Although other units in 24 MAU came ashore to military bands and parades, Portland docked at an isolated pier at the port of Jacksonville, North Carolina, far from press, relatives, or hoopla. In truth, there were not that many men nor much equipment to be unloaded. “Sweet Pea’s” embarked troops had been mostly headquarters elements, staff, and battalion-level support units. Almost to a man they had been killed in the bombing. Maybe two platoons of marines and a half-dozen jeeps were put off the ship. Like the empty passageways on the way home, the offload was quiet and forlorn.
The day was clear and cold, promising to be colder that night. In the general hubbub, I made sure the ship’s cranes hooked up our connex boxes, the Seafox, and the SDV. Flatbeds from SPECWARGRU-2 appeared under the appropriate loads, strapped them down, and drove off. Lugging my kit bag, I went down the gangplank and tried not to look back as I trotted for our ride.
As I plopped down into a seat on the bus, I slowly began to realize that it was over. I swung my feet up on a parachute bag and tossed my hat across the aisle at Dave. “Tell me I’m dreaming,” I said.
“You’re dreaming, Diawi,” said Doc. “You’ll wake up and it’ll be the first day of the trip all over.”
“Then shoot me,” I said.
Frank climbed aboard and collapsed into the seat beside me. “Vamos,” he said.
As we drove away from Portland, Cheese pressed his naked ass against the rear windows. He got a rousing ovation from the men in the bus and on the pier. “Adios, motherfuckers,” he yelled.
Adios indeed.
As soon as we were off the base, Frank told the driver to pull over at a 7-Eleven. It had been months since the lads spent a paycheck or had any cash, but together, Frank and I had a couple hundred bucks in our pockets, wrinkled and soft from months in the safe of our stateroom. Two hundred dollars was a fortune in the backwoods of North Carolina, and the pleasures of the state were ours.
The bus doors hissed open and the lads piled out. I peeled off a hundred bucks and handed it to Doc. “Get all the beer this will buy,” I said.
Doc blew into the store, strode back into the cooler, and started to stack cases of beer on a handcart. The clerk gaped at us—we looked like a gang of slow-motion robbers.
“Get what you want for the ride home,” Frank said. The lads loaded up on potato chips, pig rinds, fruit pies, beef jerky, jalapeño-pickled sausages, red licorice, and even a loaf of white Sunbeam bread—delicacies only dreamed about in the Levant.
Doc wheeled the beer in front of the counter, and Frank counted out a pile of wrinkled dollars, twenties, and fives. Bubba came up to me holding an extra-large cherry Slurpee. “Can I have one of these, Mr. Pfarrer?” He looked exactly like a kid.
“Knock yourself out, Bubba,” I said.
The beer and the frogmen were loaded back into the bus, and we started north. It was now just about sundown, and as we passed through the crisp evening, the little town of Jacksonville, North Carolina, was somber. Though it was the first week of December, we saw no Christmas lights. Normally, the place would have been a carnival. A returning marine battalion could be counted on to spend money, buy beer, and propose marriage to half the women in the county. The problem was, a lot fewer marines came home than had left.
We drank beer and did our best to make merry, but the gloom of our homecoming was hard to shake. We hadn’t been met by bands or crowds on the pier side, but the little town had not forgotten the men she had lost. There were flags and homemade banners stuck up in front yards and windows. Under the neon lights of pawnshops and tattoo parlors, messages were cobbled together out of sliding plastic letters: GOD BLESS THE MARINES and WELCOME HOME 24 MAU.
In the back of the bus, I sat with a beer and watched the night come on. As we headed north, shops and houses gave way to pine trees and lopsided double-wides. About halfway out of town, the bus stopped at an intersection, two lanes meeting two lanes under a single streetlight. As we turned north, I looked beyond a row of battered mailboxes. In the window of a mobile home was an American flag hung like a curtain. In front of the flag, leaning against the glass, was a color portrait—a photograph on brush-textured cardboard, the kind you sit for at Kmart. It was a picture of a marine sergeant in his dress blues. Beside him was a woman with dishwater-blond hair. In the sergeant’s arms was a kid of about six. The corners of the garish wooden frame were hung with black tape. Next to the picture was a hand-lettered sign, crayon on construction paper: GOD BLESS MY DADDY.
At last we drove out of town, and the pine woods loomed over us, our two-lane meandering 150 miles through swamp and little redneck towns back to Virginia Beach. The night was clear, without even a small part of moon, and I was glad when the light left the windows, because my eyes were wet.
I STOOD IN THE PARKING LOT of the SEAL Team Four building, pulling up the collar of my field jacket, waiting. Our arrival, half drunk, at 2230 hours was noted by the watch, and the trucks were parked in the secure area behind the compound. The lads had been driven singing and reeling to the transit barracks, while a tide of beer cans washed around the back of the bus. The OOD told us we were to report to the commanding officer at 1300 hours the next day. We had a sleep-in pass.
I’d offered to give Frank a ride to the BOQ, but my car, parked where I’d left it in March and half an inch deep in dust, would not start. Buzzed and smiling, Frank thanked me and caught a cab ride to the BOQ. Carrying my kit bag, I walked across the base, hoping the wind would sober me up. I wound up in front of a pay phone next to the base chapel, where I called Margot.
“It’s Chuck,” I said. “I’m back.”
Margot’s voice sounded odd on the phone, distant and formal. My last letter to her had arrived five days before. Written from Iwo Jima, it said I had volunteered to remain in Lebanon. A postcard I sent from Spain telling her I was coming home had not yet arrived. She was surprised and happy to hear from me.
“I’m on the base,” I said. “My car wouldn’t start.” I told her how to get a pass at the front gate and where to meet me.
The wind blew colder, and I stood with my parachute bag in the small white light put out by the pay phone. I was trembling from the cold, or something else. Above, the stars were bitter against black, and all at once none of this seemed real to me. It was as though I was sleepwalking when I saw a set of headlights coming at me. An aching sort of dread seized me, as though I’d found myself in the worst kind of dream, a dream of getting out of Lebanon, and I did not want to wake up before the car came to me. I had the terrible feeling that none of this was real, that I might come to back in the bunker, pressed into the sweaty nylon of my cot, with months to go until rotation.
Margot’s car stopped next to me, and for a long moment she just stared. Her mouth opened slightly, and she told me later that she was shocked by how thin I was. The wind pulled at me, and I stood there like some kind of sunburned scarecrow, the gaunt doppelgänger of the buff jock who’d left nine months ago.
I finally said, “Hi.”
She got out of the car and held me, and I was amazed by how warm and whole she felt in my arms. She was real. This was real, and I was alive.
“I have presents for you,” we both said at once.
We laughed, and she kissed me, and when she pulled away, I could see something like worry in her eyes. I wasn’t the only one who felt this wasn’t real. I was viscerally different from the man who’d gone away in May. My eyes burned through her, like they burned through everything else.
We checked in to a hotel on the beach, drank champagne, and made love, and then I held her as she slept, and through the windows I could hear the surf pounding as a whole gale blew from the immaculately clear sky. I slept and woke and woke again.
I pulled my arm from under Margot’s shoulders and walked to the windows. The first purple light of dawn was spreading across the Atlantic. The sea was rough, heaving upon itself and shimmering like a sheet of hammered silver. The coming day wavered on the horizon in a mirage brought on
by the bitter cold. It was maybe twenty minutes before sunrise, and across the sea it was noon.
In Sidon and Tripoli, in Shabra, Chatilla, and along the corniche of Beirut, the sun would now be high, and I knew the muezzin’s call was drifting from the minarets. It was something I had heard many times in Lebanon, in city and countryside, from minarets pocked with tank fire, from tiny loudspeakers attached to mud-brick country mosques. In a trilling cry would come the Thuhur, the noon call and warning to the faithful.
In the name of God,
the infinitely compassionate and merciful.
Praise be to God, Lord of all the worlds . . .
Before me was the ocean, and beyond it, a different world revolved. In the mosques and on the streets, in the hovels of wrecked buildings, on prayer mats, knelt the faithful, all facing Mecca. Their prayer was now my own.
Guide us on the straight path,
the path of those who have received your grace;
not the path of those who have brought down wrath,
nor of those who wander astray. Amen.
* * *
BOOK THREE
A
RAKE’S
PROGRESS
* * *
SOME TIME IN THE SUN
I’M NOT SURE THEY KNEW what to do with us when we came back. I am certain we did not know what to do with ourselves. It was odd enough to return from a war; it was stranger still to realize that almost no one in the United States seemed to have the vaguest concern about what had happened in Lebanon. There were no flag burners, no flag wavers; there was nothing.
The lotus-eating had apparently spread even to our own command. On my first day back, I had the amusing experience of trying to convince a Filipino disbursing clerk that I was still alive. I came home to discover that my pay and allowances had been suspended for seven weeks. Unbeknownst to me, and mercifully never discovered by my family, the navy had listed me as dead on October 23.
Although we’d sent a situation report within minutes of the bombing requesting that SEAL Team Four notify our relatives that we were all right, the Team did nothing. As a result, the entire platoon was carried as “missing” for thirteen days. During this terrible time for our families, no one at SEAL Team Four bothered to pick up a phone or lick a stamp.
Distraught, my father managed to pull navy connections to send me a message, but it didn’t reach me until a week after the bombing. By then my family had endured a daily parade of television crews camped on the front lawn, hoping to catch the delivery of bad news. My mother bravely told the assembled vultures that her son was a marine lieutenant assigned to the multinational peacekeeping force, and she hoped that they would be kind enough to respect our privacy. She did not mention that I was a SEAL, or that the navy had told her nothing.
It had been just as bad for Margot. Perhaps it had been worse. As news of the bombing splashed across the world, her phone stopped ringing. Friends and acquaintances avoided her, and even my own friends at the Team had no news to give. In this time before e-mail and long-distance phone service from the battlefield, Margot found out I’d survived only when she got a letter from me—two weeks after the blast. Until then she had floated in a half-gray limbo of grief.
The fiasco was a symptom of the command climate to which we returned. There had been a regime change at SEAL Team Four; our former CO had been kicked upstairs to the Pentagon. We also had a new XO. The new proprietors were bean counters, and Fifth Platoon was called to task for the amount of equipment we had lost, destroyed, or traded during the tour. Frank was on leave when the new XO, a guy I’ll call Skip, called me in to apply a dose of real navy. He started in and I put up my hand, an extremely rude gesture for a junior officer.
“Did you read our after-action report?” I asked.
“I haven’t gotten around to it,” he said.
Our AAR, a folder almost three inches thick, sat on the corner of his desk. It detailed hundreds of patrols, dozens of countersniper operations, and half a dozen recons up and down the coast, against Syrian and Israeli targets.
“Why don’t you read it, sir?” I asked.
The next day a chief from supply presented me with an MSLR, a materiel lost or stolen report. It listed nearly a hundred items large and small, platoon equipment valued at considerably more than I made in a year. The chief wanted me to sign the form and assume financial responsibility for the lost equipment.
I looked at the list. There was a PRC-77 radio, handset, and antenna that had been blown out of the Zodiac by a mortar round. There was an M-16 rifle dropped while its operator was being extracted by helicopter. In the classic definition of a hot extract, the weapon was lost because the red-hot gun barrel had burned through the weapon’s nylon sling. A pair of night-vision goggles was listed as “returned, destroyed.” No excuse there. They’d been smashed by a .51-caliber bullet after being negligently left atop a bunker while I ducked to consult a map. Uniform items, swim fins, boots, MK-13 signal flares, magazines, ammo cans, empty ammo cans. Batteries for our diving rigs. Web belts and dive socks. Office supplies and the antique Blue-Ray machine we used to print beach charts. The Blue-Ray bit the dust when it broke out of its locker during our passage through the gale.
The supply chief clicked a ballpoint and held it out to me. “Right on the dotted line, sir.”
“I’ll get back to you, Chief,” I said.
I took the half-inch-thick stack of single-spaced pages into the platoon office. The MSLR was crap, and this was a classic case of shit rolling downhill. Our losses had been combat-related, and we had documented each piece of equipment. For supply to make good on replacement gear would require even more paperwork. The easiest thing for them to do was try to hang it on us. I didn’t want to disturb Frank at home on leave, and it turned out I wouldn’t have to.
The enemy’s weakness is always our strength. Skip was a bean counter, and all I had to do was give him the kind of beans that he didn’t want to count. The kind of beans that would give him nightmares for the rest of his life.
We had returned with a connex box full of East Bloc weapons, war booty from our peacekeeping mission. Some of the weapons we had captured, some we had traded for, some we had acquired through a back-channel equipment swap brokered by Beirut’s CIA station chief. In short, this stuff was spooky, it was hot, and it stank, bad. Parked behind my office in a ten-foot-by-ten-foot fiberglass cube was two tons of career killer. Whoever possessed this stuff was immediately open to charges of weapons smuggling. Open to charges, indeed, because we had gotten the weapons back into the U.S., listing the locked, sealed, and inventoried container as “classified communications equipment.”
I prepared an 1149, another form, the kind officers fill out when they take receipt of government equipment. With Doc’s help, I relisted all the items we’d brought home. AK-47 assault rifles subcategorized by state of manufacture, Russian, Chinese, Romanian. Machine guns of similar provenance; Dragunov sniper rifles; snappy little AK-74s; Marakov pistols; Mosin Nagant sniper rifles (with scopes); Russian, East German, and Czech uniforms; RPG-7, RPG-16, and RPG-18 antiarmor weapons. Rocket grenades and motors. Syrian army uniforms (stained), kufiyahs and shumaggs, and Symtex plastic explosive traded for MRE battle rations. My favorites I saved for last; a pair of nasty little Skorpion machine pistols, the favorite weapon of the Red Brigades and the Bader-Mienhof gang. I recorded the serial numbers of each weapon, noting with an asterisk those we’d acquired during the CIA trade. You know, the ones with the serial numbers ground off.
I also prepared a memorandum for the record stating that we had been verbally tasked to acquire foreign weapons during our tour to augment the training armory of the Team. This statement was true, and I named names, dates, and times. I further indicated that I no longer wished to be responsible for this equipment, as I was fully aware of the regulations applying to spoils taken in battle. The entire document I classified SECRET, SPECAT, NOFORN, meaning “secret, special category, not for foreign dissemination.” I
knew that the yeoman of the watch would have to log the document, so my list and letter would not go astray. I dropped the file on top of Skip’s in basket and went home for the weekend.
By Monday afternoon a flatbed truck from SPECWARGRU-2 had picked up the connex box and taken it away. No one at SEAL Team Four had signed for the weapons, and the armorer chief at the group had declined to sign the copy of the inventory I’d prepared. He said he’d send me a copy after he made his own count of the weapons. That never happened. I never heard about or saw the inventory again.
I’d won the first round, but I would go on very quickly to lose the war. This was a staff game, a war of memos, modified orders, and paper fortifications. It was a battlefield where inaction held the keys to victory, as sure as fire superiority did in the real world. Foolishly, I thought I’d put one over on Skip as the platoon scattered for Christmas leave.
I had toddled into an ambush.
When we returned from Christmas, we were squarely in the sights of the head shed. Indolence would be their initial weapon. I was supposed to assume command of the Fifth, and Frank was to transfer. Frank was kept on, seemingly indefinitely. When he asked, there seemed to be some inexplicable delay in his orders. That delay was essentially that the Team would not let him go. Frank was to join the MILGRU, the military advisory group, in El Salvador, another plum combat assignment. His orders stated that he was to proceed no later than January 15, and Skip made sure he stayed put until January 14 at 2355 hours. This bit of discourtesy denied Frank the traditional week’s leave and proceed time, and allowed him twelve hours to pack, change continents, and jump into another war. But at least Frank got out. He was grinning like a monkey when I dropped him at NAS Norfolk.
“See you in Malibu,” he said, lobbing a mock salute back at the terminal.
Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL Page 30