélange of US F-4E Phantoms, F-16A Falcons, F-14A Tomcats, A-7D Corsairs, A-6E Intruders, French-made Mirage 5s, Russian MiG-21MF Fishbeds, and Chinese-built Shenyang F-6Cs. It was an impressive visual representation of multinational military cooperation.
Our training included patrols along Egypt’s borders. We’d fly to the location via helicopters and C-130s. Most patrols passed without incident. But one night in late August, two other guys from ODA 564, a dozen 2nd Rangers, and I accompanied the Egyptians on a night patrol along the Libyan border.
As I walked, admiring the spectacular canopy of stars, wondering if one of the tens of thousands of them cast light on a planet that supported some kind of intelligent life-form like ours, I saw muzzle flashes to my left. The commander of the Rangers in front gave the order to take cover and fire back.
The Egyptians took this as an opportunity to empty their mags, and for several minutes an intricate array of tracers arced back and forth. The Ranger commander then gave the order to bound and cover, and we retreated 500 meters. At that point the firing stopped.
When we returned to Cairo West and reported the incident, the commander of 2nd Ranger Battalion was promptly relieved of his duties and sent home.
It struck me as a severe punishment, but no one asked for my opinion. Before we left, we were given two weeks of R&R and the opportunity to board buses to Cairo to take in the sights. Having admired the ancient Egyptian pyramids since I was a kid, I wanted to see everything and followed up my visit to Giza (built around 2,500 B.C.) with trips to multiple tourist destinations in and around Cairo. These included the ancient Khan el-Khalili souq bazaar—which featured everything from spices to gold jewelry to T-shirts and fake Nikes—the Citadel of Saladin, and the Egyptian Museum, where I marveled at the mummies of Hatshepsut, Tuthmosis II, Ramses II, and Seti I, which were more than 3,000 years old.
Aside from the incredible history, I was struck by the poverty I saw on the crowded narrow streets in the old walled sector of the city, where kids in rags, blind and emaciated beggars, bikes, pollution, dust, flies, chickens, goats, and camels all fought for space, and cows were slaughtered and sold out in the open.
Anyone who didn’t appreciate the prosperity we enjoyed in the US needed to see this.
We left in September, but Operation Bright Star grew every year. At its height in October 1999, it involved 70,000 troops from eleven nations, including Kuwait, Germany, Pakistan, UK, Italy, Greece, and France. It was suspended in 2011 because of the political crisis in Egypt.
* * *
I returned to Bragg twenty pounds lighter due to a stomach problem I developed in Cairo. We were given forty-eight hours downtime to clean our weapons and gear. Then each one of us had to file an after-action report, brief our commanders, and meet with the intel folks. Then it was back to our camp at Mott Lake and the shooting range.
In A-teams our year was broken into four three-month cycles. During green cycles we were on standby, ready to deploy on a moment’s notice. In red light cycles things got more relaxed and our duties confined to more mundane tasks like driving trucks, doing guard duty, and supporting training.
The third cycle of 1984, two of us from ODA 564 were chosen to participate in Robin Sage—a nineteen-day exercise conducted four times a year over 4,500 miles of public and private land around Robbins, North Carolina. It was a grueling, unconventional warfare scenario used to evaluate the new class of SF candidates. Considered Phase IV of the Special Forces Qualification “Q” Course, Robin Sage was an opportunity for the candidates to apply the following lessons, which they had learned in previous phases of field and classroom training around ODA’s seven doctrinal mission profiles:
Foreign Internal Defense (FID): Our bread and butter. It involves working with and through indigenous troops to conduct combat operations in war and train allied and friendly forces in times of peace.
Direct Action (DA): Short duration strike actions against enemy troops, sometimes conducted by ODAs unilaterally, but often carried out with indigenous soldiers.
Special Reconnaissance (SR): Strategic intelligence gathering, often carried out behind enemy lines.
Unconventional Warfare (UW): Infiltrating into hostile nations and linking with rebel guerrilla fighters to topple a rogue regime.
Counterterrorism (CT): Usually
working with an indigenous combat unit.
Counter-Proliferation (CP): Preventing terrorist and criminal organizations from obtaining weapons of mass destruction.
Information Operations (IO): Communicating with local populations to let them know who we are and what we’re doing in their environment.
In 1952 Colonel Aaron Bank, known as the father of Special Forces, created Robin Sage to put soldiers in “real-world” scenarios that would test their training in these doctrinal mission profiles and adaptability.
The scenario we participated in involved the training of a mock guerrilla force in a hostile environment overseas. I was chosen to play the guerrilla leader, Chief Bargini, in a fictitious Middle Eastern country. Other guys from 5th Group assumed the roles of members of the guerrilla force. We grew beards, wore jeans and jungle boots, and guarded our camp in the woods from “government” patrols. I spoke only Farsi and tied a bandanna over my head to look more authentic.
At the outset of the exercise, we established a camp deep in the woods. Soon, student ODAs approached us and offered to lend us training and support. They bore gifts of food and supplies and spoke to me through an interpreter. When I asked for money, they explained that they could help us in more important ways.
“How?” I asked.
“We want to help you in your fight against oppression. We can help you gather intelligence, and organize patrols and ambushes. We can assist the villages under your control.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“How many schools do you have?” one of the trainees asked.
I held up six fingers.
“We can supply them with paper and pencils. We can build desks and chairs. Tell us what you need.”
We invited them to sit around the campfire at night, dance with us, and tell stories. By fulfilling simple tasks in the camp, the students started to blend in and gain our trust.
Within a week the SF candidates and we guerrillas were patrolling together. We showed them how to stage different kinds of ambushes and even engaged “government” soldiers, firing blanks and encircling them and taking prisoners. All the time, observers were watching the individual candidates and grading their progress.
Full Battle Rattle Page 7