Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL

by Pfarrer, Chuck

  The matter was dropped. The Seafox crew would never again disappoint, and Kelly wound up getting a medal for an op we would run in the last weeks of our tour.

  The sun dipped into the sea, and we sat on the bunker drinking warm Heinekens in steel cans and watched as the battle for Khalda continued. The LAF operated from the south end of the airport, spraying everything they had against the hillside town but making no effort to move infantry forward. It was a demonstration of classic Lebanese military technique, risking little and gaining nothing, and I wondered again what the fuck we were doing here.

  “Hey, Mr. Pfarrer, you want some chow?” It was Doug, holding a paper plate.

  “I’ll take another beer,” I said.

  Doug flipped me a warm green can. I pulled the top and drank deeply. The afternoon’s fun was still clinging to me like road buzz. I thought I would feel some sort of elation, but I did not. I didn’t know what I felt. Strangely, maybe even guiltily, I felt nothing.

  Everybody in the profession of arms worries about how he’ll do under fire. I’d managed to extract my force from a superior and well-positioned enemy. I hadn’t lost a man, but I had nearly lost everyone. If Dave hadn’t hijacked the Seafox, it all might have come out very differently.

  I would never again leave myself and my men a single avenue of escape. My feelings pinballed around: guilt, then nothing, then anger at myself. The rush left me. Then I was afraid that I had screwed up. In contact, still thinking myself invincible, I had been almost giddy. That jacked-up, euphoric adrenaline feeling would continue almost until the end of my tour. Later, it would be replaced by a deadly, self-destructive cynicism. But all of that was months away. Now I was tired. Bone, dead, road-kill dog-tired.

  I walked back through the Seabee encampment to Rancho Deluxe. It was a Sunday evening, and there had been a barbecue, hot dogs and hamburgers cooked in halves of fifty-five-gallon oil drums converted to grills, and just as the tables began to empty, the first round came down north of our position. Single explosions were so common that at first no one even paid attention. Five minutes later, another round fell, then another. Small arms and RPGs suddenly erupted to the south, and the show was back on.

  Two rounds hit the water off the beach. One at a distance and the other close, fifty meters off beach center. It was clear that these rounds were being walked in on us, so we moved for the bunkers, pulling on flak jackets over bare chests.

  By eight in the evening nothing else had fallen, though the sounds of small arms continued to drift down from Khalda. Over the radio we heard that there was heavy fighting outside the perimeter in Hooterville. At midnight Boeing 707s of Middle East Airlines began to scream off the runways. The evacuation of MEA equipment always foreshadowed bombardment and closure of the airport.

  I drank another beer, realizing suddenly that I was sunburned and buzzing. We sat atop the bunker, waiting for the inevitable barrage, taking bets on the hour when it would start.

  * * *

  LOSING THE BUBBLE

  IN WAR, BIGGER IS BETTER, and the battleship New Jersey was both. By the end of September she had completed a transatlantic voyage and joined the squadron of warships stationed off the coast. Sixteen-inch guns, armor plate, cruise missiles—she was the big stick in a language that everybody could understand. In a chow line, someone had said to me that bringing New Jersey to Lebanon was like taking a bazooka to a bullfight. It was definitely a weapon that could win, but it wasn’t the right weapon. Looming on the horizon, the ship was an impressive sight—long, lean battle wagon—but it didn’t fool anyone.

  New Jersey’s sixteen-inch guns fired projectiles the size of Volkswagens, two thousand pounds of high explosive at ranges in excess of twenty miles. One such shell could vaporize a city block. Clearly, the devices that turned Pacific islands into lunar landscape were not the weapons of choice in a densely populated city. Firepower and brimstone had brought down the Axis, but were not applicable to the chores of hard-core peacekeeping. Bad guys here did not congregate large bodies of troops, nor did they shell us from static massed-weapon positions. They offered no targets for such a heavy hitter.

  It was not merely a coincidence that when the New Jersey arrived, the tactics of our antagonists underwent a dramatic change. Previously, Druze and Syrian gunners set up on isolated promontories and whaled away when they felt the urge. Now the stakes were higher, and the consequences of establishing a battery in the open were 100 percent lethal. Offshore was a ship that could alter the geography of this country. Overnight, promontory shooting ended and “shoot and scoot” began. In the civilian centers there was safety, there was cover, and in the first part of October, fire came almost exclusively from the most densely populated areas of the city. Indirect fire weapons, mortars and Katyusha rockets, were brought to bear from vacant lots and roofless buildings in the heart of Hooterville. Sixteen-inch shells would take out the mortars, but they would also get everyone else in the neighborhood. Not exactly a transaction in the spirit of peacekeeping. So it went, round after round, in the early autumn.

  Offshore the ships coasted silently, indifferently turning north and south into the fire-support areas and out to sea in unending circles. No one pretended to take comfort in their presence. The ships would never be used the way the grunts wanted—guns fired furiously until their magazines were exhausted, until the Shouf was ablaze and sand was all that was left of this fucking place.

  Ah, fire superiority.

  It was a dream, only a dream, and in hot afternoons the low shapes of the warships trundled about, sometimes close, sometimes hull down on the hazy horizon. It was not possible to look at them without tasting the bitter frustration that was starting to poison our every breath.

  It could eat you up. A kind of cabin fever that arose from confinement in the compounds. Routine became an enemy, and there was nothing, nothing, except the exact same things you did every day at the exact same time. It took possession of will and reason. But we were lucky. We frequently ran operations, recons mostly, and we counted ourselves blessed. Walking patrol at night in the Shouf, even surrounded by six varieties of bad guys, was better than sweating it inside the perimeter.

  It was the shellings that imparted another sensation, a very real, very opposite perception. It was the feeling that welled in your guts when you ran for cover. Ran for your fucking life in this same dusty, well-known, and now boring place. Ran in the endless shriek of falling rounds. Boredom and fear tangled themselves together in the heat of autumn, and in the end, it was boredom that was the most dangerous. A crushing tedium that removed any other emotive state, any other possible feeling. It was boredom that made you forget to close up your body armor. Boredom that made you want to drive the perimeter road. Now almost nothing mattered except having enough insect repellent. The heat continued, endless and maddening.

  Each afternoon Lebanese armor transiting south on the coastal highway drew fire from Khalda. These attacks became so routine that the LAF simply returned fire from the road, stopping on the median strip to allow civilian traffic to pass as they let loose with .50-caliber guns. Showers of red tracers passed up the highway, exploding fiercely into the concrete sidewalls of the town. One-hundred-round bursts were aimed by the white flashes of impact and hit nothing but buildings that had been hit a million times. In this manner, fire was traded over the course of weeks.

  The return fire could shift without warning onto Green Beach. Sometimes the distances were great enough to give us a few seconds’ warning. From the pillbox on left flank, binoculars brought close the damage, low-rise buildings pocked like plague victims, black streaks up their sides from smoldering fires. It ran like this for days on end.

  One afternoon was memorable. There had been pitched firefights all day, and at about five o’clock, the Lebanese APCs withdrew. It was Miller time. Return fire sputtered off and finally stopped. From Hooterville in the northeast, the sounds of other, more distant firefights drifted to us on gusts of favorable wind. Our show seemed to be
over.

  We were not fed dinner because the perimeter remained on Condition One until 1900. On Green Beach the quiet led many to break cover, and tables in the leeside of bunkers filled with men tearing open MREs for dinner. Quite suddenly, dinner ended. A burst of 7.62 machine-gun fire spat from Khomeiniville and traveled the length of the beach. It impacted a tableful of Seabees at the north end. There were wood splinters and ricochets, MRE packets shot out of people’s hands, but incredibly, no one was hit. In the time it took to breathe, small-arms fire redoubled. Discernible were the quick bursts of M-16s and FNs, the staccato bleating of Kalashnikovs.

  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 cal
l 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.