The first issue was parking, and for that I always carried two open packs of Marlboro cigarettes. Immediately after parking the car, I’d give three cigarettes to the first kid I saw, then I’d promise him the rest of the pack for watching my car. I never had anyone say no. I’d walk half a block in the direction of dinner, select a kid at random from the throng, and make him the same deal, three cigarettes and the rest of the second pack. This kid’s job was to watch the first kid. I’m pretty sure this works, because I have never been car-bombed or ambushed as I returned to my vehicle.
Safe restaurants have a number of things in common. Almost invariably, these establishments are mom-and-pop operations, and Mom and Pop usually have at least one grown child living in the United States. This you’ll know because the owners will almost immediately mention it to you. There might also be American icons about: football posters featuring the Miami Dolphins, Elvis on velvet, or the occasional Budweiser clock. Skittish, surly, and hostile proprietors were to be avoided, as were locations openly associated with political parties. You might dine at a place that had a poster of Che Guevara on the wall, but it was usually a onetime deal. If you sat down and everyone else got up and left, it was time to pick another restaurant.
We all had favorite places, but it was best not to be predictable. The joints were usually small, sometimes Indian or Chinese, but mostly local. A suitable restaurant contained a dozen tables at most and had to be somewhat shielded from the street. A few thick pillars or an archway or two was sufficient front cover. The place also had to have at least two rear exits, and the exits, like the front doors, had to be visible at all times from one’s seat. There were a few other things to look for—thick tables, few windows, and a number of other diners between you and the front door. Heavy tables were better than light tables for absorbing shrapnel, and other diners made it difficult to throw or roll a grenade across a restaurant. As in Lebanon, we took the presence of children to be an indication of safety.
If dining alone, I sat with my back to a corner; if I was dining with a companion, one of us was responsible for watching the front while the other watched the back. It was unwise to eat with a person you would not trust with your life. As you sat down and looked at the silverware, you applied the left-hand rule, closing your eyes briefly and gripping the seat of the chair with your left hand, then imagining yourself with your pistol held out in front of you, backing toward the rear exit, left hand extended behind. This path was loaded in memory, as were various what-ifs for drive-by shootings, grenade attacks, and car bombings.
Now on to the menu. The food in Latin America is good, often terrific, but tends to reassemble a quartet of ingredients: tortillas, chicken, rice, and beans. I ate anywhere deemed tactically sound, including from street stalls and pushcarts, but I have a few ironclad rules. I am not one of those people who goes to Bogotá and complains about the hamburgers; I am, by and large, omnivorous. My rules have allowed me to feed in some of the most down-market and ungodly places on earth with little damage to my digestive tract. The only food trouble I’ve ever had abroad was from a bad salad served by the U.S. Marines in Lebanon.
When I am out on the economy, I drink only liquids with bubbles: beer, soda from a bottle, and agua con gas, or sparkling water. Rarely fruit juice, and never fresh-squeezed juice. Rum, Mescal, or liquor neat, and never with ice. I eat my vegetables when I’m back in the States and avoid lettuce, greens, and raw onions anywhere south of Key West, as they can often be shigella vectors. I will generally eat any domestic animal and several others, including cayman, nutria, peccary, and goat, if it is barbecued and well done. As far as cheeses go, hard ones yes, soft ones no. Crispy pupusas, the Salvadoran cousin of an empanada, can be had throughout Central America, and they are usually nontoxic if eaten at 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
I avoid seafood, especially clams, crabs, oysters, and mussels, but have never been burned by conch. A favorite is sopa de caracol, conch and coconut soup, and ticucos, a killer Honduran tamale with beans. Hot sauce and chili peppers always, as I have this dearly held theory that no human pathogen could possibly survive in a bottle of Tabasco sauce. As you might suspect, Central America has neither the cuisine nor locale for fine wine. To wash it all down there are a number of primo beers, Nacional, Imperial, Port Royal, Salva Vida, and the ubiquitous Panama. Although I infrequently eat dessert, I am a sucker for flan, especially the Panamanian sort, cool and creamy inside and slightly caramelized on top.
I’ll lay no claim to being a Latin American food expert, as most of the time I spent in country I was in the field, eating MREs, rice, bananas, plantains, conch, or other things we could scrounge or barter for. I made regular trips into the urban areas, most often to give reports or to be debriefed, and I seldom stayed more than two or three nights.
Once, when Greg, Mike Darby, and I were on an overnight to Tegucigalpa, we checked in to our rooms and agreed to meet in the lobby for dinner. An hour later, we all appeared, shaved, showered, and dressed in identical black aloha shirts. The shirts had been issued to us by a three-letter government agency and were supposed to allow us to “blend.” They were cut wider under the left arm to accommodate a pistol. The wooden buttons were backed with Velcro, allowing them to be torn open rapidly to access the shoulder holster. There is something inherently preposterous about a Hawaiian shirt tailored to conceal a handgun. We stood around like idiots, each in identical togs with Bianchi side-draw shoulder holsters, packing Beretta 92 SBF automatic pistols.
Greg grinned. “You can’t lose,” he said, “when you dress like I do.”
It was a line from ZZ Top, and from that moment on we were the Sharp-Dressed Men. The shirts were ridiculous, helmeted kahunas riding surfboards, but we always wore them on liberty and carried our pistols like a posse of sunburned gangsters. We were certain that chicks dug us.
I got to put my shirt to the test one night in the bar of the Days Inn in Tegucigalpa. The physical plant of the hotel differed little from the cigarette-burned joints scattered on the side of the interstate, but at this time in Honduras, it was probably the nicest hotel in the country. It was one of the safest, located a bit out of town, with multiple approaches and escape routes; the compound was surrounded by a six-foot cinder-block wall topped with broken glass and barbed wire. It was a safe place to meet, and we were sometimes sent there to recoup. The bar was air-conditioned to 65 degrees, and there was MTV on the satellite dish. The beer was always subzero.
I had attended a briefing at the embassy that afternoon, filling the military attaché in on the nonevents of my most recent deployment to Puerto Lempira. I was to return to Puerto Limpera in the morning, and a week later, I was due to rotate back to Puerto Rico. I was hot and tired, and the charm was rapidly going out of my tropical vacation. It was a weeknight, and the hotel was nearly empty. I ate a plato tipico at the bar and was proceeding to drink myself good-looking while the bartender wiped glasses and wondered why the hell I didn’t go back to my room.
About ten o’clock, two women entered the bar. They were in their twenties, attractive, and I guessed from their clothing that they were either Canadian or American. They were both tanned; one had shoulder-length dark hair, and the other was blond with her hair cut short like an athlete’s. I nodded as they sat down across the bar, since it was rude, as well as silly, to ignore them in an empty bar. After a few moments we’d tried to send each other a drink, and I walked over and introduced myself.
Lucky for me, they were both named Vicky. They were Peace Corps volunteers who had just finished a tour in a place called Copan, near the Guatemala border. They were outprocessing in Tegucigalpa the next day and heading back to the U.S. the day after that. They were both from New England. Blond Vicky had rowed crew back in school, and I did my best to be a charming ex-oarsman. We drank pretty steadily for about an hour, and I was able to fend off any inquiries about who I really was and what I really did by being extremely interested in the elementary school where they’d taught in Copan.
We had a shot of tequila. Blond Vicky looked at me hard. “So, what brings you to Tegucigalpa?” she asked.
The yacht-delivery line wasn’t going to work. We were a hundred miles from the ocean. I answered with a question: “What are you doing here?”
It was a great opportunity for her to improv, but she didn’t take the bait. “We’re in the Peace Corps,” she said.
“In school, did you row port or starboard?” I asked.
“You never said what you did for a living.”
“I work for the government,” I said. It was true enough, and part of what’s called a “layer.” When asked, I would reveal that I worked for the government; when pressed, I would say I worked for the Executive Department of the government; if pinned by an inquisitive person at an embassy party, I would say that I worked for the Department of Defense. The mundane fib of “defense contractor” was safe enough.
“What kind of government contractor are you?” she asked.
“A well-behaved one,” I said.
She smiled. “What are you, some kind of spy?” Making a show of patting me down, she moved her hand to the side of my shirt. She patted down my right side and under my left arm. Then her hand fell on the Walther PPK tucked into my shoulder holster. I can tell you with only a small amount of vanity that she was instantly smitten.
Twenty minutes later, we were sprawled on the bed in my room. As we kissed, I was sober enough to remember that I had a wife at home. The pang of conscience made me flinch. “I’m married,” I finally said.
She kissed me again. “So am I.” We kissed more, and it started going somewhere. She sat up and straightened her blouse. “Maybe I’d better go check on Vicky.”
“That might be a good idea.”
She looked at me the way she had after the tequila shot. “Are you all right with this?” she asked.
I heard my voice deep and flat, as though I were listening to myself speak down a long tube. “Yeah, I’m all right.”
She left and pulled the door closed behind her. I lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. I made myself try to think of nothing, nothing being a fine substitute for wanting to follow her. At last I peeled off my shirt, slipped my arms out of my shoulder holster, and placed my gun on the nightstand.
I was in the bathroom splashing my face when I heard a knock on the door. “Who is it?”
“It’s us,” one of the Vickies whispered.
I opened the door, and they were both there, the blond Vicky and the brunette Vicky. The blond kissed me, and then the brunette kissed me. They didn’t say anything as they pushed their way into the room and the door closed behind them. We made out on the bed for a while in a big pile, and then the clothing started to come off. I watched them kiss and undress each other, and whatever objections I had to being an unfaithful husband wafted away like smoke. We made love until I had to leave for the airport in the morning, and I never saw them again.
On the helicopter back down-country I sat in the door gunner’s seat, letting the wind snap into me. I watched the red-dirt towns and the dusty roads pass below until the ground became low and fingers of mangrove reached inland, and then the broad water of Barra de Caratasca yawned under us. Again I tried not to think of anything.
I was back in the bush outside of Puerto Lempira, lying on a simulated ambush position with a detachment of Contras. From out of the darkness, I watched a three-foot-long fer-de-lance slither over my rifle barrel. The viper was too close for me to try to pull away, so I remained perfectly still. As it moved through a thin sliver of moonlight, its scales showed silver-gray, as if it were made of chain mail. For a long moment it remained across my weapon. Light stripes and a dark diamond pattern covered its wide back. Its eye was like a shiny onyx bead. I held my breath until it disappeared back into the gloom, its skin hissing over the plastic foregrip of my rifle.
I count myself lucky that the serpent chose not to strike me dead.
THERE WERE SEVERAL more deployments, and MTTs were dispatched to the Dominican Republic. We hosted several deputations from the Teams up north, and Greg and I ran combat-swimmer training for platoons undergoing PDT. The Caribbean was quiet, and the tour stretched out. Frank was busy in El Sal, and occasionally we’d hear of some exploit or near-miss. While Frank was kicking ass, I was getting dangerously bored. I drank like a bastard and ran barely enough to keep the fat off.
Bored or not, I’d inherited Frank’s command ethic, and when a detachment was called upon to tour South America, I sent Greg and boat crews Delta and Charlie. The exercise was called UNITAS, and the tour was what we liked to call “low intensity, high per diem.” Strictly peacetime, it was a series of exercises and special-warfare demonstrations for our South American allies. It was all goodwill, a four-month grip-and-grin. I would have loved to go, but Fifth Platoon’s mission was to stand by for contingency operations, and that mission was my responsibility. As Frank said, platoons are commanded by platoon commanders, detachments by assistant platoon commanders. Greg and I had grown close; he was a good officer, a wild man on liberty but sane when he operated, and I had complete confidence in him. When they shoved off, our world in Puerto Rico got smaller. Alpha, Bravo, and I remained in Roosevelt Roads, poised to put out any brushfires that might erupt.
We waited. There was no trouble in paradise.
Then I received a call from the SEAL officer detailer in Washington, D.C., or rather, the detailer’s secretary, a no-nonsense lady named Margrethe Foster. Margrethe is the Moneypenny of the SEAL Teams. Detailers come and go, but Margrethe remains. She is the power behind the throne, the woman who knows where all the bodies are and where all the skeletons are buried. She’s put a few skeletons in the ground herself.
“Okay, Pfarrer,” she said, “your orders came in.”
I waited while the connection from Washington crackled and hissed.
“You’re going to SEAL Team Six.”
* * *
BECOMING A JEDI
THE SUPPLY CHIEF was in a hurry because it was time to go home. I’d shown up late, with an inventory half an inch thick, just as he was pulling closed the steel-and-wire mesh door that separated his office and warehouse from the passageway. He grunted as I handed over my paperwork, equipment I’d need for my course in Green Team, the training cell of SEAL Team Six. The other twenty or so members of my training class had drawn their kits over the last several weeks as they arrived and checked in to the Team.
I was late for an unsurprising reason. When I received orders to Six, the commanding officer of SEAL Team Four called me in Puerto Rico and attempted to get me to decline the transfer. He said he had a great position at the Pentagon for me, an assignment that would be better for my career. As far as I knew I had no career, and I had no desire to serve at the Pentagon. I politely but firmly refused. My orders were to report aboard SEAL Six no later than September 15, and I was looking forward to the change. But through acts of either inertia or contempt, I was ordered to remain in Puerto Rico until September 14. Like Frank Giffland, I had been given one day to check out of my old command and in to my new one.
All day on the fifteenth, I had dashed around the SEAL Team Six compound, schlepping paperwork, getting ID badges, drawing weapons, parachutes, diving rigs, and radios, much to the consternation of clerks and technicians who told me this should have been done weeks ago. I learned pretty quickly that being a Green Team member didn’t cut much ice at Six. None of the support guys I dealt with were even SEALs, but they all gave me a hard time. I made no excuses and asked no favors, but I soon rounded up what I needed. Supply was my last stop and the biggest haul. There were more than two hundred items on my gear list, everything from desert cammies to arctic overwhites, ice boots to shower shoes.
The chief frowned. “When do you need
this?”
“Tonight,” I said. “I start training tomorrow.”
He pushed open the door reluctantly, and I followed him into supply. He removed a folder from a file drawer. “We didn’t think you were coming,” he said.
I’m sure he would have been delighted if I’d been killed by land crabs in Puerto Rico.
“What’s your operator number?” he asked.
“One-five-six,” I said.
He shook his head. “We already have a One-five-six.”
Before I could ask to pick a new number, like 007, the chief’s eyes fell on a flat cart loaded chest-high with duffel bags. It was an individual operator’s load-out, all the equipment I would need to draw. The number 205 was stenciled neatly on the bags.
“I got a full load-out right over there. You have a problem with changing your number?”
“Does it get me my gear any faster?”
“You become Two-oh-five, and you can sign right here.”
We were both in a hurry. I signed, and the booty was mine. In the stroke of a pen, I was Operator 205.
“It’s all there,” the chief said, “all of it and then some. I just inventoried it myself.”
I smiled as he locked up the supply room. Thinking I had scored, I shouldered the pile of bags on the cart and wheeled it into the passageway.
“What happened to Operator Two-oh-five?” I asked.
“His parachute didn’t open,” the chief said.
SEAL SIX HAD THE JACK, and it showed. The equipment I’d drawn was the best of everything. I stayed up late that night, stowing the gear in my cage, a locked wire enclosure about the size of a one-car garage. Here I would keep every piece of my operational kit racked, stacked, and ready to fly. Each operator had a cage, his own personal space, warehouse, and dominion. There was little communal equipment. We all drew our own gear and were responsible for maintaining it.
Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL Page 33