The building had been a PLO hospital before the marines assumed it. Four levels of galleries and balconies all faced in to each other above a tiled central courtyard. It had once been a beautiful building, but it was burned and gutted by either the advancing Israelis or the retreating Palestinians, and on its vertical surfaces, inside and out, were dark streaks from fire smoke. The interior was ravaged, ceiling tiles and marble facings torn away, exposing inert electrical wire and air-conditioning vents.
The rooms were filled with field desks, radios, maps, mosquito netting, and aluminum cots. About 350 marines lived and worked here. The headquarters units slept beside their desks. The offices of operations and staff officers were marked with hand-lettered signs. A stenciled sign in front of the building said BEIRUT HILTON. Nobody called it that; the place was always called the “battalion landing team headquarters,” or simply the BLT. This was the building that the world would come to know as Beirut’s marine barracks.
Frank and I looked around. There were empty rooms. Plenty of space to stow our gear, hot food, latrines, and showers—occasionally even hot showers—out back. The walls were solid, and that meant we wouldn’t have to dig a hole for cover.
As we checked the place out, we got the hairy eyeball from every marine who passed us. SEALs do not wear rank or tridents (the badges that identify us as SEALs) on our combat uniforms. Frank’s jungle boots were not bloused into his trousers, and I wasn’t even wearing boots—I was wearing high-top canvas coral shoes. Our hair was long. We both had Fu Manchu mustaches. We were carrying CAR-15s, not M-16s. We were not wearing the starched four-peaked “covers” marines and sailors are expected to wear with their battle dress uniforms. Pushed back on our heads were floppy jungle hats, and the front of mine was folded like Paddington the bear’s. Marines have a great affinity for spit and polish. SEALs do not.
“I detect a potential lifestyle conflict,” Frank said.
I agreed. Compared to the way our platoon dressed, Frank and I looked like recruiting posters. If we moved into the BLT, it wouldn’t be long until some marine major blew a gasket.
On the drive back to the beach, Frank and I came up with a dozen sour-grape reasons why we wouldn’t move into the BLT.
“Too far from the water,” I said.
“Too close to the brass,” he said.
“Too many jarheads.”
We both knew this meant we’d have to build a place on Green Beach. “Build” meant digging a bunker and foxholes. And Green Beach, though close to the water, was far from a perfect position. It was exposed as hell. If—no, when—this place went to shit, we’d be open to the elements.
The American position at Green Beach occupied a strip of coastline along the Beirut-Sidon highway, maybe four hundred yards from the terminal at Beirut International Airport. The position was separated from the highway by three hundred fifty-five-gallon drums filled with tar. This barrier ran the length of Green Beach, sequestering the seventy marines, Seabees, and SEALs stationed there from the busy coastal highway. A twenty-foot watchtower stood at beach center, and the northern and southern approaches were sandbagged machine-gun nests, barbed wire, and cement tank traps.
Still, no one stationed at Green Beach took comfort in the defenses. The marines at the airport and the outposts had buildings to shelter in, and the troops north and south of the runway could take consolation in what was left of the perimeter fence. But Green Beach stood alone. It was isolated from all other American or allied positions. Green Beach was backed across the highway by a fifty-foot sandstone bluff. Although the terrain provided some cover from snipers, it also screened us from supporting fire from the other marine emplacements.
Put tactically, we were in an unsupported position. Put in grunt lingo, our shit was in the breeze.
Although the tar barrels were adequate defense against small-arms fire, any vehicle with sufficient momentum could careen off the highway, crash through the barrier, and come to rest by the flagpole. This was not just a theoretical possibility: The American embassy had been truck-bombed just a month before, and a marine trained an M-60 machine gun on every car that passed on the road. It was cold comfort to think we would probably get the truck-bomb driver who got us.
There were tents at Green Beach, but they were strictly for show. Snipers and artillery attacks were something we lived with seven days a week. Sleeping accommodations were underground. Under Frank’s direction, the platoon dug an eight-by-fifty-foot hole in the sand, reinforced the sides, and roofed it over with Marston matting and two layers of sandbags. We christened our underground condo Rancho Deluxe.
We were safe six feet under, and the rancho was home. Over the coming months, our tents, left nearby as a diversion, would be gradually reduced to ribbons by snipers, ricochets, and shrapnel. By the end of our tour, Rancho Deluxe was a vermin-infested cesspool, but it held up through rocket and artillery attacks and would survive the massive truck bomb that was to destroy the marine barracks.
We settled into the somniferous beginning of our tour.
Our detachment was responsible to the commodore for the security of U.S. naval vessels within the anchorage and for the ships under way in the Beirut AO, or area of operations. We would also be available for tasking from the commander of the landing force (with the concurrence of the commodore). Those odd jobs included reconnaissance, calling in naval gunfire, air strikes and artillery support, courier runs to the embassy, liaison with allied and Lebanese forces, explosive ordnance disposal, diving ser-vices, ship-hull searches, parachute operations, direct-action missions, and underwater demolition. In short, everything that SEALs do. Our AO ran from Sidon in the south to Tripoli in the north. Hundreds of square miles of ocean and a like area of land.
Frank decided on a rotation of forces. Doc Jones and I would take boat crews Charlie and Delta. Frank and Tim, our LPO, would take boat crews Alpha and Bravo. Two boat crews equaled a SEAL squad—eight shooters. Eight guys, for us, were considered a pretty good-sized group of men.
The arrangement worked like this: One squad would do a week at Rancho Deluxe, the other a week out on the ships and in the Seafox. The squad at Rancho Deluxe would handle land ops and water security in the immediate area of Green Beach; the other squad would take blue-water ops, long-range coastal patrols, and ship security. We’d operate for a week and then switch. The platoon would combine for bigger operations, recons and direct action, countersniper ops, or deep penetrations into the hills. Later, when airplanes started getting shot at, we would establish another rotation, a detachment aboard the helicopter carrier Iwo Jima. This team would work directly for the battle-group staff and provide combat search and rescue (CSAR) for downed aircraft and aircrew.
Again the arrangement was pure Giffland. He generously split the command, placing great faith in me and my two boat crews. Our assignments rotated, and through them all, I enjoyed Frank’s confidence and a terrific latitude for self-expression. I have heard of few other SEAL elements, anywhere, that were allowed to function in such a joint-command mode. The arrangement worked well. At the beginning of the tour, we never did the same thing long enough to get bored.
By the end of summer, boredom would not be an issue.
HOLLYWOOD PREPARES YOU in a certain way for war. The set design of the movie Saving Private Ryan typifies the war-demolished building as imprinted on the American psyche. It bears little resemblance to the destruction of real war. To the uninitiated, devastation not fitting the Hollywood stereotype is at first perceived as surreal, even fake. It is only after considerable exposure to real battle damage, legitimately bombed buildings, and authentic death that the vapid images of Hollywood are forsaken.
Until you look into a building hit by artillery, or see with your own eyes a house chopped open by rocket fire, you have only a film director’s impressions. These are the gutted provincial buildings of World War II Europe, their raised stone walls burned on ragged edges and roof tiles broken and scattered about the street. In Lebanon I was constan
tly amazed by the resilience of the buildings. Almost every structure in the city had been touched by battle, and most showed an astounding stubbornness against destruction. Into the sides of single-story houses would be punched neat two-and-a-half-foot holes, the leavings of 105-millimeter tank rounds. Through these holes could be seen utterly obliterated interiors. Walking by a targeted building, I noticed that the holes appeared to have been punched with a blunt instrument, as though the ends of a telephone pole had been jammed through the walls. The damage to the exteriors would often appear slight. The real shit happened inside, where the people were. All traces of human habitation were blown to tatters by the shaped charge effect of armor-piercing shells. Often a house would stand through four or five hits. When there was no secondary fire, the edges of the entry holes looked like wet cement.
We came to learn that the Lebanese civil war was a struggle unique in modern warfare, a contest continually escalated and abated, an ongoing battle among a minimum of five sworn and ruthless enemies. Alliances in this war were brief and utilitarian, and of the several sides, none enjoyed any distinct numerical or tactical advantage.
In Lebanon considerations of terrain and technology short-circuited the fundamental precepts of maneuver warfare. There was little daily change in forces or position. With the rare exception of those times when the U.S. built a fire under the Lebanese army, there were almost no attempts by any side to capture ground. Druze, PLO, Amal, Hezbollah, and Phalangists all had a piece of the pie, and none seemed particularly disposed to take from his neighbor. So it went month after month, each of the major players controlling one part or another of the capital city, leaving the central government of the Lebanese Republic paralyzed, ineffectual, and beholden to seventeen-year-old kids working roadblocks at city street corners.
Each of the antagonists maintained a bastion of terrain, either mountainous or urban, unassailable citadels that were the respective power bases. These areas remained undisputed, defended chiefly by spectacular canyons or the raw human arithmetic of attack and defense in urban terrain. Such considerations made it inopportune to bring ground forces to bear. Without infantry to seize and control territory, the players remained static, dug in and unwilling to make the sacrifice of an assault.
This stalemate engendered a wholly original form of warfare, a kind of megasniping in which mobile long-range weapons were key. From deep within the sanctity of home turf, rockets, artillery, and mortars were used to drop high explosive on troop concentrations and area targets. When legitimate military targets were not available, opposing gunners were content to hammer a rival’s “hostile” civilian centers. Neighborhoods, schools, and markets were hit, requiring retaliation in kind. Other neighborhoods would be hit, leading to an escalation of targeting, the second tier more outrageous than the last. Inevitably mosques, churches, and hospitals came under the gun, leading to more vigorous retaliation, more civilian casualties, etc. The cycle was arrested by cease-fires that came and went like daydreams. Breaks in the fighting frequently lasted less than an hour.
In the media the daily passage of shells from place to place was called an “artillery duel,” a careless and inappropriate metaphor that somehow conjured the image of two noble adversaries aiming at each other’s guns. As though it were good guy against bad guy, not lunatic militiamen hammering the living shit out of women and children huddled in the basement shelters of their homes.
At the start of the tour, there were plenty of opportunities to observe the interface of architecture and artillery. Foot and jeep patrols through the slums around the airport were especially educational. Spreading to the east and north of the runways was an area the marines soon named Hooterville, after the ramshackle heap of buildings in the cartoon of the same name. A warren of dirt streets and tumbledown cinder-block structures, Hooterville was probably the most frequently shelled urban area on the planet.
In the time before the Israeli withdrawal, marines made daily excursions from the airport, north, east, and infrequently, south. SEAL squads occasionally accompanied these daylight patrols to learn the arrangement of the streets, visit the outlying marine outposts, and generally get the lay of the land.
The other units within the multinational forces also walked the beat. North of the airport, in West Beirut, the French Foreign Legion patrolled aggressively. East of the runways, in the foothills of the Shouf, a British reconnaissance company was stationed. A no-nonsense outfit straight from a deployment in Northern Ireland, the Brits used armored cars called Ferrets to conduct daily sweeps. Immediately north of the airport was a wild no-man’s-land, untroubled by the Italian San Marco battalion who rarely, if ever, stepped from their walled compound. The Italians let the locals party hard. The Italian sector came to be known as Khomeiniville, and patrolling through it, or just flying over it, would become more and more of a thrill as the summer ground on.
Since the bombing of the U.S. embassy in April, the American and British legations were doubled up in a well-guarded and heavily fortified compound along the corniche in West Beirut. Hostile activity in Khomeiniville frequently closed the coast highway and prevented vehicular and foot traffic from moving north. The embassies were often cut off from the troops that were supposed to protect them.
In the beginning of the tour, the admixture of French, Italian, British, and American sectors was made livelier by the presence of the Israeli Defense Forces. Dug in to positions south of downtown, IDF armor and infantry units manned pillboxes, roadblocks, and fighting holes scattered through the Italian, American, and British sectors. These emplacements signaled the high-water mark of Israeli conquest during the Lebanese-Israeli war. In the time before the multinational force became the prime target, the IDF was sniped at constantly, which kept a constant volume of steel in the air. It was the prudent peacekeeper who knew where the IDF was, and where might be their enemies, lest one become embroiled in an argument not of one’s making.
Before the lid came off, the marines patrolled twice daily, ostensibly keeping order in the sector around the airport. Peace in the city was a dream that would sour into a lurid nightmare. Walking patrol in broad daylight with half a company of marines was a trip. A gaggle of forty men is a parade for SEALs, not an operational force. Besides working in much smaller units, SEALs almost never operate in daylight and would never do so by choice. But this was peacekeeping, and the rules were different. Sometimes the patrols were as unreal as moonwalks. We usually moved parallel to the main body of troops, or sometimes parallel and trailing, so we might be able to react and envelop any opposing force. We were in our spec-ops battle kit: flop hats, combat vests, and individual radios, the eight-man squad packing two M-60 machine guns. Each M-60 gunner carried six hundred rounds, and the squad deployed at least two M-203 grenade launchers, as well as a pair of AT-4 antitank rockets and M-14 sniper rifles. The firepower carried by the eight SEALs nearly matched that of the marine platoon.
It was not merely a question of armament. Marine tactics were to muster up, line up, and walk the route. Period. Their patrols were not arrayed or prepared for combat. If there was danger, the marines would be the last dumb fuckers on the face of the planet to know it. In flak jackets and rucksacks, with their weapons slung and unloaded, they couldn’t react. Accompanying the marines into Hooterville, I always had the feeling that the patrols were the bait and we were the hammer.
Much of the way, we hugged walls, walked backward, and leapfrogged boat crew upon boat crew, covering intersections and rooftops as the patrol lumbered on its way. Covering and moving, we’d jog five steps to every one taken by the marines. In close alleyways, there would be not a breath of wind, and the air would lay so thick that just breathing was a dull labor to which you applied the greater part of your thoughts. The heat burrowed into your skull, numbed your senses, and made simply walking an effort.
Checking doorways and alleys, we’d trot through grimy neighborhoods where shell-smashed buildings hunkered beside half-constructed ones. Above us on walls and
balconies poked hand-lettered signs in Arabic saying God knew what.
In some parts of town, children clamored by us, saying in English, “Hello! What’s your name? Give me cocoa!” To the delight of the kids, we’d hand over packages of hot-chocolate powder from our MREs. They would swarm around, touching us, laughing, doing weird dances. There were toy pistols, cap guns, everywhere. They poked at you, in the hands of children, from around corners and behind walls. At first they would stop your heart, and then you’d seen a million of them, and in the hot afternoons, you got numb. Some marines didn’t even look. They just walked.
In Khomeiniville the hostility of the people was another kind of heat. Predominantly Shiite Muslim, the people there did not dig the multinational force. They held a separate, religiously mandated hatred for Americans. It was here that we really walked patrol. Each face was a blade. People spat at us, made contemptuous gestures, and pushed their kids indoors. As we approached blocks of houses, the women would ululate to one another in the high, trilling lu-lu-lu-lu that was a signal of both warning and contempt. The sound would echo off the buildings, a bizarre, stuttering howl. It made your skin crawl, and mercifully, American incursions into this part of town were short. But sometimes we were in longer than we wanted to be.
In the narrow, serpentine streets, it was not difficult to become disoriented. In the labyrinth of buildings and blind alleys, you could believe that your compass was screwed, then, trusting your sense of location, press on in some inane direction until you were hopelessly and completely lost. Wandering patrols might emerge in places Americans were definitely not supposed to be. When patrols stumbled through market squares that had never in history been profaned by the boots of Christian infidels, the eyes of the locals were like saucers. Whatever was going on would stop outright. If fruit vendors were in the process of making change, they would freeze, clutching money and merchandise like statues until we left. Whole streets would halt, and the people would stand and gawk as though the patrol were from Uranus. Other times people would only laugh, smile, and point; it depended.
Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL Page 18
