Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL

by Pfarrer, Chuck

  At Green Beach we subsisted on a fairly steady diet of MREs. Only when the chow truck was able to negotiate the perimeter road did we eat hot food. Dining with the French was an enchantment. One afternoon, after conducting a harbor sweep with the Commando Hubert, we were treated to rabbit, haricots verts, green salad, fresh-baked bread, and strawberry crepes. After dinner the corporal chef apologized to me, saying they would have had something better if they’d known we were coming. American MREs consisted of squeeze packets of chicken à la king and worse. French rations looked like they’d been put together by Martha Stewart—one I ate contained canned pâté, potted mushrooms, preserved pears, and a flavor-locked package of Gruyère cheese. In each French ration box were small bottles of red and white wine and a fortifying shot-bottle of cognac. Vive la France.

  One afternoon boat crews Alpha and Charlie combined with members of the Commando Hubert to run an antisniper room-clearance operation against the demolished Holiday Inn downtown. Together with the Legion’s Night Movement Company, we conducted a floor-by-floor search of fifteen stories of smoke-blackened, gutted rooms. We had no contact, but the event was a nail-biter not made any easier by the copious amounts of wine the French had served with lunch.

  EACH NIGHT THE THUD of artillery fire would tumble down from the hills and drift across the outposts by the perimeter road. “Stray rounds,” we were told. Rounds “unintentionally” fired in our direction crashed into the fields around us on a regular basis. Occasionally they fell on Green Beach itself. These were reportedly accidents, the gratuitous leavings of someone else’s fight. It was a common bitch that this didn’t get us hostile-fire pay. Across polished tables in Washington it had been decided that this was not hostile fire; it was somehow more benign, gentle, unintentional. Half a world away, premeditation was figured into the Druze firing solutions.

  Cease-fires came and went, and rounds fell with increasing frequency onto the American positions. Apparently, what occurred beyond the wire was not our concern, and that which fell into our sector was taken in the magnanimous spirit of peacekeeping.

  In a hole along the perimeter, “stray rounds” were perceived in an entirely less forbearing way. There would be a red, silent flash in the hills, a small blink sometimes among many others, but it was a sight that the wise and the living learned quickly to recognize. It meant that a rocket-propelled grenade had been fired, and you watched for the telltale red glow of the traveling round. When the RPG was fired across your field of vision, intended for someone else, it seemed to move slowly, a red dot crawling across the sky, limping like an incredibly deadly fat man toward its target. Even when it was fired directly at you, it was sometimes possible to see it coming. When it was about halfway between the fuckers who shot it and you, the sound of the launch, a kind of bumpfff, would drift down from the hills. If you had seen it fired, there would be time to get down. If you hadn’t seen or heard, there would be only the consuming red blast of its detonation.

  While you’re waiting, sweating the incoming round in the bottom of your emplacement, time seems to dilate. The sound rolls away, and the night twists silence into the beating of your heart and the dry sounds of breathing. Sometimes there was no explosion; sometimes the RPGs hit cement taxiways and skipped off. Sometimes they thumped into dirt embankments and failed to detonate. Then there would be nothing, like a switch had been thrown. Slowly, you would open your eyes. Your senses would assemble themselves in a stammering swirl, and you would realize that you were alive. The hills would then be still, and the dust would drift away into a single thought that seeped into cognition from the lower centers of your brain: stray rounds.

  Before we knew the names of the players, the bad guys were a faceless lot, any of the nearly half-dozen militia organizations fighting against the Lebanese armed forces. When we were fired on, the joke was that the perps were Jake and Abdul, the Druze Brothers. But now, the summer half over, things were different. We knew somebody up there in the hills, a name, and “Wally” was always watching. The head of the Druze militia was Walid Jumblat, and it wasn’t hard to imagine his hypothalamic eyes constantly watching, round like an owl’s, noting our movements, shelling us, shifting fire, hitting us again. It was his game, and we were made to play it.

  The Police song “Every Breath You Take” became something of an anthem for us. When it was played on the local stations or broadcast from the navy mobile detachment station at the airport, people would sing along, changing the words just slightly to fit this very peculiar summer affair:

  Every move you make

  Every shit you take

  The bunkers you create

  Wally’s watching you.

  Oh, can’t you see

  He’s got the RPGs

  And when you hear that sound

  Here comes another round

  Wally’s watching you . . .

  The little white jets of envoys came and went from the airport and, in the Shouf artillery, beat out a tempo. I bought a book of stamps, intending to write anonymous letters to my congressman, but for no reason at all I changed my mind. It became difficult to write at all. My letters from this place were a study in the descent of consciousness into sunstroke. I had written often this summer to Margot, and less often to my parents. To them all, I wrote only about the weather and the bad food, idiotic travelogue. I never mentioned the shellings, our missions, or how fucked up the place was becoming.

  I am certain the inanity of my letters was a tip-off. My dad sent me long missives telling me to be careful, take care of my feet, and not to be afraid to call bullshit on stupid orders. Sage advice that served me well. My mother sent tin cylinders of Danish butter cookies and gift boxes from Hickory Farm: wax-wrapped lumps of cheddar, saltine crackers, and gelatinous canned hams. Normally, these were Christmas gifts you sent to people you didn’t like. In Beirut they were delicacies devoured at once. Margot sent a picture of herself in a blue string bikini, sitting on a towel in Virginia Beach. “Hurry home,” she scribbled on the back. “I have a surprise for you.”

  I had a surprise for her, too, believe me.

  BY MID-AUGUST THE IDF had nearly completed the readjustment of their line. Forces were redeployed from the Shouf, south to the city of Sidon into a long oblique that was to form a new buffer between the borders of Lebanon and Israel. On the promontories above Green Beach, columns of smoke loomed over their burning supply dumps as IDF convoys rolled south. In the city their barracks and depots had all been abandoned. Only armor and a rear guard of infantry remained to cover the withdrawal and to work the checkpoint on the coastal highway.

  The last remaining IDF position occupied a slight hillock two hundred meters south of the Lebanese university in the Shuafat. The Star of David fluttered from a staff atop a two-story building that was surrounded by bunkers, foxholes, tanks, and armored personnel carriers. The marines referred to the Israeli position as “Fort Apache,” and it looked like the sandbag capital of the world.

  During the ponderous course of the IDF pullback, this position became increasingly exposed and removed from the bulk of the contingent. In microcosm it played out the course of things to come: daily snipings, rocket and mortar attacks, car bombs. But the Israeli response to these attacks differed qualitatively from our own—the Israelis got even, right away. When IDF positions took fire, their reaction was always the same: a twenty-five-minute full-on barrage into the neighborhood from which the rounds had come. A chilling tactic had come to replace response in the Israeli military vocabulary: collective punishment. They would hose down the three-square-block area from which the fire had originated. The IDF fire was so intense, so instantaneous and well aimed, that even across the Shouf you seemed to sense the anger in it. These tactics did not engender any sort of community feeling, and as the IDF pulled back from Fort Apache, there was an escalation in exposure to the marine company occupying the grounds of the Lebanese university. The marines would soon inherit the annoyance felt for the previous landlords.

 
The folks back home might have thought that America and Israel were fast allies. Certainly the impression of the Lebanese was that America had intervened to shore up the IDF’s occupation of Beirut. The fact that the marines did nothing to restrain Israeli excess bolstered this impression. In actuality, relations between the marines and the IDF on the ground remained touchy.

  There were several instances of deliberate IDF provocation, of armored vehicles being driven into American-held positions, and more than one marine had pulled a weapon on an Israeli tank commander. We’d had a few run-ins ourselves. For us, it was mostly trouble at vehicle checkpoints, where IDF armor blocked the street and would deign it inconvenient to allow us to pass. Doubling back over roads we had just driven was more than a hassle. It was dangerous. We took to calling the IDF “God’s army” and other things much less complimentary.

  Once, aboard the Seafox, we’d been ordered south to intercept a high-speed contact. The blip turned out to be an Israeli navy patrol boat heading hell-for-leather north into the American AO. We were ordered to deflect him. Provided with courses and speed by U.S.S. John Rodgers, our intercept brought us into contact with an IDFN Dabur-class patrol craft. We did our best to wave him off, but we were soon engaged in a game of bumper boats, the Israeli refusing to slow or fall off until finally, weapons were pointed at each other and we both went to all-stop.

  The Israeli patrol boat was a sixty-footer, bigger than us by half and armed with 20-millimeter cannon. If he opened fire, we’d be shot to pieces in a matter of seconds. I stood on the middle deck of the Seafox with my rifle hanging around my neck. For a moment we bobbed there, guns manned, waiting for someone to blink. Then, from the bridge of the Dabur, the Israeli officer in charge swung a megaphone at us. In clipped English he informed me that if I continued to block his way, he would sink us. I answered that if he proceeded any farther north, he’d be on a very short trip. I gestured over my shoulder. U.S.S. John Rodgers, all three hundred feet of her, was bearing down on us, bow wave brilliant against the blue water. John Rodgers’s five-inch .50-caliber gun was swung to port. She meant business, and so did we.

  “I advise you to withdraw, Captain,” I said.

  The Dabur turned slowly back the way she came. As the Israeli PB motored insolently south, I took some smug comfort in thinking that at least around here, we were still God’s navy.

  Back on the beach, the assignments were varied, but a creeping monotony was digging in. The only antidote to boredom was not giving a shit. I had secreted a surfboard in one of our load-out boxes before we left Virginia. Of my quiver of surfboards it was my primary weapon, a six-ten cherry-red Lopez Lightning Bolt, a rounded pintail shaped by Gerry Lopez himself. I got it ashore in a body bag. I had Bubba, Cheese, and Dave help me carry it off the helicopter on LZ Brown. In a combat zone there is one thing people look at but don’t see, and that is four SEALs carrying a body bag. The “body” was driven down to Green Beach in the back of a deuce-and-a-half truck, and I stashed it in one of our connex boxes outside Rancho Deluxe. The surf is not epic in Lebanon, but sometimes it comes up. Mostly knee-high mush, but I would ride the right-hand break on the south side of the causeway sections. Two of our counterparts in the Commando Hubert were also surfers, and they came down to ride occasionally. The conditions were not always pleasant. To the fundamentalist Islamic mind, there must be something inherently offensive about surfing. One afternoon the waves were up, and I paddled out. Twenty minutes after I got in the water, three Katyusha rockets straddled the beach and the coast highway. I unassed my board and ran back to the bunkers in a crouch. SEALs, Seabees, and beachmasters all cheered me. Two weeks later, it happened again. I was working a short section by the causeways when the shrieking howl came out of the sky. This time the rounds hit the beach close and south, by the Seabees’ tents. As I ran to the bunkers, no one was cheering. I dove into Rancho Deluxe and a close round fell, compressing and rarifying the air around me. As the dirt came down on top of us, I heard one of the Seabees saying, “That shit ain’t funny no more, man.”

  The implication was plain. Surfing provoked Wally. When Wally got pissed, he lobbed rockets. Rockets put holes in the water tankers, shrapnel through tent flaps, and shut off the rounds of the chow truck. I stopped surfing after that.

  Over the summer we provided security for a variety of junketing VIPs. There seemed always to be one or two of them about, undersecretaries of something or another, one-star generals, or, most offensive of all, congressmen. We walked with them, Vuarnet sunglasses covering our eyes and weapons hung around our necks. Sometimes we deployed sniper teams on rooftops overlooking vainglorious press conferences. Most often it was one or two, and on occasion it was a package deal, half a dozen of them in a gaggle, their staff-officer escort herding them through the positions. It was customary to give them cammies while they toured the sector. Ostensibly, it was to reduce their signature, though I doubt a plutocrat in a three-piece suit looked any more appealing in a sniper’s sights than a fat man in camouflaged utilities. They were ludicrous in their immaculate out-of-the-bag BDUs, but they wore them, always. Wore them to be photographed at the outposts, shamelessly posing with men who wore the uniform for a living, marines who often had been ordered to make themselves available.

  When the hand of one congressman was put out, I took it, hot and damp, into my own. Our eyes never met, and as I prepared to say something, the hand was taken from mine and put into Frank’s. The eyes passed over Frank in a like manner, quickly, emptily, and as the politician walked away, I looked down. His new camouflaged trousers had been drawn up and bloused like a trooper’s, but they were tucked into black nylon support stockings and shiny black loafers.

  We provided security for the visit of then vice president George Bush. After he was heloed back out to the flagship, I was in the MSSG building and saw on a public-affairs office bulletin board a freshly developed photograph of the vice president shaking hands with the president of Lebanon, Amin Gemayel. It was a standard propaganda shot, but a cartoon thought bubble had been drawn above the smiling face of President Gemayel. Just like the kids in Hooterville, Gemayel’s thoughts were on American goodies: “Hello,” the thought bubble read, “What’s your name? Give me cocoa.”

  IF THE DAILY HAPPENINGS of the Lebanese civil war could be known up to the second, the precise mission of the multinational peacekeeping force was less well defined. It was written somewhere in a pamphlet entitled “Lebanon,” printed and distributed by the MAU, but the mission statement was vague, buried in page after page of nonsense about the local climate, geography, and agricultural history. A very nebulous line like “to establish a climate in which the Lebanese armed forces may carry out their responsibilities.” Potentially heavy stuff.

  There were maps in the handbook as well, fairy-tale renditions of the positions occupied by the major players. The Druze were shown to occupy a circle five miles in radius that did not even touch Beirut. Other potential hostiles were shown in similarly sterilized posits, and the Lebanese armed forces, the LAF, was gallantly depicted as controlling the capitol. The maps offered up a Lebanon that America wanted to force into being, and had precious little to do with the reality of the war.

  Becoming the mentor of the struggling Lebanese Republic may have been a noble ambition, but it proved eminently shortsighted. This was a multilateral civil war, and although the several protagonists clearly enjoyed fighting one another, they each had separate axes to grind with the existing government. Increasingly, our peacekeeping efforts involved separating everyone and allowing the LAF to attack whomever they wanted. We had undertaken nation building as a half-assed collateral task. America’s pretense of neutrality was slipping away fast. That fig leaf would soon be abandoned outright.

  After weeks of burning supply dumps, the Israelis evacuated their last positions in Beirut on the night of August 28. The Israeli withdrawal created a dangerous vacuum that drew together the major players in a bloody land grab that reverberated through the Shouf. Eve
ryone involved, Druze, Amal, LAF, everybody, seemed to fire at the marines. The shelling raged for days. As the sun lifted over the Shouf, Beirut sweltered under the bleak haze of cordite. In endless gray afternoons, the hills shuddered with the thumping blasts of barrage and counterbarrage.

  The pretense of near-misses was abandoned for the outright bombardment of the airport. Days passed in the brief intervals between shellings. We moved uneasily in the compounds. Standing more than four steps from hard cover became something of a reckless thrill.

  In the bunkers, men sat soaked with sweat, eyes round like the eyes of children in a thunderstorm. They sat for hours, grinding their teeth at the shriek of wind through the tail fins of careening rockets. Close impacts would lift sleeping men six inches off the damp floor, dropping them roughly into the rudest of all possible wake-ups. In the middle of the most accurate barrages, it was impossible not to find this all a horrendously poor joke. Perception changes under fire: Senses become keen; sight, sound, and smell are made infinitely more acute by megalevels of adrenaline and simple fear.

  I had ways of passing the time then, filling my imagination with the names of dogs I might own, plans I had, the cruel things that might be said of old lovers. In these days the sunlight seemed to take on a faint, almost apologetic quality. Light cowered through the doorways and vent holes, a pasty, almost palpable something that reminded me more of luminous mud than sunlight. The shellings seemed an incredibly violent meteorological phenomena, a kind of killer weather. And when it broke, what spilled down upon us was this vaguely repentant sunlight. These are thoughts best comprehended by a mind four days without sleep.