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SEALs arrive aboard M/V Cape Mohican during a ship takedown exercise.
U.S. Navy
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BOOK ONE
JOINING
THE
CIRCUS
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THE ’ROOT
TWO SIX-WHEELED armored cars were angled into positions that faced north and south, up and down the Beirut-Sidon highway. Around each, bulldozers had pushed up six-foot piles of debris and dirt to form barriers. The Lebanese crews straddled folding chairs in the small patches of shade afforded by ponchos strung from the main gun of each car’s turret. Some of the soldiers held Belgian-made FN rifles across their laps; other weapons leaned against the tires or simply lay in the dirt at the soldiers’ feet.
All day they watched the flow of traffic down to Sidon. Trucks, cars, and buses in an endless stream between the capital and Lebanon’s second largest city. Sometimes for hours on end the soldiers would do nothing but breathe back the stale dust and wave flies away from their faces.
That was sometimes. Now and again one of the soldiers would step into the road, shoulder his weapon at the windshield of an oncoming car, and wave it over to the side of the road next to the checkpoint. Sometimes they would open the vehicle’s trunk, yank out the seats, and feel up the passengers.
Sometimes a little money changed hands, baksheesh, and the car would be allowed on its way without the indignity of a search. When you passed their position in an American jeep, they would bid you on your way in the dullest manner imaginable. Other times Lebanese soldiers would flash peace signs and call, “Hello! U.S.A. good.” On the radio antenna of the vehicle, the Lebanese flag would hang absolutely limp in the hot afternoon. It always seemed to me the sorriest and most wrung-out flag in the whole world.
Lebanon is the most beautiful and fucked-up place I have ever been. For an idea of sample geography and climate, imagine La Jolla or maybe Capri. On much of the coast, mountains plunge directly into Homer’s wine-dark sea. In winter, the mountains above the city wear a dusting of snow. The land is handsome, mountainous, and fertile. Beirut has been called the Paris of the Middle East, an epithet you can almost still believe.
The city itself is perched on a low sandstone bluff sticking like a thumb into the eastern Mediterranean. Loomed over by the Shouf Mountains, it spills away in jagged clumps to the foothills inland, and south to the camps. Beirut’s much-fought-over airport lies on a sprawling level stretch south of downtown, runways arrayed in a giant X. Around the tarmac are scattered garbage dumps, refugee camps, and teeming slums.
It was not just war that gripped Lebanon but a vicious, sectarian civil war. To be honest, to this day I have no goddamn idea what the United States of America was doing in Lebanon. It was absolute folly to think for even an instant that we would somehow do any good.
More marines would die in Beirut than at Khe Sanh. By the end of my tour, what was left of the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit (MAU) would be crushed, humiliated, and hunkered in rat-infested bunkers. Snipers would fire on anyone, anywhere, within the American positions. Twenty-four MAU was sent into half a war—the wrong half—the part that involved holding a piece of flatland against enemies with high ground and artillery to spare.
This was peacekeeping, Lebanese-style.
Almost wholly ignored by the press back home, the marines, Seabees, and sailors of 24 MAU would endure almost seven months of snipers, car bombings, rockets, mortars, and artillery attacks. These marines and sailors would sustain America’s most shameful military defeat since Pearl Harbor, the massive truck bomb that was to destroy the battalion landing team headquarters at Beirut International Airport. In one dreadful instant on an October morning, 243 men would be blown into very small pieces.
At the beginning of my tour in May 1983, that terrible Sunday morning was six months away. I have been warned against characterizing world affairs as they relate to my story. That warning is especially cogent when talking about Lebanon, whose politics are deadly, convoluted, and probably incomprehensible to an American mind. My own world politics were then coldly neutral. I was a commando. Naval special warfare was my profession. When ordered to accomplish a mission, I would plan, give my opinions on the merits of the tactical arrangements, then carry out my assignment. I cared for the safety of my men, my chances of success, and little else. SEALs are operators. Not policy makers.
We all knew our operations had political ramifications. War is politics. Our missions didn’t just contribute to foreign policy; sometimes they were foreign policy. We were all volunteers: If I was given an operation I did not want to carry out for reasons of ethics or personal safety, I could quit. We all could.
When we first received orders to Beirut, I thought only: Well, at least we’ll get some work. I could have no idea how much work we would actually get. Civil war is an almost congenital problem for Lebanon. If you were trying to design a petri dish to incubate a national self-destruction toxin, you couldn’t do better than Lebanon. The country is a lot like the cartoon character Jessica Rabbit: She’s not bad, really, she was just drawn that way.
After World War I the Ottoman Empire’s possessions were carved up by the victorious allies. The area that now comprises Lebanon and Syria fell into the possession of France. The present-day Republic of Lebanon was cobbled together from the region’s two dominant religious groups, Mar-onite Christians and Sunni Muslims. The Christians were concentrated in an area around Mount Lebanon, a bastion they shared with the Druze, a mysterious sect of Islam whose religious beliefs are a closely held secret. Sunni Muslims predominated in the coastal cities, Sidon, Tyre, Tripoli, and Beirut. A minority of Shiite Muslims were sprinkled in the countryside. Of the religious groups, the Christians and Sunnis tended to dominate economically.
By 1920 France had established a Greater Lebanon. Within this gerrymandered territory, Maronites comprised a little over 51 percent of the population. That was fine with France and fine with the Lebanese Christians. It is fair to say that the Shiites and Sunnis had been more or less dragooned into this artificial nation. Muslim allegiance and interest more naturally lay in a merger with Syria.
When France capitulated in World War II, Lebanon was controlled by the Vichy French government. A Free French and British force invaded unopposed in July 1941 and declared Lebanon an independent republic. As Europe burned, nobody paid much attention to Lebanon.
A series of political compromises eventually led to an agreement called the National Pact. I have read that this pact, a founding principle of the Lebanese nation, was never even written down. In purest measure, the pact was a political giveaway. In exchange for certain prerequisites, the Maronites would allow Lebanon independence from France and would acquiesce to the concept that Lebanon was an Arab country. To make sure Christians stayed on top, a 1930s census was used to draw up representative districts, resulting in a permanent Christian majority in parliament. It was further agreed that the president of the republic would always be a Maronite; the prime minister would be a Sunni; and the speaker of the parliament would be a Shiite.
This arrangement worked until 1958, when shifting census numbers made Christian dominance no longer demographically viable. In May 1958, opposition to President Camille Chamoun led to riots in Tripoli and Beirut. Chamoun appealed for western military intervention, and U.S. Marines landed for the first time in July 1958. Chamoun left office, and a shaky peace returned. U.S. forces were withdrawn in the autumn. America’s first intervention in Lebanese affairs had come cheaply. The second intervention would cost us dearly.
Lebanon sat out the 1967 Arab-Israeli war but increasingly became an unwilling haven for the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Israel complained that Lebanon made no attempt to stop attacks launched from within its territory. In 1968 the Israeli defense forces (IDF) began a string of reprisals, air strikes, and incursions into Lebanon. These attacks have continued to the present day.
In 1970 and ’71, the PLO was routed from Jordan afte
r a bloody series of clashes with the Jordanian army. Large numbers of PLO members fled into Beirut and southern Lebanon. The guests quietly set about taking over. Tens of thousands of refugees filled camps around Beirut and other cities. PLO militias and splinter groups abounded. They opened offices and bought apartment buildings. PLO members manned roadblocks and shook down passing motorists. There was little the Lebanese could do.
Lebanon wisely declined participation in the second Arab-Israeli war—the Yom Kippur shindig—in 1973. During and after that conflict, the PLO operated freely from southern Lebanon. Again the Lebanese army made little effort to curtail PLO operations. In fact, the government in Beirut was less in control of its own territory. No one was in charge. Christians, Shiites, Sunnis, and Druze formed militias, and fiefdoms spread through the country. The rule of law bowed down to the Kalashnikov.
Civil war erupted again in 1975. Tragically, an estimated hundred thousand Lebanese became casualties, and hostilities ended only when a Syrian force invaded in 1976, halting Palestinian, Muslim, and Christian forces. For a while. The conflict resumed. This time think Apocalypse Now. The world watched in horror as a modern nation devoured itself.
Throughout 1981, Christian militias continued to battle the Syrian army. In retaliation for continued PLO attacks, the Israeli air force pummeled Beirut at will. The country was in ruin. Lebanon, as a sovereign state, had ceased to exist. Parts of Beirut began to resemble the surface of the moon.
In June 1982, in an operation called Peace for Galilee, the Israeli army invaded, ostensibly to rid the southern section of Lebanon of pesky individuals prone to lobbing mortars and Katyusha rockets at the towns and kibbutzim of northern Israel. The IDF rolled up the coast, swatting aside the Lebanese army, the PLO, and whatever Hezbollah, Syrian, or Druze forces decided to show their faces. In a matter of days, the Israelis occupied the southern suburbs of Beirut.
Yasser Arafat and what was left of the PLO cowered in the cellars of West Beirut, cornered. It is probably true that Yasser Arafat needs Israel, and Israel needs the PLO. For whatever reason, the decision was made to let Arafat and a large portion of the PLO escape. Under the supervision of a multinational force comprised of U.S. and European troops, five thousand Palestinian fighters boarded ferries and evacuated to Cyprus. The multinational force withdrew. A detachment of Navy SEALs personally saw to the security of Arafat as he passed out of Lebanon and onto Cyprus. The PLO hauled ass. The Israelis stayed and would continue to occupy parts of Lebanon until 2000.
Through this all, the Christians held on to the presidency of Lebanon. In August 1982, Bashir Gemayel was elected president. He was killed three weeks later by a car bomb that took out an entire city block.
Following his death, Christian Phalangist militiamen crossed Israeli-occupied territory in South Beirut and entered the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatilla. More than a thousand men, women, and children were killed in an orgy of destruction. The Israelis watched the murderers come, and then they watched them go. If the Israelis were not accomplices, they were at least cheerleaders. International condemnation fell on Israel’s then minister of defense, Ariel Sharon.
The condemnation faded. The martyrs of Sabra and Chatilla were mostly forgotten. The bodies were bulldozed into a dump north of the airport, and Bashir Gemayel’s brother, Amin, was elected president on September 21, 1982.
Another multinational force, this one composed of U.S. Marines, British army, French legionnaires, and Italian soldiers, landed. The marines dug in at the airport and along a stretch of beach south of downtown. The British took a section in the foothills. Italian marines from the San Marco battalion and a detachment of French legionnaires occupied parts of West Beirut. In the West’s eyes, this NATO force was intended to provide stability. In the Arabs’ view, the infidels were obviously intended to support a continued Israeli occupation.
Then, in April 1983, the American embassy in Beirut was truck-bombed. Americans started dying. The players in this free-for-all began to choose sides relative to the presence of United States Marines at the airport.
Uncle Sam’s hand was being dealt, and he didn’t even know it.
The United States brokered a treaty with Gemayel and Israel in May 1983. The compact stipulated the withdrawal of all foreign troops. Having retreated to the Bekaa valley and the mountains above Beirut, Syria rejected the peace agreement. The Syrians knew the Israelis were not about to fight uphill to throw them out. So it sat: Israel eyeballing Syria, Syria eyeballing Lebanon, Lebanon at the mercy of its own militias.
In May 1983 Fifth Platoon of SEAL Team Four was delivered into this mess by U.S.S. Portland, a landing ship, dock—a big troop-carrying amphib. The trip across the pond was uneventful. Aboard Portland, it was just us, the spec-war detachment, and about three hundred marines, mostly headquarters elements of the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit.
Two days into the passage, we got a dose of real navy. Portland’s captain was a screamer, a martinet and petty tyrant named Zimanski. Captain Zimanski’s principal hobby, besides sleeping in his chair on the bridge, seemed to be dressing down his officers at meals. The wardroom on a warship is supposed to be a place of sanctity. Manuals on etiquette specifically caution junior officers against discussing work, politics, or religion during meals. It’s often said that a ship’s wardroom is the officers’ living room. Not so on “Sweet Pea.” Zimanski had no politics other than self-interest, and his religion was himself. That left work.
To the teeth-grinding embarrassment of the entire wardroom, Zimanski would begin by lambasting the ship’s executive officer. No punches were spared, and every meal seemed to erode the man’s authority and respect. The XO of a warship is next to God in the chain of command. All the poor man could do between bites was sit there and take it. Zimanski ordered his officers to be present for all meals, and he often sent the messenger of the watch to retrieve skulkers who tried to miss meals when not actually on watch. After demolishing the XO, Zimanski would switch fire onto the operations officer, the chief engineer, the first lieutenant, and so on, all around the table, until he had chewed out every single officer. This went on meal after meal. The only officers spared the ritual were the SEALs and the marines. As embarked troops and not ship’s company, we fell outside the captain’s ambit. That did not stop him, however, from offering opinions.
Frank Giffland and I took to flying to Iwo Jima whenever possible and eating as much as we could on the mess decks with our guys. Two things have to happen in a bully-victim dynamic: One person has to play the bully, and the other person has to volunteer to play the victim. We weren’t Zimanski’s victims, and that was going to make for an interesting cruise. Our equipment, boats, minisub, and heavy weapons were to be stored aboard Portland, so we would have to thrash out some sort of working relationship.
Fifth Platoon had been assigned to Mediterranean Amphibious Ready Group (MARG) 2-83. Our wire diagram connected us to the commodore of Amphibious Squadron 8. In fact, as SEALs, we were a “theater” asset. That meant we could be, and would be, called upon by the EURCOM (European Command) commander in chief to conduct special assignments.
Afloat, we were navy, working for the commodore. Ashore, operating in a USMC environment, we worked for the commander of the landing force. We did it all. Or basically, we did what we wanted. Our lines of command and accountability were nebulous, a fact all SEALs exploit to full advantage. It was our game to play the commodore off the colonel, and the general off the admiral.
Frank and I deployed with a full platoon, and we were loaded for bear. Two officers, four fully manned boat crews, a chief petty officer, and a first-class leading petty officer. In addition to our four F-470 raiding crafts, we had at our command a Seafox-class patrol boat manned by a detachment of special boat unit sailors.
The Seafox was to be our workhorse. Though it had some serious design flaws, namely sea-keeping, crew comfort, and the location and scope of its weapons suite, the Seafox was fast, had decent range, and was arme
d with .50-cal and M-60 machine guns. It had radar, encrypted radio capability, and an IFF, or identification friend-or-foe system. Made from carbon fiber and radar-absorbing materials, the Seafox was one of the earliest maritime applications of stealth technology. In what was a closely guarded secret at the time, the Seafox was invisible to radar.
Also attached to our unit was a detachment from Underwater Demolition Team Twenty-two. They operated an eight-man wet submarine, an SDV, or SEAL delivery vehicle. This platform gave us great options in the insertion and extraction departments. Four other ships, Austin, El Paso, Harlan County, and Iwo Jima, delivered to Lebanon the remainder of fifteen hundred grunt marines, transport and attack helicopters, amphibious personnel carriers, Seabees, bulldozers, tanks, and artillery. America was back in Lebanon, in a major way, and what we found there was enough to blow your mind.
Into a nation the size of Connecticut were jumbled together several occupying armies, a UN peacekeeping force, five mutually antagonistic Lebanese militias, and the rump section of a PLO rent by mutiny. It was the business of intelligence officers to monitor the activity of these diverse entities, and to that end captains and majors tended maps that showed troop movement and recent terrorist activity.
Snipers, car bombs, mines, and kidnappings were common fare. During the initial part of our deployment, such surprises were reserved mostly for the Israeli army. In the serenity of the headquarters area, these shenanigans were reduced to red tape on topographic maps: real-time items of intelligence to be collected, correlated, and filed.
In the early days of the multinational peacekeeping force, the U.S. occupied the airport and a string of emplacements in Hay es Salaam, the slum surrounding the north end of the runway. Fifth Platoon came ashore with the Seabees and quickly looked for a place to set up shop. Frank and I took a jeep up to the battalion landing team headquarters, a four-story cement building located 150 yards north of the airport terminal. Several factors recommended this place as our new home. For one thing, it was made of reinforced concrete.
Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL Page 17