There was frustration, furious madness, looming in the eyes of the men in September’s bunkers. Watching shells surround the positions my friends occupied, feeling the shock waves, pressed to the floor of my own ditch, I felt it, too. Microseconds of homicidal anger flashed across my consciousness, the kind of indescribable hatred you can feel only for treacherous motherfuckers who daily rain metallic death upon you. Nothing could be made of this rage. It had no outlet, no constructive or destructive end. The madness of the bunkers dissipated itself in nothing. It was spent in the Zen of sitting with a sandbag between you and oblivion, with your thoughts streaming down your face in huge, dirty beads of sweat.
For days the Phalangists battled the Druze for Bhamdoun, in the hills above East Beirut. There was much fighting, day and night, and American positions on the north perimeter took rounds incidentally and deliberately. From the fields of the Ash Shuafat, LAF artillery pummeled the Shouf and the north-facing hills beyond in an endless symphony of thuds.
Eventually, Druze forces managed to overrun the Phalangist position in Bhamdoun. In retaliation, the LAF 8th Brigade, a mixed Christian and Muslim unit, was ordered forward. Not much was expected of this attack, but to the shock of all—and the chagrin of the Druze, PLA, Hezbollah, and Syrian army—8th Brigade managed to penetrate as far as Suq al Gharb. It was at this point that the Syrian-led resistance stiffened and the LAF called for American naval gunfire support. As I am led to understand, the politicos, led by Special Ambassador Bud McFarlane, were in enthusiastic agreement. Closer to the ground, the marine commander, Colonel Tim Geraghty, was not so hot on the idea. There were more than a thousand artillery pieces in the Shouf overlooking the Beirut airport, all of them owned by people unhappy with the United States. Actively siding with the LAF would put the marines squarely in the sights of those guns. For as long as he was able, Colonel Geraghty prudently declined to call for naval gunfire support of the LAF.
Frank and boat crews Alpha and Bravo operated in the vicinity of Suq al Gharb during these weeks, conducting reconnaissance and locating targets, principally hostile artillery positions and command bunkers. On September 16, several shells were fired at the American embassy in West Beirut. In response, Alpha and Bravo, assisting ANGLICO units, directed naval gunfire against Druze artillery positions in the Shouf. On the nineteenth, Frank’s squad helped direct fire as U.S.S. Virginia, Bowen, and John Rodgers lob-bed in an additional 350 shells, this time in support of LAF units around Suq al Gharb.
The fight was on, and the United States had picked sides.
There were now French, British, and American aircraft carriers off the coast. Occasionally, they would come in, looming like great gray beasts on the horizon. Their war planes, Etendards, Buccaneers, and Tomcats, daily roared over the Shouf, always in twos. Low and very nearly at the speed of sound, they would come in off the water, banking over the airport, roaring through the foothills too low, too fast, for the AA guns to track.
It was a show put on for the grunts. The governments of England, France, and the United States all threatened air strikes if the shellings continued. The overflights were a warning to the guilty and a belated show of resolve to the men in the bunkers. The airplanes spent probably thirty-five seconds in the same air that daily rained rounds on our heads. Bank, thunder, and blast off. As quickly as they had come, they would disappear back over the sea to the carriers. In the vernacular of the marines, they were “weasel dicks,” escape artists.
But in the last part of summer it didn’t matter. Nothing really mattered. The hills that had once seemed so like San Diego were now familiar, malevolent, and distinctly Lebanese. In the compounds marines had developed a sensitivity to sound so acute that they could detect incoming rounds almost as soon as they were fired. Walking was done with an eye to the nearest bunker. Into every man’s spinal cord was programmed a leaping dive for cover, a reflex triggered by the sound of falling shells. It was something that you did not think about. It was a response housed in the low centers of your brain, with the same dark processes that made you breathe or sweat.
When it was explained in print, laid plain in ink and photographs between the covers of some slick news magazine, Lebanon was a distant outland that could not be heard or touched or smelled. In such descriptions it remained a distant, incomprehensible struggle, a war among a dozen distinct enemies, less a civil war than a well-equipped free-for-all. Before I came to this place, I stared into the black ink against the white page, the photographs of shocking destruction, and none of it could make me sense one instant of what the place would be like. In words and white space, there was not a breath of the country, of its people, or of the simple tragedy of this war.
It is not the purpose of newspapers to print ephemeral bullshit like ambience, and the facts were sensational enough for the folks back home. In the Shouf, the war was printed in the blackness of the Lebanese nights. From a position on the perimeter, the white crashings in the hills were nearly as meaningless as the pictures in the magazines, but to marines inside the wire, this meaninglessness differed from the meaninglessness of the war at home. Here, violence was the overwhelming reality. It was what you lived, breathed, and ate. Here, only the abstraction of the play-by-play was missing. Tracers are tracers, rocket fire is rocket fire, and the grunts normally had no idea who was shelling the airport or why. Sometimes, weeks later, they might read it in a magazine. It might even be explained in a letter from home. In Beirut there was no program, no scorecard. In the long months of the deployment, marines would come to know some of the players, the ones with grudges, but that was all. The vagaries of Lebanese politics would remain to them as fleeting as sunspots.
The fighting filled your senses, made you sweat, made you dig bunkers and fill sandbags. The Lebanese civil war was not a thing elegantly laid out for you to comprehend. It was something only half understood, and every marine fully comprehended the part that would kill. The rest didn’t need explaining.
* * *
HAULING THE MAIL
SOUTH OF BEIRUT INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, fighting for the suburb of Khalda had gone on for two days. Like a ripple spreading across a pond, the violence had widened, thrust and repulse, attack and counterattack, until it engulfed the entire city. It started up again sometime around noon, dull pops in the mountains of the Shouf. A vague commotion in the hills. By evening the thud of rocket and artillery fire was incessant. At eight o’clock rounds began to fall into the Shiite neighborhoods outside the airport. Long arcs of tracer passed from hilltop to valley and back again. Before midnight Druze batteries above the city opened fire, and two Katyusha rockets slammed into Saint George’s Hospital. Soon everybody, Phalangists, PLO, LAF, Hezbollah, Druze, and Amal, had all opened up and weighed in.
By dawn of the third day, it was pretty much everybody versus everyone else. To the south of downtown, the Sidon-Beirut highway was cut, and the American and British embassies were no longer connected to the Anglo-American forces near the airport. As the fighting dragged on, it was decided that SEALs could deliver the diplomatic pouches. Given the fluidity of the tactical situation, it was also thought prudent for the SEAL Team to get eyes on the embassy, should an evacuation be necessary.
After receiving our tasking, we took the Seafox from Green Beach to Iwo Jima. After briefing the battle-group staff, boat crews Alpha and Bravo loaded aboard a pair of Hueys. Our escort was a brace of AH-1 Cobra gunships.
The Hueys came in low over the coast, directly from northward, at eighty knots. I sat in the portside door of the lead Huey, my feet on the skids, weapon between my knees and aimed below. Scott Speroni sat at my side, knees also in the breeze, M-16 pointed forward. We flew over bands of green, then brown, then rust-colored water as the helos crested the breakwater and crossed the harbor.
“Feet dry,” the pilot’s voice crackled in my headset as we passed over a burning warehouse in the port. The door gunners jacked the bolts on M-60 machine guns, slamming them back then forward and pointing muzzles at the ju
mbled houses streaking below us. We were now over West Beirut. The morning was clear, bright, and deadly.
I stuck my head from the helicopter. Looking behind, I could see the second Huey and the bristling shapes of our escorts, the gunships above and trailing. On the deck between Speroni and me sat the reason for our mission: two yellow nylon bags containing the U.S. and British diplomatic pouches. The bags were stuffed into two Alice packs and cinched tight.
Agreeing to fly into this shit was not the smartest thing I’ve ever done. Now and again, from the buildings below, a green tracer would wobble up after us. The helicopter flight may have been exhilarating, but a jeep trip from Green Beach would have been suicide. Now we depended as much on audacity as airmanship.
Even though it was broad daylight, our four-bird formation flew directly into the city, popping over the tops of buildings, swooping down where broad avenues made canyon flying possible, then up again, skimming the tops of offices, stores, and the gutted hulks of destroyed buildings. We sucked laundry off clotheslines and pedal-turned right angles at intersections. More than once, as we flew over a narrow rue, astonished faces would jerk up at us. Armed men would lift their weapons as we passed above, simply too fast to track.
We doglegged west and set up on the LZ, a median strip on the coast road three hundred meters west of the American embassy. It was an LZ the French called Ingénue and we called Boardwalk. The Cobras banked left, breaking in narrow silhouettes south and east as the first of the Hueys touched down on the empty street of the corniche. The second Huey hovered over a three-story building directly to the south, and Steve’s assault element fast-roped from it onto the roof of the building. The guys on the roof covered our insertion and spotted for the Cobras.
Humping the Alice packs, Dale Hickman and I jogged from the helicopter and into the wreckage of a café. Hickman was a card, a wiseguy from Manitowoc, Wisconsin. His call sign was Cheese, and the Cheese was fearless. He carried a single-action .44 Magnum Ruger Blackhawk pistol in his shoulder holster. Operators were allowed some discretion in their weapon selection, and Cheese’s secondary weapon was a hand cannon with a ten-inch barrel. If you asked him about it, he’d say, “Hey, size does matter.”
Rudi, a tough Cubano from South Miami, and Bubba trotted after us, covering the approaches as we waited to link up with the boat crew from the second helicopter. The Hueys lifted off and, trailed by their escorts, turned north, back over the harbor and its shipwrecks, and directly out to sea. In a few moments Steve’s assault element had worked their way down through the building and joined us in the smashed restaurant. Behind us, in the street, a dead man was sprawled next to an overturned moped. Obviously, there were snipers about. But none of that was as disconcerting as the quiet.
We set security, and I pointed binoculars west toward the Duraford Building, the structure that housed the American and British legations. The corniche was empty, not a person or vehicle in sight, and from the south and east, the rattle of small arms and the thud of artillery were unremitting. On many of our other visits to West Beirut, the corniche had been crowded and traffic-choked, even when there was fighting at the Green Line. Today no one was out. The shops along the promenade were boarded and still.
“Where the hell is everybody?” Rudi asked.
“Shit, man, if I lived here, I’d be gone, too,” Bubba said. Suddenly, he seemed to me to be one of the blinding intellectual lights of the century. The guy was a philosopher, I thought, a hillbilly Voltaire.
But his crack didn’t quite answer the question. The fighting was mostly to the south, and only an occasional artillery round was being lobbed in on West Beirut. This part of town was Sunni Muslim, prosperous and relatively untouched. Life had a tendency to go on here, no matter what was going on in the Shouf.
I decided not to give it much thought. We were inserted, there was no trouble, and I was happy enough. Between us and the American embassy were about five blocks. The embassy’s marine guard detachment used the call sign Devil Dog. The Dogs had reported that the LZ on the embassy roof was taking sniper fire, so we’d followed their recommendation and put down at the secondary LZ on the median strip. The corniche turned slightly, and although we did not have a line of sight to the building, snipers around it did not have a straight shot back at us.
“Patrol order, by boat crews,” I said to Steve. “Cover and move, I want to keep a fifty-yard interval.”
The two boat crews would be mutually supporting but would not pre-sent a single target to anyone intent on ambush. We moved west on the litter-strewn sidewalks, hugging the buildings. We scanned the street and rooftops, checking out the few abandoned vehicles parked on the sidewalks.
We passed the embassy of the German Democratic Republic, buttoned up tight with rolling metal shutters. The quiet was unnerving. The two boat crews leapfrogged west, covering and moving until we came to a place along the road where we had a visual on the embassy. Facing our direction was a sandbagged pillbox. Covering the western approach to the embassy compound, the barrel of a marine .50-caliber machine gun jutted from a loophole. I halted the boat crews, and we took cover. Walking up and ringing the doorbell was not an option.
We were arrayed in a variety of camouflage styles, German, Czech, and desert cammie smocks. Half of us carried American weapons, half carried AK-47s. I was toting my M-4 carbine, a half-sized M-16 variant we called a “poodle shooter.” Over my assault vest I wore a set of communist Chinese magazine pouches. None of us looked particularly American. This was a good thing on patrol, but not necessarily a good thing when linking up with straight-leg American units. I did not wish to have a tiff as we approached a machine-gun nest of jacked-up leathernecks.
I called Devil Dog on the PRC-77 and told them we were approaching from the west. I used my call sign, Bad Karma, gave our number as “less than company-sized,” and told them we were “in costume.” There was some delay on the marine end; finally, we were cleared to approach. As an afterthought, I asked what the sniper situation was. On that I got an answer straightaway: “Haul ass.”
We moved as close as possible under the protection of buildings. Then I had Steve’s boat crew set up to cover us as we prepared to cross the last open space into the compound. I gave one of the Alice packs to Steve and kept the other. As Steve’s boat crew sighted in on the rooftops and windows, Bubba, Cheese, Rudi, and I sprinted across the last open intersection, tumbled over the sandbagged emplacement and into the embassy compound. We were aboard without incident. We set up covering fields of fire and signaled Steve to cross.
Steve’s boat crew followed, also without adventure. We were in, the nylon bags were delivered up to the embassy, we bummed some water from the marines, and we were free to go.
To the south of us, the airport, like everywhere else in town, had come under fire. There had been marine casualties. Our helo package, the Hueys and the pair of Cobras, were presently medevacking wounded from LZ Brown behind the main hangars at Beirut International. We’d have to make other plans to get out. Not having helos to ride in didn’t bother us much. The embassy roof was still taking sniper fire, and none of us wanted to hang out in the middle of the median strip waiting for a ride.
I called the Seafox and requested an extraction from the seawall of the corniche. They answered right away and gave an ETA of thirty minutes. Content to be under cover, we sat in the shade of the pillbox and power-napped as a few rounds dropped to the south of us, distant thuds that echoed through the streets and alleyways.
The marines stared at our uniforms and haircuts. We didn’t stare back. Cheese’s hog leg of a pistol got noticed. He grinned at a marine. “It fires .44 Magnum rounds, just like Dirty Harry’s.”
“They let you carry that thing?” a corporal asked.
“Son, they make me carry this thing,” Cheese answered.
Fifteen minutes passed, and the echoing gunfire from the south actually seemed to die down. The day was getting on, and it was hot. This was the midafternoon lull, another un
ique feature of war, Lebanese-style. We decided to take advantage of the intermission.
I called the Seafox again, confirmed their ETA, and our two boat crews moved to the western end of the embassy compound. The extraction site was a break in the seawall two hundred yards west of the embassy. The terrain was identical to the approach: We had to cross a wide intersection before we could resume the relative cover of the buildings along the coast. Along this section of the corniche, five-story buildings faced over the broad multilane coast road. Beyond the road was a ten-to-fifteen-foot seawall dropping straight into the Med. Approximately every quarter mile, stone steps were recessed into the seawall, leading to small stone boat landings. We planned to extract from the closest one.
The problem was, from the buildings seaward, there was zero cover until the seawall, and then the cover was not perfect. The seawall offered protection only in its defile and the straight drop to the sea. Once into concealment like this, we’d be bottled up until our ride arrived.
Steve’s crew crossed the intersection first, jogging the twenty or so yards by shooting pairs. No sweat. They found hiding places on the other side and set up to cover Rudi, Bubba, and me. We tumbled over the sandbagged wall and sprinted across the intersection. Oddly, I noticed as we ran across the street that the streetlights were on. A red hand was blinking “don’t walk” as I chugged toward Steve and his guys.
When I was halfway across the intersection, an earsplitting noise poured out of the sky—the wail of incoming Katyushas. There was nothing to do but keep running. I didn’t have to tell Rudi or Bubba to hurry; they were hauling ass. My Swiss and Irish genes do not lend themselves to great bursts of sprinting speed. Truth be told, I don’t dance that well, either. Legs pumping, Rudi and Bubba accelerated across the pavement. Even carrying his M-60 and six hundred rounds, Rudi was faster than I was.
Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL Page 21
