We’d made it into position with a little over five minutes to spare. I laid the AK-47 across my arm, and Bubba crouched, watching the road, as I fished the binoculars out of my pack. I pointed them down into the valley and scanned. There were several structures strewn below: low mud-brick hovels and a few flat-roofed two-story cement-and-cinder-block structures, typical Lebanese architecture. I pulled out my map and tried to puzzle out the location of the target. I wasn’t at this task very long.
From behind us came a clanking noise, something like a cowbell struck out of tune and with no semblance of rhythm. I snapped my head around. Next to me, Bubba silently tapped two fingers under his eyes, the hand signal for “enemy.” As quietly as I could, I snapped down the safety on my AK-47. We scooted lower into our juniper bush. From the washed-out road came the clanking again; it was the rattle of tack and harness on a forlorn-looking donkey pulling a small farm cart. The cart was of local manufacture, the transaxle of a demolished truck mounted under a rough-hewn wooden platform. Bald automobile tires wobbled as the donkey came out of the gloom, and through the branches I caught sight of an old man in a tattered shumagg clutching dully at the reins.
We held our breath. The cart would pass within twenty feet of us as the driver and donkey negotiated the hairpin. Pressed into cover, I lowered my head, chin almost in the dirt. The old man wore a tattered gray suit jacket over a grimy dishdasha. The old fellaheen was leaning back against a two- or three-foot plywood partition separating the front of the cart from the platform. On his feet he wore a pair of Reebok tennis shoes. The counters were broken down, so he wore them with his naked heels out, as though they were a pair of bedroom slippers. As the cart approached, I glimpsed something behind the partition in the back of the cart. The driver was not alone.
Two men in Syrian army uniforms sat facing backward, their muddy boots dangling off the back of the cart. The hoods of their camouflaged field jackets were pulled up, and their rifles, an AK-47 and an RPK machine gun, were laid across their laps. They were sodden from their trip through the fog, and both just sat hunched as the cart rolled down the rutted track.
Head down, the long-suffering donkey shuffled through the turn. We could plainly smell the sharp odor of the old man’s Galloise cigarette as he exhaled. My eyes flicked to Bubba. He watched them, sighting across the top of his CAR-15, his expression completely impassive. His finger was on the trigger, weapon aligned flawlessly with the back aperture and the hood of a field jacket placed square over the front sight post. It was my prerogative to initiate the ambush. If I fired, Bubba would fire; if I did not, he would let them pass.
I weighed our options. We were far up into the mountains, and the sound of gunfire, never an uncommon thing in this country, would probably pass unnoticed. Wherever these guys were going, they would definitely not be expected soon. They were traveling by donkey cart, and we were miles from anywhere. We could kill them easily. There was the question of the old man, obviously an innocent, but it would be no great species of marksmanship to head-shoot the soldiers and not kill him.
Each second brought them closer to the muzzles of our guns. It was not mercy that saved their lives. The decision was purely tactical. This road wasn’t even on my map; I had no idea where it led or how frequently it was traveled. There was no way of knowing who might be traveling with them or coming up the mountain unseen. We might kill the soldiers only to alert some larger patrol behind us in the fog. Our job here was to watch, not kill, and everything that did not further the mission was merely sport. If they did not see us, I would let them live.
It is a queer, affecting thing to hold someone’s life in so fine a balance. There’s power in it, a weird juice that it’s best not to ever get used to. The soldiers and the old man passed almost close enough to touch, and they had no idea that crouched beside them was a pair of bogeymen, emissaries of the Great Satan, slack pulled out of triggers, weapons set on rock and roll. I have done this several times, waited unseen and ready to kill if I was discovered, and it has always struck me as lunacy that the people I am ready to destroy never have the vaguest idea that their lives hang by a thread.
The cart passed, and we watched as the donkey ambled down the road and at last passed from sight. The drama had unfolded in what seemed like weeks. Bubba’s thumb rocked back the safety on his rifle, and I let out a long breath. We had avoided contact by the barest of margins. There was no telling who might come down the road next, and we both pressed as far down into the brush as we could.
We sat, waiting, and rain sprinkled us. I pulled out my map again and looked into the valley. I found the buildings, printed squares and rectangles, neat, straddling wide contour lines, and I imagined taking a pencil eraser and scrubbing them out. Then Bubba tapped me on the shoulder and nodded at the valley. “Showtime,” he whispered. Those were to be the only words spoken between us in nearly nine hours.
I looked over his shoulder. The Etendards were here.
From our left the first plane materialized, moving so low in the distance it seemed at first to be a truck. The faint sun briefly glinted off its canopy, and the fighter flew close on the valley floor, preposterously fast, and utterly without sound. As it banked, setting up on a group of low buildings, we could see its wide swept-back wings, mottled in stripes of gray and green-gray. The plane’s black-tipped nose pointed up, it gained altitude slightly, and then the sound of its screaming engine came up the ridge to us, sharp and angry, the noise of the banking turn it had made a full ten seconds before. As the Etendard passed over a cluster of cinder-block buildings, two dun-colored cylinders dropped away from its underwing pylons. Small white parachutes bloomed behind each bomb, and the weapons pitched down as they fell behind the speeding fighter. The bombs seemed to trail the jet, traveling horizontally as it banked precipitously. The Etendard was traveling at transonic speed, nearly the same velocity as its sound waves, and as it went wings-vertical, the fuselage was engulfed in a cloud of vapor.
In the same instant the Etendard was swallowed by mist, the buildings were torn by fire. Twin hemispheric shock waves blinked up, and at the center of the concussion, a pair of dirty-orange fireballs engulfed the structures. The clouds roiled and swept up into the sky. Another explosion, a secondary from inside the buildings, threw up a column of smoke and fire. Explosives or ammunition stored in one of the buildings had detonated, and the crashing of the three distinct blasts echoed from the valley floor and rolled up to us, sounding perfectly like the sound of a thunderstorm.
The remaining aircraft made their runs. Two came in a pair, close together, and the last arrived in a group of three. All dropped drogue-retarded munitions, and the weapons struck around the shattered remains of the buildings hit by the first plane. Each time the Etendards attacked, it was like watching a Godzilla movie with the sound out of sync. Explosions gushed from the earth without a whisper, and many seconds later, the scream of jet engines and the thudding of bomb hits echoed against the hills.
As quickly as the Etendards had come, they were gone. Clouds from the explosions drifted away after several minutes, pillars of smoke that held together and lifted vertically from the earth. On the valley floor no noise came from the gutted buildings; the day was again silent. We watched, and the only sound was the murmur of wind blowing downslope.
I scanned with the binoculars. Around the rubble, people ran without purpose; vehicles came up the roads, ambulances and trucks full of men, converging on the craters and rubble and dust. Syrian armored vehicles moved in with the rescue parties, ridiculously forming a cordon around the destroyed places. My binoculars brought close gaping holes gouged into the two- and three-story buildings in the Hezbollah compound; great damage had touched each of the dozen or so structures in the complex. As the dust rolled away, I could see ZSU-23 antiaircraft guns rolled out from bunkers, and in the dirt streets swarmed armed men the precise size of ants. They scrambled atop the flat piles of rubble, removing debris with their bare hands. I knew the rescuers would be cal
ling out the names of dead men. I knew the things they would find in the wreckage, things that did not look like human beings, and I knew how it would change them.
I wondered what it had been like for the men who planned the BLT bombing. I wondered if they, too, had watched from the hills while the calamity of an enemy played out in miniature.
It was our turn to watch now. A surfer and a hillbilly, hiding in a juniper bush, struck dumb by the baleful splendor of an air strike.
* * *
HOME AGAIN
BACK ABOARD PORTLAND, I took a shower and scrubbed the camouflage paint from behind my ears. From my locker I broke out a clean set of cammies, amazed at the fragrances of starch and detergent. I found my jump boots and brushed them, then bloused my trousers. For the first time in months I’d put myself in a presentable uniform. It was nearly midnight when I walked into the empty wardroom. I drank a cup of bug juice, and the steward came in silently to bring me a cheese sandwich. I ate it slowly.
I walked through the ship to the platoon’s berthing space. It was the middle of the night; everyone not on watch was tucked into his rack, and the red-lit passageways were deserted. I took several ladders below, into the troop spaces, wandering through deck after deck of empty bunks. On the way over, these same compartments had been thronged with hundreds of marines. They were now empty, the names of dead men and annihilated units still visible on masking tape stuck to lockers and bunks. Portland was a ghost ship.
I was glad when I came at last to the platoon’s berthing space. I pushed open the hatch, and the lights inside were burning brightly. The guys were in their racks, fast asleep, and demonstrating the remarkable ability of the American sailor to sleep oblivious to dazzling light. The only sound was the small whir of a pair of electric fans.
Doc Jones sat at the table between the bunk rows. He was smoking a cigarette, looking at nothing. “I wondered when you were going to get up,” he said as I entered.
“What are you doing down here, Doc? I thought you’d be in the chief’s quarters.”
“Fuckin’ goat locker,” he said. Doc stubbed out one smoke and lit another. I looked around the compartment. No one had even an eye open. Twitching in his rack, Bubba began snoring like a gut-shot bear.
Doc looked at me. “Just checking on the guys?”
“Yeah,” I said, “just checking.”
“‘Although slothful and ignorant, the enlisted men are cunning and devious and bear watching at all times,’” Doc said. It was an oft-repeated quote in the navy, supposedly taken from a World War I naval officer’s handbook. Although I’d heard it a hundred times, I still smiled.
Doc sat and smoked, listening to the guys sleep. It finally occurred to me that he was watching over them—like a hen brooding her chicks.
“We made it, Chuck,” he said at last. It was the first time he’d ever called me by my first name: not “Diawi,” not “cock breath,” not “Mr. Pfarrer,” but “Chuck.”
I said, “Yeah, Doc. We made it.”
Our platoon had conducted more than a hundred combat patrols and reconnaissance operations during a seven-month tour. Some were successful, some were not, but Doc, Frank, and I had taken sixteen SEALs into combat and were bringing sixteen home. I did not consider this testimony of my prowess as a commando or my leadership as an officer. I saw it as the reckoning of karma.
“You did okay,” Doc said to me. No praise I have ever received in my life has moved me more. I could only nod my thanks. I felt oddly like I wanted to bawl. A moment passed with just the smoke from Doc’s Marlboro hanging in the air.
“I heard you volunteered to cross-deck,” Doc said.
“Where’d you hear that?”
Doc narrowed an eye at me, like there was some way a jive-ass LTJG could ever do anything that a chief petty officer would not discover. To cross-deck meant to leave the homebound ships and join the arriving troops. It was called that because the volunteer’s person, equipment, goods, and chattel were shuttled from the deck of one ship across to another.
“Are you nuts?” Doc asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know.” I probably was.
After I had returned from the air strike, Frank and I were pulled aside by the task force operations officer. He told us the incoming MAU was worried that their turnover was short and that the new marine infantry companies were inexperienced in urban warfare. The commander of the landing force had asked for volunteers to join the incoming units and serve a second tour. The request made sense. Only crazy people could help sane people make sense out of insanity. Peacetime cross-decks were not unusual, but I had never heard of anyone, anyone, who did not have a plate in his head asking for back-to-back combat tours.
The operations officer was a lieutenant commander, a nice guy, and he looked embarrassed even to be asking us. He apologized before I heard my own voice saying, “I’ll stay.” In the same breath, Frank said he’d stay.
I remember the shock on the man’s face. We were both certifiable. I considered myself lucky to have lived through one tour, and now, casually, I was saying I would stay in Lebanon for another six months. I had not just said it, I had said it in front of witnesses, and I stood scratching as the commander spelled out our names on his clipboard. P as in Peter, F as in fox, A, double R, E, R. Charles, middle name Patrick. LTJG, USN. O-positive. Catholic. Suicide victim.
I was doing the unthinkable; Doc had found out, and he was busting my chops.
“What are you?” he was saying. “Some kind of retard?”
“How many tours did you do in Vietnam?”
“I don’t see what—”
I cut him off. “How many, Doc?”
“Too goddamn many.”
“Did you volunteer, or did they send you back?” I asked, knowing that like almost every Viet-era SEAL I knew, he’d asked for a second tour.
“You know what,” Doc said, “Vietnam wasn’t like the shit we just went through. You’re stupider than the average cake-eater if you asked to stay back in Wally-world.”
He was right. I was insane. So was Frank.
“Why don’t you go up on deck,” Doc said quietly. “You look like you could use a little air.”
On deck late at night, the marines at the rail had no faces. In the clear, moonless night, darkness was an almost opaque pigment that made their features uniformly dark and formless. It was a night in which you could not have recognized your own brother. The shadowy forms were made vague by both the mottled colors of their camouflage BDUs and the wind, which pulled and inflated the uniforms so that their shapes were changeable, hardly recognizable as human.
The red glow of cigarettes would rise and fall from the rail, burning bright, then fading. This night was unseasonably mild and perfectly, eerily still. The wind across the deck was only that caused by the ship’s forward movement, and around Portland, the sea spread away, mirrorlike and flat. The water was black, and the wake seemed afire with the unearthly light of bioluminescence.
Standing in the wind, I thought of the long lines of bodies we had laid on the tarmac. I was haunted by the letters and envelopes that had blown down the street after the bombing. Pictures of families, of children and wives, seven thousand miles away, made suddenly into widows and orphans.
I was scared now, fucking terrified, and standing alone in the darkness, I cursed myself for offering to stay. But I knew why I’d volunteered. This was not over, I told myself. It was not over, and I wanted to stay until it was.
Escaping the silence of the empty troop spaces, I stayed up on deck all night, staring into the glow of the wake until the sun rose, and then I stood with my face red from the wind and looking, in the moment of dawn, as though quite suddenly the sun had ambushed me.
The following evening Frank heloed over from Iwo Jima. It had been decided that our services would not be required by the incoming troops, and we were spared a second tour in Lebanon. Somewhere up the chain of command, a small decision made by a faceless staff officer had certainly saved my
life.
I can’t remember if I was relieved or not. I remember only that my offer to stay had been serious, and that I was fully aware how ridiculous and self-destructive I had become.
PORTLAND CONTINUED to steam slowly west. The platoon spent days cleaning and repairing gear and weapons, making ready for homecoming and the scrutiny of the bean counters back at the Team. Our trip across the Med was unremarkable. Portland was still an unhappy ship, and when Frank and I could no longer abide Captain Zimanski’s tantrums in the wardroom, we took meals in the connex boxes, liberating sandwiches from the crew’s mess or happily accepting Doc Jones’s invitation to dine in the chief’s quarters.
Along with the rest of the squadron, Portland passed through the Straits of Gibraltar, and two days later we were in the teeth of an Atlantic gale. “Sweet Pea” was no beauty, but she was built to last, and the storm tested her. For two days hurricane-force winds and monstrous seas beat upon the squadron. From the bridge, we watched green water surge over the bow of Iwo Jima and roll across her flight deck. The bow of an aircraft carrier swept over by the sea was a majestic, fearsome sight.
Portland rolled and plunged, and we subsisted on coffee and sandwiches until it was calm enough for the cooks to prepare hot food. Watch on watch, day and night, the 1-MC would crackle and from the loudspeakers would come a strangely indifferent voice intoning, “Stand by for heavy rolls.”
The ship, all 553 feet of her, would shudder and slow as fifty-foot waves heaved on our bow. Thumped by Atlantic rollers, the entire vessel seemed to ring, a deep, groaning clang like that from a gigantic, lopsided bell. Finally, the gale blew itself out, vomit was swabbed from the decks, and on a bright, chilly morning, the coast of North Carolina hove into view.
As we cleared the sea buoy, the lads loaded kit bags and made a clean sweep of their berthing spaces. Frank and I went and found our friends in the wardroom, wishing them the best and thanking them for favors big and small during the cruise.
Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL Page 29