Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL

by Pfarrer, Chuck

  But there were spookier things that happened when you were on patrol. Much spookier. Like empty streets—totally empty: abandoned bicycles, stores with their doors open and no one behind the counter, empty baby carriages. The streets would be deserted, as though the people had been lifted in midheartbeat off the face of the planet. The only sound would be the trickle of the thin ocher stream of sewage that ran down the middle of the dirt street.

  It didn’t take a tactical genius to figure out what had made the population take cover, and in these situations, lost or not, you kept moving. In places where portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini covered every square inch of wall space, and Iranian flags hung from empty balconies, you kept moving. And children were what you really looked for. They had grown up in this place, weaned on the sound of artillery and ambush, and they knew when the shit was coming like kids in Cleveland know how many days until Christmas. These kids lived in the streets, played in the streets, and saw everything. On a daylight patrol or on a jeep run, you watched the children. Where there were no children, there was always danger.

  As abruptly as the buildings had risen around us, the alley-wide streets would open to dirt roads cutting hot green fields, heading south back to the airport. As we trudged down the road, an endless stream of trucks, cars, and buses would pass, dragging behind them a jetsam of plastic bags and long gritty plumes of dust. The scraggly fields spread east to the foothills, low plots of vegetables worked over by squatters. The patrols would stagger file on the rutted roads, and the SEALs would walk behind to cover the withdrawal, scanning rooftops as the patrol crossed the wire perimeter and reentered the airport. A three-hour walk would often leave me trembling with adrenaline and exhaustion.

  In this manner, through the months of May and June, we learned the city. The modus operandi became foot patrols through Hooterville and vehicle sweeps into Khomeiniville and West Beirut. We sometimes attached ourselves to marine jeep patrols but more often worked on our own, either on embassy runs or liaison trips to meet up with the Foreign Legion companies stationed in West Beirut. Our jaunts were balls-to-the-wall: two jeeps and eight men howling down the boulevards as fast as we could drive, pulling onto medians to pass stopped traffic. A rifleman stood in the front seat, swinging his weapon over the windscreen to halt opposing traffic at intersections. We didn’t stop for lights, traffic jams, or the khaki-clad traffic police. Automatic weapons were the right-of-way. We pointed the muzzles into the windows of stopped cars on our right and left with serious “Get back” looks on our faces.

  In the rear seats of the jeep, you tried to watch everything, the cars and street corners, the rooftops and windows, the million balconies. The wind against your skin was heaven; it was cool, and it meant that you were moving, and in movement there was at least the illusion of safety. Cooking down the roads too fast, you hoped, for snipers to track. In our hearts, we knew better. There wasn’t one of us who couldn’t ding a driver in a moving car at a hundred yards. Knowing the art of the possible, we keenly watched the roofs.

  On my first run to the embassy, Bubba darted our jeep through third-world traffic as though it were nothing. Cars screeched to within a coat of paint of our fenders, their drivers shaking two fingers at us in an Arab gesture that I am certain does not mean “Peace be with you.” Through it all, Bubba would grin his insane hillbilly driving smile and press the accelerator to the floor.

  Jeep patrols played out in an incredible montage of poverty, wealth, people, vegetable markets, ruin, billboards, and grazing goats. Closed rues would open at a turn to grand boulevards, and the dense mass of belle epoque buildings would tumble to rubble-strewn urban canyons. From Casablanca to Armageddon in the space of a city block.

  There were parts of the city where the obliteration was symmetrical and complete. In these places, the roads were dirt and cement dust, fine as talcum powder; the streets were smooth and white, the wreckage almost blinding when the sun was high. Shattered concrete and rebar lay on either side, sometimes two and three stories high. Roads were bulldozed through square blocks in a perfect grid pattern, like newsreel footage of the ruins of Nagasaki. Plastic bags and tatters of clothing fluttered from cracks in the smashed buildings and blew down the street, the city of death littered with the possessions of its victims.

  Driving past the flattened buildings, the reek of putrefying flesh would drift over the jeep like a shadow, beyond abominable or nauseating or any other word you could use to qualify a smell. It was an odor that was positively evil. In a vague way, you sensed it constantly in the city. It was a lurid fetor that worked its way into your clothes, burned into your senses, and made your stomach twitch. Twisting up from the filthy streets, dust devils roiled into the heat, coming at us like ghosts, like evil genies. We would pull bandanas up to cover our faces, but the stink would follow, clutching at us until, hours later, we could jump into the sea with all our gear on, hoping mother ocean would make the smell go away. But it didn’t, and I never got used to it.

  Pockets of civilization bloomed amid mayhem. Parts of Beirut, affluent and self-consciously cosmopolitan, defiantly continued business as usual. The contrasts could be mind-boggling. On a street loomed over by shattered, desolate skyscrapers, I shot a dog gnawing on a human skull. Ten blocks away, a Jaguar sedan was parked in front of a store window filled with Chanel, Gucci, and Levi’s. Standing in front of the window was a woman shrouded in a burqa, a garment covering her from head to ankle. Her view of the world was a netlike rectangle covering her eyes. As we drove past, I got a glance at her feet. Under the tent, she was wearing a pair of four-inch red stiletto pumps.

  At the end of each patrol, an intel guy would ask where you were and what you saw, and once, being debriefed by a gunnery sergeant who looked like my old man, I told him it was like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Later, when things got bad, we would sit in amazement to think of the places we had naively walked or driven during the first months.

  While we were learning our way around, the population was being militarized. Unknown to us, in May, commencements were being celebrated in the Bekaa valley. Through the month of June, the first graduates of Hezbollah training camps were being infiltrated back into the city. They set about surrounding the American and French positions, quietly surveying targets, timing patrol runs, and doing their homework.

  The joyrides and walks in the park would soon be over. Our tour was about to take a turn for the violent.

  * * *

  THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION

  HE WAS CALLED “the mad mortar man.” He had no other name, no face. He may have been one man or a dozen. He prowled through Hooterville in a pickup truck in which he had installed a Soviet 82-millimeter mortar. He would drive to spots where he had predetermined the fire solutions, then let fly at the compounds. Sometimes he would reach all the way over the airport and hit Green Beach; sometimes he would hit the BLT and the MSSG buildings. It was up to him.

  The worst thing about mortar fire is that it gives no warning. The report of the weapon is so distant, so muffled by surrounding buildings, that you never hear it. The round travels slowly up, up, up, and then straight down on top of you. You never knew about it until it was in your shorts.

  The mad mortar man was special, and his work was as unique and identifiable as his signature. He always fired just a few rounds, maybe four, in rapid succession. Then he would shift fire, driving his truck to some other spot and hitting a different part of the airport. That would be a day’s work, nothing colossal; most of the time he wounded no one, but it was always enough to cancel the movie and the rounds of the chow truck. He really was an annoying son of a bitch.

  It was a hot afternoon a few weeks before the Israeli withdrawal, and the hills above the city had been quiet since sunrise. Carrying my rifle and body armor, I walked from Rancho Deluxe down the berm toward the causeways. I was preparing our Zodiac for a patrol of the anchorage, a daily occurrence we called “hassling fishermen.”

  The causeways were a floating set of piers anchored
to the beach sand, and they were Green Beach’s raison d’être. Daily, landing craft disgorged trucks, jeeps, and trailers onto the piers, supplying the troops with bullets, beans, and butt wipe. Green Beach was the main link to the American, British, French, and Italian warships offshore. The causeways were the logistical nexus of the operation and would become a favorite artillery target of the Druze, PLO, and Syrian troops who occupied the high ground around us.

  It was a little before noon, and I was walking along the second section of causeway, nearly to my boat when I heard it. The slightest sound, but definitely the sound of a mortar round—incoming. When they are fired from a long way off, and if the wind is just so, sometimes you can hear them. As they fall, mortar rounds make a sound like a child whispering “woof-woof- woof.” It is the sound of the tail fins cutting the air. If you hear it, the round is right on top of you, and there’s not an instant to do anything but pucker and die.

  I closed my eyes and thought: I’m dead.

  The round slammed into the water next to the causeway section I was standing on. I don’t recall the explosion. I don’t remember hearing anything except the small sound of the round dropping in on me. But the causeway section was blown into the air, and so was I.

  The explosion ripped my shirt off my body. A huge geyser of sand and water shot into the sky, and the seawater that rained down on me was the temperature of blood. I made a perfect two-point landing—on my head and shoulders. Remarkably, I’d turned a somersault with my CAR-15 held tight in my hand. I got to my feet, reeled two steps, and fell. I was soaking wet. I thought it was with my own blood.

  Under me, the pontoon section was punctured and sinking but was still connected to the rest of the causeway. As I staggered off it, dull thuds echoed from the hills above the airport. More rounds were on the way, and I had to find cover.

  As I crawled off the causeway, I saw a Seabee lying facedown in the sand in front of me, and I grabbed him by the elbow and started to drag and pull and finally run with him back to the bunkers.

  Then it came again: woof-woof-woof. The beach exploded as half a dozen more rounds straddled our position. As we scrambled across thirty yards of beach, rounds hit all around us. Ass over tea kettle, we fell into the bunker. I was covered with sand and soot, and my hair was singed on the left side of my head. I looked like Wile E. Coyote on a bad day. As I patted myself down, checking to make sure my parts were still connected, the Seabee yelled for a corpsman.

  I stood trembling in the bunker and did the math. The burst radius of an 82-millimeter round is nearly fifteen meters. In plain English, any person within a thirty-meter circle may reasonably be expected to be vaporized, killed, or crippled by the explosion. The round had detonated under five feet from me. I should have been turned inside out. But there wasn’t a scratch on my body. To have survived was astounding. The chances of surviving a near-direct hit without a nick were infinitesimal.

  This was the moment that I abandoned atheism.

  My conversion was not an epiphany; it was more an exercise in the scientific method. Until this moment, for me, God had been an unlikely hypothesis. That hypothesis had now been supported by an experiment. A mortar round had knocked me on my ass and spit me out alive and unharmed.

  In Beirut my call sign was Bad Karma. Although I was not cosmic-enabled at the time, I accepted my nom de guerre with an eye to the universal consequences of being a combat soldier. The game was life and death. I ran my operations and was as available to destruction as any person in the city. I knew that the sword of karma swung both ways.

  OUR TACTICS EVOLVED as the summer progressed. As militias coalesced in Hooterville, marine combat posts outside the perimeter came under increasingly frequent attack, and the slums surrounding the Beirut airport became deadly with concealed shooting positions and ambush sites prepared by an ever expanding coterie of bad guys: Druze, PLO, Hezbollah, and Amal. The marine CPs (combat posts) offered fixed targets the militias could fire on when their mood suited. By the end of August these attacks happened several times a week.

  A sign was posted at the main entrance to the airport, a blue-and-gold-stenciled piece of plywood autographed by the cast of the television show Hill Street Blues. It said: HEY, BE CAREFUL OUT THERE. It was right next to the checkpoint where a marine sentry made sure your weapons were unloaded before you left the American sector. When we passed the sentries, holding back the charging handles of our weapons to show we were in compliance, they would pass us a look like “You guys are unloaded, right?” I always smiled back as vapidly as I could. I was not about to write a letter to the mother of one of my SEALs, explaining that I was the officer who got her son killed riding around West Beirut with an unloaded rifle. Multinational force regulations to the contrary, our standing orders were for SEALs to show empty at the checkpoints, drive around the first corner, and put one in the chamber. Locked and cocked, fuckin’ A.

  Intelligence reports indicated that Hezbollah surveillance posts and bunkers were being built inside houses, making them both difficult to detect and harder to attack. Snipers often engaged marine targets from the windows of occupied buildings, trusting that American peacekeepers would be reluctant to fire back at an apartment block filled with women and children. As the attacks on the CPs picked up, foot patrols were very often curtailed or canceled, and vehicle patrols became the norm. Our routes through town varied; and in unpredictability there was safety.

  One of the principal tenants of naval special warfare is that SEALs pick the time and place of combat. We engage the enemy on our terms and in the place of our choosing, or not at all. But this was peacekeeping, and we found ourselves increasingly the hunted, not the hunters. Adhering to the rules of engagement meant we were not free to ply our trade as we wanted, so we maximized what tools we had: surprise, deception, and firepower.

  We varied our routes and the time of patrols, daylight and predawn, and moved in convoys of two or three jeeps (not Humvees). Jeeps were everywhere, and heaped with equipment. A dirty American jeep looked pretty much like a dirty Druze jeep.

  SEALs are given wide latitude in the selection of weapons and equipment. In short, we use what works, no matter who made it. American weapons, particularly the M-16, have a distinctive outline. When Russian-made AK-47s and RPGs, or rocket-propelled grenades, came into our possession, we carried them on patrol. Packing the weapons of the bad guys was one way to lower our profile in town. Our woodland-pattern cammies were also distinctively Yankee. Instead of out-of-the-bag American uniforms, we often wore a mixture of desert and woodland patterns, blue jeans, and camouflage smocks from Czechoslovakia and East Germany. Our Mad Max outfits were less obvious for being eclectic, and made us look like generic Beiruti militiamen; American flags Velcroed to our shoulders kept us within the Geneva rules governing combatants and uniforms. Arab headdresses rounded out our attire. We wore the black and white Palestinian kufiyah, or the red and white Arab shumagg, depending on the neighborhood. Most often we wore the cloths tied around our necks or tucked into the collars of our cammie blouses. Occasionally, we wore them in high style, snugged down on our heads with black ropelike Ogal, very T. E. Lawrence. The purpose of the costumes was to buy us time. To anyone bumping into us, we’d look, at least at a distance, like an indigenous patrol. Even a ten-second delay by our enemies was sufficient time for us to react. Sometimes the props and costumes worked, sometimes they did not.

  We had flexibility in our selection of weapons, and we generally carried heavy. The ability to lay down a withering counterbarrage, what we called a “base of fire,” was the only tactic that would allow us to extract from an ambush. Each four-man boat crew deployed at least one M-60 machine gun or a Russian-made RPK-squad automatic rifle. We each carried a minimum of ten thirty-round magazines for our M-16s. In addition, my CAR-15 was fitted with an M-203 40-millimeter grenade launcher. The 203 was capable of lobbing HE/DP grenades (high-explosive/dual-purpose fragmentation and antiarmor projectiles) to a range of four hundred yards. I patr
olled with a round of “beehive” chambered in my grenade launcher, a specially designed round that turned the 203 into an extremely large shotgun. Instead of buckshot, the beehive round was filled with two hundred finned nails called “fléchettes.” At the press of the trigger, the beehive would deliver a cloud of nails traveling at five hundred feet per second. It could be extremely persuasive at close range.

  To designate targets for helicopter gunships, I also carried a magazine containing thirty rounds of red tracer, the color used by NATO forces. It is the wise operator who remembers that tracers work both ways. Thirty red fireballs would clearly indicate what I wanted the gunships to shoot at, and just as plainly the location from which I was shooting. I carried a second magazine filled with green tracer, the preferred color of our enemies. More than once, booger eaters stopped firing when they thought the green tracer flying back at them meant they’d opened up on friends. In addition to our combat loads, we carried radios, aircraft ID panels, smoke, frag and stun grenades, water, and first-aid kits. The weight, all told, amounted to about forty pounds per man.

  As ambush attacks and vehicle bombings became more frequent, we relied increasingly on the Seafox and helicopters to insert into and extract from the city. By the last weeks in August, we stopped jeep patrols entirely but continued to visit allied positions, particularly the French.

  In the French sector, a battalion of Legion Etranger (foreign legionnaires) kept the hammer down. The Legion battalion was comprised mostly of Eastern Europeans, Cambodians, and Vietnamese. There were some Germans, principally escaped East Germans, and at least one American, who translated for us. Their officers were, to a man, Saint Cyr–educated. The discipline of the outfit was strict; the troopers were professional and squared away. The French forces were augmented by a detachment of Commando Hubert, French naval commandos, and we were often the recipients of their gracious hospitality.