Cowardice disgusted me because I feared it in myself. I did not hate weakness; I feared it. I feared that I would not be brave enough to lead my men. I was afraid that I would not be gallant enough, or wise enough, or proficient enough to safeguard the lives entrusted to me. My feelings for Stan had to be put aside, and I will tell you honestly that I cared nothing for him. His failings endangered men who daily did their best and better. My feelings for Stan were without even a leaven of pity, but his life had been entrusted to me as well.
There was no reason to woodshed him—Stan was right, Lebanon was no place for a family man. He was of no value to me, our mission, or his mates. The wrong man in the wrong place. We both knew he was simply meat, cannon food, a walking bull’s-eye.
But we all were. All of us equal, all of us dancing on the drumhead together, and he deserved no special treatment because he was afraid.
“Look,” I said. “I’m scared, too. I wake up every day in the bunker same as you. I wonder every day if this is the day I’m gonna get it.”
“I can’t take it anymore,” he said.
“Neither can I.” If Stan expected a pep talk, he wasn’t going to get one. “Fuck the mission,” I said. “Fuck Lebanon and fuck the multinational force. But we’ve got a job to do—just Fifth Platoon. That job is to get through the tour and keep each other alive. We’re gonna do it—together.”
“I’ve done my best,” he said.
“You haven’t done shit,” I said flatly. Stan looked up, and I lowered my voice. “What matters to me is the effect you have on the platoon.”
“I know what they think about me.”
“They pull your weight. They do the things you won’t do or can’t do. And it isn’t right. You want some downtime?” I continued. “Get out from under your rack once in a while. I’m not gonna reward you, take you off the line, because you’re scared.”
Stan blinked at me. “The SDV guys don’t go ashore,” he said. “Why can’t we stage off the ship? Why can’t we just move the platoon back onto the boat?”
He was right. The SDV detachment we’d deployed with was a bunch of athletes. They’d been ashore only twice since we’d been here. They spent their days lifting weights, tinkering with their minisub, and watching movies in their connex box. They lived in air-conditioned comfort ten thousand miles from the eye of the shit storm.
“I’m not in charge of the SDV detachment,” I said.
“I want to talk to Mr. Giffland.” Stan wiped his nose.
“Go ahead.” Then I heard the sound of my own voice, low, quiet, utterly without feeling. Like it was playing somewhere on a transistor radio. “I don’t expect you to lead, Stan. You don’t have it in you. But I expect you to haul your weight. As long as you’re in my squad, you will. You’re going to pitch in, you’re going to quit bitching, you’re going to quit second-guessing my orders and start hauling your load, or I’ll make sure you’re on every patrol that leaves the wire, every antisniper detail, every hot medevac, every shitty job I can think of.”
Stan stood.
“The helo will be on the flight deck in two hours,” I said. “You’re gonna be on it.”
Stan walked out. I don’t know if he ever spoke to Frank. I didn’t mention our talk; I didn’t have to. Frank was a good enough officer to know that Stan was losing the bubble. The problem was in my squad, and I was left to handle it myself.
Stan remained in the platoon, and he stayed in the rotation, doing his time ashore just like the rest of us. He did so quietly, ostracized, disregarded, and ignored by his mates.
I have no idea what courage is: worth through valor, duty over self-preservation—don’t ask me. I don’t know where it comes from, I don’t know why some people have it and some do not. I do not know why it deserts people suddenly; I have never been able to figure out how some people find it when it is needed most. Stan had lost whatever small amount he brought to Lebanon, and I could understand why. This place was insane. It was criminal, a grotesque lampoon of a war in all things except cruel death, and I hated it.
I knew that I could have been more forgiving to a man who had simply been broken. But I was not because I was slowly being broken myself. There was certainly a better way for me to have handled this. I was not then the person I am now. I now think that I was callously short with Stan, peremptory in my evaluation, and smug in judgment. Inside, I was as beaten up as he was.
We feared different things, showed our fear in different ways. Had different nightmares. But we were both afraid. I was too strung out, too pissed off, and too cynical to say the right things. Maybe there was no right thing to say.
The platoon was what I cared about, more than my own life. Stan was a part of the platoon, but he was the weak part, the part that could make it all fail, make us sink, make us all get sucked into caution, foreboding, mistakes, and death. For that I despised him. Not because he was a coward, but because his weakness made it harder on us all.
I felt many times in Lebanon that I held seventeen lives in my hands. These men, their flesh and blood, became my life. Stan was a problem only because he diminished the whole. He pissed and moaned and placed doubts in hearts already near breaking. Stan was a problem because he showed us that we were all scared shitless, he showed us that we all just wanted to go home, and we all wanted just to live.
In this fucked-up, hopeless place, Stan showed us that we were still human.
* * *
BLOODY SUNDAY
I PUSHED BACK THE blackout curtain and felt my way, totally night-blind, up the sandbagged stairway. At the top of the steps I tried to walk but nearly stumbled and stood for a moment blinking back the inky darkness. Slowly, as my pupils dilated, the night became less opaque. I made out the shape of a rat running down the walkway at my feet, and I kicked at it furiously, missing. “Fucker!” I spat. The rat skittered away, a lump of shadow swallowed by greater darkness. Eyes wide, I began to walk.
Above the Shouf there were two pops, and illumination rounds sputtered to life and coasted slowly beneath parachutes. In their light the hills were nebulous, cloudlike. I moved from the bunker to the barricade when the light had subsided, watching the hills, hearing the closer conversations of others who watched from covered positions.
Along the highway, Lebanese armor passed south, and from that direction came the sounds of sporadic fire. There was no one on the road now. The coast highway stretched away, north and south, four lanes empty. The moon drifted slowly over the Shouf, casting no light on the sea or earth. A small-arms round passed overhead, followed by the evil whistle of a ricochet. Pulling my flak jacket closed, I crossed an open space with my fists clenched. The darkness ebbed suddenly as another illume round coasted to earth. This was one of theirs, and I crouched against the low wall of the barricade, pressing myself into the shadow until the flare extinguished itself in the ground outside the wire.
The wind came from the Shouf in gentle gusts, scented with the smells of the mountains. It was a cool night, in this moment absolutely silent. Crouching against the barricade, I put the night-vision goggles to my face and looked out into the Shouf.
To the naked eye, the hills showed signs of warfare, the flashes of muzzle blast scattered over a vast darkness. In the goggles, the night positively came alive. The Shouf glimmered with the reports of weapons and fountains of tracers. Explosions loomed, blinding in the goggles, flashing like point-blank strobe lights. In the green sky, illumination rounds fell to earth like ancient suns, lighting the dark city in feeble greens. In the goggles it was all green—green or on fire with an ungodly light, blinding, nearly white.
It was the evening of October 22, and the shelling had started after dinner, Katyusha rockets and 122-millimeter howitzers. These weapons kept up a steady harassing fire against the south portion of the airport and Green Beach. It was Saturday night, date night, and our choices were simple: We could sit in the bunker and get shelled, or we could patrol outside the wire and try to locate the shooters. When the moon went
down, I told Doc Jones to get boat crews Charlie and Delta ready, and in a couple of minutes the lads were turned out, weapons and equipment checked, faces painted, ready to rock and roll. As they huddled around me, I pointed a red-lens flashlight at the map.
“We’re going to run a recon south to Khalda and see if we can find the shooters,” I said. That was the sum total of the briefing. We had operated so often in the last six months, I didn’t need to explain in detail. Every man knew his assignment, his place in the patrol order, his fields of fire, and the procedures for leaving and reentering the perimeter. No one said a word as we mounted out and I waved the squad forward.
We patrolled east, up the narrow jeep road that wound through the dump just inland from Green Beach, then we exited the airport heading south, paralleling the Beirut-Sidon highway. After moving a click or two through scrub and abandoned orchards, we recrossed the highway and moved onto a bluff at the water’s edge. The hillock was the site of an ancient Roman villa. It had been partially excavated, and the trenches, broken columns, and architectural bits made excellent cover. From a tactical standpoint, it was a great piece of real estate. The ruin was situated on a promontory maybe fifty feet high. The water was at our back, in case we needed to bail, and the elevation allowed us a 180-degree view of the airport, the mountains of the Shouf, the scrub and orchards of the Ash Shuafat, and the bombed-out high-rises of Khalda maybe a mile away. Our cover was solid, and the night was overcast and extremely dark. If they managed to drop a round on us here, it would be a freaking miracle.
The airport had come under fire from either Druze or Syrian units in the Shouf. It didn’t matter to us who was pulling the trigger. Using NVGs, we scanned for muzzle flashes and attempted to get a fix on the position of the shooters. It was a game we had played with the Syrians for a long time, and they seldom fired more than three rounds before they folded up and moved to another location. As soon as we could verify their new firing position, they would take off again. The built-in delay of alerting our own artillery and requesting permission to call in fire virtually ensured that whoever was shooting at us could do it with impunity. The booger eaters knew that. What they didn’t know is that we’d require only one shot at them. We carried a laser illuminator called a MULE (Multiutility laser equipment). It used a coded infrared laser beam to designate targets. Laser-guided rounds, called “copperheads,” could be fired by the ships patrolling offshore. With the laser, we could put a sixteen-inch naval gunfire round right between their eyes. We could hit them, that is, if we could find them.
By 0100, we hadn’t acquired any targets. I ordered the squad up, and we crossed the highway under a culvert. We turned right and patrolled quietly south, toward the hillside town of Khalda. We’d seen some truck headlights winding through the darkened streets, and we set up another observation position, this one in a wasted, crater-torn olive grove in the Ash Shuafat. I deployed the squad in an L facing the town. If anyone happened upon us, they would stumble into an ambush.
From up the hill came the snarl of engines. The night-vision goggles revealed a couple of trucks towing artillery pieces. Syrian army. Without a doubt, these were the shooters, but the rules of engagement forbade us from firing first. The rules of peacekeeping basically forbade us from firing at all. In order to “defend” ourselves, it was necessary for us to identify man, weapon, and muzzle flash. Lost on the command structure of the multinational peacekeeping force was the fact that any person observing these three phenomena, in order, would almost certainly be killed.
In order for me to engage the trucks, I would first have to report their position and report that I had observed them firing. That report would be forwarded up the chain of command, and I would then be advised if I might engage. It was a dangerous, bullshit arrangement.
Maybe I was getting burned out. But tonight I didn’t even bother getting on the radio to report the Syrian position. I just waited. We watched for a while, pressed down into the grass. If they started to set up their guns, I would put some beehive on them and ask for permission later.
We waited. They screwed around, smoked cigarettes, and hung out a hundred yards in front of us. One of them stood on the hood of his truck and panned around with a pair of Russian night-vision goggles, but we were camouflaged nicely. He couldn’t have seen us if he’d been standing right on top of us.
This wasn’t going to be our night. The Syrians didn’t unlimber their weapons, and after half an hour they piled back into their trucks, and the engines coughed over. Towing the artillery, the trucks moved up the hill and back into the Shouf.
The shelling continued. All we could do was watch in frustration as rockets and big-caliber rounds thudded onto the runway and the beach. All night the bad guys kept up the tactic of shoot and scoot, and we were never even able to turn on the laser. The night was a wash, and two hours before sunrise we turned north and patrolled back into the American sector and Green Beach. Rounds screeched overhead as we moved north, and we periodically hit the deck as shells dropped around us.
We crossed the perimeter without further adventure and did not return to our bunker until nearly 0500. The debrief was short; the guys were pissed and exhausted. Doc Jones sat on his rack across from me. He lit a Camel and took a long drag. “What do you want to do about breakfast?” he asked.
I hung my weapon and web gear on the nail over my cot. I said, “Screw breakfast.”
“It’s Sunday, they have pancakes up there at the BLT. Why don’t I get a truck and we can roust the lads up there. A hot meal could do them good.”
“You want to have a nice family meal, Doc?”
Dave was already in his rack. “Fuck breakfast,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “Anyone who wants to go with Doc and feed their faces can go.”
A chorus of “fuck you” trickled out of the bunker.
Doc lay down on his rack and closed his eyes. “Bunch of lazy bastards. Go hungry,” he said.
We weren’t lazy. We had patrolled all night through a steadily shifting artillery barrage. The shelling was over, and the postadrenaline crash was on us. There was maybe forty-five minutes of darkness left, and it was time to sleep. After cleaning my weapon, I remember only falling into my cot, rolling up the sweaty lump of my flak jacket for a pillow, and dropping immediately to sleep.
At 6:23 A.M. we heard something—an explosion, a big one, but one wholly unlike the sounds of artillery and rockets to which we had grown accustomed. The sound was a gut-wrenching THUD followed by a megadecibel sound, something like a long groan. I knew only that it was big and close. Then a shock wave pressed into the bunker, and the ground beneath my cot, the dirt in the very side walls of our hole, started to move, heaving like an earthquake.
It had been close, deafening, and for a second or two, I thought it was a direct hit on us. I just lay in my rack, making sure I was still connected to the planet. I tried to imagine what in the hell it had been. Nothing I had ever heard anywhere had sounded that big.
Doc sat up. “What the fuck was that? A SCUD missile?”
Then a face burst into the dugout. “Jesus Christ. They got the BLT!”
I said, “Bullshit.” In every artillery duel, every bombardment, any round that landed within a grid square of the headquarters would start the same flurry of rumor and false reports from the other positions. I got up, put on my pistol, and climbed out of the bunker. The position was frenzy. We had gone immediately to Condition One. Marines ran for weapons. The pillboxes on the flanks were being manned, and the antivehicle barricade was pulled across the road entrance.
It was like a dream, like I had somehow fallen back asleep. I climbed numbly up into the watchtower. A huge black cloud drifted into the sky seven hundred feet above the airport. From the French sector, another smudge of smoke loomed over the city. I raised the binoculars to my eyes. This is a dream, I told myself, a fucking nightmare.
The headquarters building was gone.
It was there, then it was not. Blasted fl
at into a squat chalk-gray pile of rubble and rebar, its topmost floors evaporated. The explosion shook the earth for three kilometers, its shock wave splitting oak doors in half at the MSSG building a quarter of a mile away. Two hundred yards through a grove of uprooted, mangled trees, the buildings housing the office of the Lebanese liaison had also been destroyed by the concussion of the blast.
It had happened just after six in the morning. On Sundays breakfast was always served late, and it was the privilege of the men at the battalion landing team headquarters to sleep in. While the marines dozed, a two-and-a-half-ton Mercedes truck drove down through a Lebanese army checkpoint and into the airport parking lots. It turned a circle, gathering speed, and crashed through a steel fence. It went across a hundred yards of parking lot, through tar-barrel and barbed-wire obstacles that hardly slowed its acceleration. The truck bulldozed its way through the sandbagged bunker at the entrance of the headquarters. Tires squealing on lobby tiles, it plowed on, dragging marine sentries on its bumper as it rushed into the open center courtyard of the building.
Then it detonated.
In the minutes after the blast, chaos reigned. No one had any idea if the truck bomb was a precursor to a move by the Syrian army, or if the airport would soon come under general attack. In one stroke, the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit had lost almost a quarter of its men. More than 240 marines had been killed in the blast, and 150 more were trapped in the rubble or lay wounded in the parking lot.
We didn’t know it at the time, but across town, the French Foreign Legion barracks had been hit by an identical truck bomb thirty-eight seconds after the BLT was struck. The second bomb killed sixty legionnaires and destroyed their headquarters building.
The multinational peacekeeping force was in deep shit.
Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL Page 25