Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL

by Pfarrer, Chuck

The messenger of the watch ran down from the beachmaster’s bunker. He said I was wanted on the radio. CTF61, the commander of the amphibious task force, ordered the SEAL element to conduct an emergency sweep of the American anchorage. We were to check for mines and immediately interdict any craft or combat swimmers found in the exclusion zone.

  A Huey set down on the beach. Doc Jones and the Seabees’ two corpsmen jumped aboard and flew immediately to what was left of the BLT. Frank Giffland’s squad was still aboard Iwo Jima, manning the search-and-rescue slot. I did not have direct communication with them but assumed Frank would proceed as quickly as possible to join forces with us on the beach.

  Out in the anchorage, the landing ship Harlan County was heading toward the beach at flank speed. She was in the process of lowering her bow ramp, and it appeared that she was preparing to come alongside the causeway on Green Beach. I thought this was in preparation to evacuate the airport.

  I left boat crew Delta at Rancho Deluxe and told them to be prepared to destroy our bunker and equipment if we were ordered to withdraw. We loaded the Zodiac, and boat crew Charlie and I headed out into the anchorage.

  We swept the area in the vicinity of the causeway and the water in front of Harlan County. Several small fishing boats drifted in the northern portions of the exclusion zone. It had long been suspected that fishing boats were used to spot the artillery attacks on the positions at Green Beach, and we had made captures aboard the boats previously. A boat-borne suicide attack was a very real possibility. On a normal Sunday we would have boarded and searched any small craft found within the exclusion zone. This morning the fishing boats were sunk with long bursts from M-60 machine guns and rounds from our M-203 grenade launchers.

  We returned to Green Beach and ran the Zodiac up onto the sand. Harlan County had made up to the causeway and disgorged an ambulance and heavy-lift equipment. I told Steve to notify CTF61 that I was headed for the battalion landing team, and that he had command of the squad until I returned. I jumped on the running board of the ambulance and rode it up the perimeter road toward the airport terminal and the battalion landing team headquarters.

  The ambulance drove down the middle of the runway, and we took a couple of sniper rounds en route. The bullets pinged off the cement, and we drove balls-to-the-wall. The ambulance skidded past Rock Base and swung around to approach the BLT from the north. But we couldn’t see the building, because it wasn’t there anymore.

  The ambulance stopped a hundred yards from the road junction, its way blocked by a burning Lebanese jeep. Carrying my CAR-15, I jumped off and jogged the rest of the way. I went down the road that passed the headquarters building, the building where the marine amphibious unit commander and his staff had set up, and from the end of that short street it hit me. A smell like fifty-seven kinds of dead, and in the grip of that indescribable stench I walked with my weapon into the open space where the headquarters building had once stood.

  It was now eight in the morning. The sun shone unbearably on the whiteness of a three-story heap of rubble. There were bulldozers there already, forklifts and cherry pickers moving about car-sized pieces of concrete. The sun made it all blinding, the debris and the hot dust shimmering around the rubble. That dust clung to everything and everybody, living or dead.

  I found Frank near the north side of the crater. He had taken a helo ashore minutes after the building went up. With several others, he had crawled into the still-burning building to remove dozens of TOW antitank missiles stored on the collapsed first floor. At great risk to themselves, they had removed the missiles and their high-explosive warheads before they could be detonated by the fire. This act of bravery saved the lives of the rescuers and many survivors.

  Frank’s hands now shook, and his skin was ashen from the dust. I didn’t look much better. I was struck dumb by the most horrifying sight I had ever seen in my life.

  Body parts, shredded clothing, sleeping bags, ponchos, and web gear hung in trees and littered the ground for hundreds of yards. The building had been utterly smashed, opening to a colossal crater in its center. At the center of the blast, there was nothing. Gray powder. Only the skeletal, gunmetal driveshaft of the truck that carried the bomb stuck upward from the hole.

  Around the central crater, the building had dropped in on itself, floor upon floor. About the outside, close upon the sides, were the largest pieces of the concrete floors, thirty feet square, which had been blown out of position and cast up on their edges.

  Tangles of one-inch reinforcing steel hung like nests of serpents. Close behind the building, the tents and huts of the motor pool were blasted, turned inside out, and ripped to shards. A hundred yards away, jeeps had their hoods and windshields ripped away by the pressure wave, radiators and wheels flattened or torn completely from the twisted chassis. Farther from the building, the personal articles of the victims were propelled from the explosion. Canteens, shaving kits, the broken hulks of tape players. Every imaginable piece of equipment in the Marine Corps inventory lay in the acres around the smoldering wreckage.

  Weapons, rucksacks, and field gear.

  Letters, thousands of letters, cast into the sky and fallen like snow.

  Photographs of families.

  PT gear, socks rolled into balls. The names of dead men stenciled on towels and T-shirts. Most appalling was the open space in the sky where the building had been.

  The air was thick with the smell of cordite and burned flesh. Joining the other rescuers, we dug for survivors with our bare hands. We worked close together, keeping an eye on one another and watching carefully to make sure the places we dug would not collapse further. The entire building seemed to groan. I could hear the muffled sobs of buried men beneath my feet.

  I crawled into the wreckage as deeply as I could and found myself in a coffin-sized space. Above me were heaped gigantic slabs of concrete. Between the slabs there was no space, not an inch, but a pair of boots stuck from a crack, jungle boots like my own, covered with the dust of vaporized concrete. Their owner, presumably, was smashed thin as a piece of paper between the slabs. Just inches from the boots, protruded, hands and arms draped down from the crack, absolutely still and gray, like pieces of discarded statuary. In the hulk of the building, wreckage and corpses were twisted together inexorably, like sculpture made by Satan’s own hands. I remember it was all gray, uniformly gray, with the exception of thin black trickles that I was shocked to find were blood. And immediately below, inclined toward the place where I dug, was an opening in the debris. I shoved myself through it. In the half-light, I could make out the shape of a torso, likewise covered in dust, its color exactly that of the concrete. It seemed at first to be part of the slab. I could not see a head or arms.

  I only slowly recognized the form to be human. The cammie jacket had been ripped away, and the subtle lines of a bare chest were exposed.

  I pressed my hand to the marine’s chest. He was dead.

  WE WORKED ALL DAY in the rubble as sniper rounds cracked and spattered the concrete around us. Frank and I were finally called back to the beach, and we walked to LZ Brown to catch a helo. The scene at the landing zone was somber. We met Doc in the hangar. He stood by a stretcher, covered head to toe in concrete powder and blood, a stethoscope looped over his neck. Doc would work in this place, without sleep or rest, for the next forty-eight hours. As each hour passed, fewer bodies were pulled from the rubble, each stretcher load less resembling anything human, until what was delivered were only fluid lumps in green bags. Burned, bloated, unrecognizable shapes to be classified, identified, embalmed, and shipped home.

  On the runway the dead were laid out in neat lines, wrapped in nylon poncho liners and the shredded, gore-splattered sleeping bags in which they died. The casualties were piled into helicopters and flown to the ships in an endless series of lifts.

  The faces of the men loading the helicopters were stiff with dust and shock. Between lifts, they sat, eyes wide, staring into nothing. In the endless drone of the helicopters there w
as no solace. In the hot blast of wind over rotor blades the men worked without speaking.

  I could have never imagined a tear coming from Doc, not Doc the brazen, Doc the fearless, Doc the hard-dick killer of VC sombitches. The next night, when he stumbled back into the bunker, he collapsed on his rack and sobbed like a child.

  I closed my eyes in the dark bunker and tried to will myself to sleep. I thought of a band concert I attended in the BLT three weeks before. I had sat against the wall on the fourth floor, looking down into the courtyard and at the faces that lined each of the four levels of interlocking balconies. It was a navy band, one of those admiral’s bands, and we were told that we were damn lucky to get them to play for us.

  For twenty minutes they played half-assed rock and roll, then packed up and were heloed back out to the flagship. But as I’d looked into the faces of the marines who watched that band, I could not have imagined this building flattened and each man who lived here, each man of 240, wasted. Not just dead, but shredded, hung in trees. Ripped open and tossed like roadkill.

  Now they were gone. Simply fucking gone. What was left was sealed in metal boxes. It was often only the crap someone had peeled from the inside of a boot. In that magnitude of loss, men are only numbers killed, wounded, and missing, three finite categories roughly analogous to crushed, crippled, and vaporized. I really have no idea how they decided whose mother got what box. There was not enough left of some guys to put into a juice glass.

  In the end, everybody got the same thing. Closed caskets with flags draped over them.

  IN THE DAYS THAT followed there was only shock. It was almost impossible to feel grief. The horror was so overwhelming, so incredible, that we became frozen to it. There were so many bodies, so many twisted mangled heaps of flesh, that it was impossible to comprehend these were once people, comrades, friends.

  Our shock was compounded when we listened at night to the BBC World Service and heard that the United States had invaded Grenada. At the time of the broadcast there was still heavy fighting on the island, and the airport had yet to be secured. We listened, slack-jawed. The marine amphibious ready group now fighting in Grenada had been on its way to relieve us. We were sitting here with our asses kicked, and our backup was twenty-five hundred miles away, fighting another war. Any faith I had in our war planners, any trust I would ever have again in the command structure, evaporated in that moment.

  The thinnest cordon of marines now held the airport. The Shouf bristled with artillery, and by any conservative estimate of troop strength, we were outnumbered at least five to one. We could be wiped out and swept into the sea at any moment. It did not happen, and for the life of me, I do not know why. We were defeated, thumped, beaten. It was only the resolve, tenacity, and unflinching courage of individual marines that stood between us and Alamo time. The survivors clung together, every man aware that we were thousands of miles away from help or mercy.

  In the days after the bombing, the rules of engagement changed. Marines received shoot-to-kill authorization. An astounding bit of news.

  Now that the cows were gone, someone made damn sure that the barn doors were closed. At the south end of the parking lot, bulldozers had heaped great piles of red earth, vehicle barricades, in a series of staggered mounds that required passing vehicles to weave through a number of small openings under ten miles an hour. A deuce-and-a-half truck was placed across the road by the checkpoint, and a .50-caliber machine gun covered the approach. But there wasn’t a building there anymore—just a pile of rubble.

  Behind these new barricades, the wreckage of the BLT loomed, jagged and forlorn. When the wind came from the north, the abominable stench of the place would drift down onto the checkpoint. The smell of bodies blasted into atoms. The marines would pull cravats and neckerchiefs from beneath their flak jackets and place them over their faces to cut the smell. Then they looked like a mess of dusty, dumb-fuck deputies guarding a bank that had already been robbed.

  The wreckage of the building became an archaeological dig. When an FBI explosive team arrived, their leisured, careful probing had an almost academic air about it. For a week a dozen marines dug through the crater, probing, poking, and sifting. Three FBI explosive experts huddled together under the blown-out girders that held aloft what remained of the second floor. Now and again a marine would come up from the pit carrying a scrap of metal. The FBI agents would look at it and either throw it away or tag it. Half a piston. Pieces of a water pump. A small portion of an engine block. Pieces of the truck that had detonated in the lobby. A remarkable amount of it was recovered from the fifteen-foot-deep hole it had blown into the earth.

  Forensics, like hindsight, is all-seeing. Starting from the moment of detonation and working backward, the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and National Security Agency were able to discern exactly what happened, how it happened, and who was responsible. Information that was extremely fascinating, but not one speck of it as valuable as a warning.

  Blast-damage assessment revealed much about the bomb itself, a masterpiece of destructive engineering. It was first thought that so sophisticated a device could have been constructed only with Russian assistance. It is now known that the man who designed the bomb was an Iranian-trained member of Hezbollah named Imad Mugniyah. The intrepid Mugniyah would go on later to impress Osama bin Laden, who would take a page from Hezbollah’s operational handbook and coordinate even more spectacular attacks against multiple targets. In decades to follow, Mugniyah would come to specialize in the demolition of U.S. military barracks, again constructing purpose-built bombs, most notably the tanker-truck weapon detonated outside the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. That 1996 blast would kill 19 Americans and wound 170.

  The bomb that destroyed the BLT was an elegant weapon purpose-built for its target. Loaded aboard a two-and-a-half-ton Mercedes truck, the bomb consisted of nearly six thousand pounds of C-4 plastic explosive, boosted by three hundred gallons of compressed propane gas. The cargo bed of the truck was lined in marble, and the explosives were loaded to form a shaped charge, focusing the blast up and out for maximum effect. The bomb was actuated by at least three mechanisms: a thirty-second timer initiated by the driver; a radio-controlled safe and arming mechanism actuated by an observer in the airport parking lot; and a dead-man switch on the steering wheel, which activated the bomb as soon as pressure was released by the driver.

  The explosion vaporized the first two floors of the building and collapsed the remaining three stories. It blasted a crater forty feet in diameter and threw off an eight-hundred-foot mushroom cloud. The explosion could be heard as far away as Sidon, thirty miles to the south. The FBI determined that the bomb produced one of the largest nonnuclear explosions in history.

  The operational planning for the attack was equally impressive. The driver, a Hezbollah member, had been cultivated, vetted, and specially selected for a martyrdom operation. Seventy virgins awaited him in paradise. Photographs were taken of the BLT, and the explosive payload was mea-sured to fit through the overhang and portico at the front of the building. The bumper of the truck was reinforced to plow through the steel-and-concrete fence that separated the BLT from the airport parking lot.

  After the blast, satellite photos revealed that in the Bekaa valley, the bombers had marked out facsimiles of the BLT and the surrounding parking lots. They put together exact copies of the fences, tar barrels, and sandbag bunkers surrounding the building. Practice runs were made against a mock-up of the target, rehearsals were timed to the second, and the detonators and fusing mechanisms were rigorously tested.

  Nothing was left to chance, and nothing would go wrong. All of these preparations went on under the noses of almost daily American reconnaissance flights. Two identical truck bombs were constructed at a Hezbollah installation in the city of Baalbek, one intended for the French, one for the Americans. With the complicity of Syrian military intelligence, the weapons were driven into Beirut on the evening of the twenty-second. An all-ni
ght artillery barrage, carried out by units of the Syrian army, made certain that the marines would be exhausted and that large numbers of them would still be asleep when the attacks were carried out at 6:23 A.M. Sunday morning.

  The operation and its execution were flawless. The crater was testimony.

  THE AIR FORCE TRANSPORTS that took the bodies of the battalion landing team returned in three days with fresh troops, another half of a marine amphibious unit that had been packed off piecemeal from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and dropped into our life. “We’re here to bail you fuckers out,” I heard one of them say.

  They were integrated into our positions, their companies assuming emplacements on the perimeter and there digging bunkers, filling sandbags, starting from scratch. To me they seemed so incredibly pink, and young, and their uniforms were crisp with starch like they had just stepped out of recruiting posters.

  With the starch and boot polish, they brought with them a massive case of attitude, like they had arrived on white horses and we were somehow damsels in distress. To an extent that may have been true. But nothing could prepare them for what they found over here, a situation more fucked up than a Norwegian bullfight. The rules of engagement alone were enough to blow their minds. And you could read it all over them, see it plainly as they moved, wide-eyed, through the positions or smelled what was left of a four-story reinforced concrete building. Even the old ones, the gunnery sergeant Khe Sanh veterans, found this place on the other side of believable. The survivors were like zombies, walking around taking close rounds and sniper fire like it was nothing: marines who had timing down to such a high art that they ducked only when the shit was right on top of them (“It just ain’t cool to get down sooner”).

  Scariest of all was an elemental transformation of the chain of command. What mattered out on the wire wasn’t rank, it was experience. The survivors were alive because they were cagey. They were here because they knew how Wally operated, and they had adapted. The newly arrived marines were discernible not only for their fresh uniforms and incredulous expressions but for their dangerous naïveté. Our replacements were untested and therefore unreliable. Newly arriving officers and noncoms often found their orders ignored, especially when they were life-threatening. To a man, the survivors of 24 MAU supported the chain of command, often to the point of gallantry, but they obeyed their own. Soon the new guys learned to watch and learn. Some of them died anyway.