Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL

by Pfarrer, Chuck

  THERE WERE WORDS that became exhausted in my vocabulary; words like “anger” and “grief” and “fatigue” had been pushed beyond the finite limits of their definitions. They had been lived and felt to the outermost edge of reality, in ways I never could have imagined, so the words themselves meant nothing. Every ounce of meaning had been wrung out of them, and they remained jumbled letters totally disconnected from the numb and fucked way I felt.

  My emotions were the frailest shadows. When I felt something, it was as though I was affected in only the most tangential way. Like living by long distance. It was impossible now to feel the rage I had once known, or to indulge the camaraderie of this ordeal. When the wind blew from the runways and the stench of the BLT was driven down to our position, the putrid-sweet odor would make me think: At least I am alive. But waking in the nights, in the absolute black stillness of the bunker, sometimes I couldn’t tell if I was alive or dead.

  We lay out nights beyond the wire, set in perfect ambush, waiting for militiamen to wander into our traps. But none came. The Wallys seemed to know the rules were changed. They knew there was no patience left and that what waited for them in the quiet night was payback. Along the perimeter, every marine who could get away with it aimed down into the streets of Hooterville. Men carrying weapons were dropped by single rounds of 5.56- or deadly 30.06-caliber calling cards left by the snipers of the STA platoon.

  We continued to patrol, and survival depended on appearing where we were not expected. On one November morning we swept down on a car parked on the jetty south of Green Beach. This breakwater, we knew, was often used as an aiming point for artillery strikes.

  We drove south, past the parked car, then did a fast U-turn. Dave cranked the wheel, and the jeep bumped suddenly off the coastal highway, up the slight embankment at the foot of the jetty, and turned sideways, blocking the narrow dirt road. Rudi swung the M-60 across the hood of the jeep as we walked toward the car’s owner, who’d been there since sunrise with pole and fishing tackle. The fisherman moved quickly for his car as we approached. Bubba stopped him as Cheese and Doug searched his vehicle.

  “Do you speak English?” I asked.

  The fisherman shrugged. “Little,” he said. My weapon was slung forward, pointed with calculated indifference at the fisherman’s chest. The man’s smile slowly twisted itself with a different meaning.

  “Parlez-vous français?” I asked. As I spoke, my thumb rested against the safety catch of my rifle, and my index finger rested just inside the trigger guard.

  The fisherman lowered his eyes and stared at my hands. He said, “Je parle un peu français. Anglais un peu aussi.”

  I nodded, and Dave came forward to search the man’s creel and gearbox.

  “L’auto? Est-ce le votre?” I asked. Is this your car?

  The fisherman shook his head and smiled. He didn’t answer, or he didn’t understand.

  I changed tacks. “Où allez-vous, monsieur?” I asked.

  The fisherman shrugged. “Où?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Maintenant?”

  “Yes, asshole. Oui, maintenant.” My eyes left those of the fisherman for an instant as Dave finished his search.

  “He’s got a pair of binoculars,” Dave said.

  I’d probably need more than that if I was going to shoot him. “You were in a hurry when you saw us coming,” I said.

  The fisherman answered at length. My French is barely idiomatic, and the fisherman’s was thick with an Arab accent. We were having a serious communication problem.

  “What did he say?” Rudi asked.

  “Said he’s going shopping, I think.”

  “He was watching the fucking beach,” Doug spat.

  He probably was. Sensing our mounting ire, the fisherman shifted on his feet.

  “See if there’s a radio or a topo map in the car.” Either of which would provide convincing evidence of an artillery spotter. I asked the man for his papers. At this point the fisherman was about to lose it, and he said something subordinating and acutely plaintive in Arabic.

  I raised my palm. “Your identity papers. Donnez-moi votre pièces d’identités.”

  The fisherman nodded and reached with exaggerated slowness into his trousers. He produced a bundle of paper from which he took the blue plastic-coated identity papers. They were folded in half and in half again. As I took them, my weapon remained pointed at the man. I held the papers in front of my face so that I could look simultaneously at the photograph and at the face of the fisherman. The papers were printed in Arabic and might have said anything, they might have said that this guy played tight end for the Cincinnati Bengals, but I ran my eyes over the document and the man. I could not read Arabic, and I made no pretense of doing so. I knew how to ask for identity papers, and I always did. When I took them, I watched the faces of the people. I looked for signs of uneasiness, I looked for the language that was plain upon their faces. I looked for tampered photo edges and fear that was greater than that generated by the flash suppressor of a weapon aimed straight into their guts.

  “Nothing in the car,” Bubba said. He was disappointed.

  “Regardez-vous la playa américaine?” I did not know the French word for “beach,” so I used the Spanish word.

  Somehow the fisherman understood. “Non. Je pêche seulement ici.” His French faltered. “I make fish here only,” he said in English.

  I stood for a long moment with my weapon pointed at him, saying nothing and thinking less. I thought nothing of blowing this fuck out of his shoes. Why had he come here all the way through West Beirut? What was so important that he had driven through a widening artillery barrage? Why hang out near an American position where more shells were falling? To fish? The bullshit light was on, big-time.

  My thumb rested against the safety switch of my rifle and my finger tapped the trigger.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  In those seconds I hovered as close to casual murder as a human being could possibly ever come. I could have killed this man as casually as you would step on a cigarette. I am ashamed to say that I wanted to kill him.

  Maybe he was spotting artillery. Maybe he was reconnoitering the beach, and maybe he was just a dipshit, the kind of guileless fuck who actually did drive through an artillery attack just to go catch some fish.

  My thumb snicked the safety back from auto and onto safe.

  I handed back the papers. “Écoutez, monsieur, il est très dangereux içi, parce que vous êtes près de la position américaine . . . We watch,” I said, pointing back toward the beach. “We see cars and people here, and we must check.”

  “I am a fisherman only.”

  “Peut-être vous êtes,” I said.

  “Can I go?”

  I nodded. The man picked up his equipment and began to walk to his car. “Have a nice day,” Rudi said.

  It meant nothing. The muzzle of Rudi’s M-60 was still pointed squarely at the fisherman’s belly.

  * * *

  LETTING GO

  IT WAS COLD AT NIGHT NOW. And it seemed to rain often, long and often. In pelting downpours, our bunkers sagged; dirt soaked through and dribbled out of sandbags perforated by shot and shrapnel. Repeated requests by the marine amphibious unit for concrete, timber, and building materials were, incredibly, still being refused by Washington. No permanent defenses were to be erected at BIA. Our bunkers were a scandal, the best of them only what could be lumped together, and many were without overhead cover. Structural components—wood beams, pallets, chunks of beach matting—had to be bartered for, and the better one’s ability to scrounge, the safer one slept. Now even the best of bunkers were melting away in the rain.

  It was decided in November that Green Beach was no longer a safe position. I don’t know what “safe” meant, exactly. The tar-barrel and barbed-wire barricade that separated the beach from the Sidon highway was now looked on as wholly unsatisfactory. Charlie battery had been relocated to the sandstone bluff directly behind Green Beach
, and it was decided to move the navy landing force components—Seabees, beachmasters, SEALs, and the marine shore party detachment—inland to the ridge. The beach would be manned during the day, but only a guard force was to remain at night.

  This meant the bunkers that seven months of hard work had made deeper and sturdier would be abandoned, and the men on the beach would now be quartered on the ridge in GP tents.

  It wasn’t the most popular decision of the tour.

  The move required that new bunkers be constructed, and now that the rains had begun it was impossible to dig into the soft ground. Any hole deeper than three feet quickly oozed in on itself and healed like living tissue. Protection was going to be sandbags, above ground: the kind of emplacements we called “delta hotels,” or “direct hitters.”

  While new bunkers were being layered together, people built sandbag walls around their cots—the ultimate short-timer’s security blanket, but they really provided insufficient cover. Mortar rounds are delicately fused; anything striking the tent roofs would detonate overhead, spraying sleeping men with molten steel. Heavier stuff, Katyushas and artillery, would blow the tent and its contents into rags. No one had to be reminded that a lot of the shit intended for the beach was sighted by impact on the very hill that we had been ordered to move to.

  We learned in November that our tour had been extended. The 24th Marine Amphibious Unit had originally been due to rotate out the last week in October, but our relief had been diverted to Grenada. We wobbled on in what we came to call triple overtime. For some the extension was a punishment. There were others, officers and men, who saw the extra time as penance. The dead required an act of contrition, an atonement, an apology. That burden fell on us, the defeated. We had not been vigilant enough, valiant enough, squared away enough, and 240 had died. Guilt drifted down on us like smoke, and there were times that I felt it, too: We were still here because it was what we deserved.

  I got on by telling myself that in a couple of weeks, four at the most, it would be over. For the survivors of BIA, it was a strange time, an empty time. For seven months marines had counted days, marked calendars, and dreamed of getting out, but now, with deliverance at hand, it was almost impossible to take joy in going home. It was as though we had all undergone a collective nervous collapse, fire teams, squads, platoons, and companies made into zombies, each of us with a moment seared into our brain, one second out of an entire lifetime that could never be erased. The bombing was something different to each of us. For some it was the thunderclap that heaved into the bunkers, or the shadow of an immense mushroom cloud rising behind the airport terminal. It was the first time you saw silhouettes blown into concrete—the complete stencils of human beings blasted into mist and plastered against the shattered walls of the BLT. It was the terrible minutes you watched a corpsman shoot morphine into a convulsing body, a marine impaled on rebar, trapped and hopeless of rescue.

  The survivors kept to themselves; they were quiet and watched out for one another in a manner that was both forlorn and touching. If you sat down to eat, pulling open an MRE in a muddy foxhole, the marine next to you would reach into his pocket and, without a word, toss over a bottle of Tabasco. Marines you’d never met would hand you cigarettes, dips of Copenhagen, water from their canteens—precious things that were yours because you were still alive.

  Twenty-four MAU hung together, and the marines who had reinforced us from Camp Lejeune were scrupulously ignored. Their fresh-issue cammies, farmers’ tans, and like-new equipment marked them out from a hundred yards away as cherries, new meat, tourists. And they knew better than to ask about anything. The place freaked them, and the survivors freaked them, too. The veterans, to a man, had eyes that would scare a crow off a phone wire.

  Beirut was no longer a piece of landscape but something not of this world—a twitchy mirage, a thing between geography and nightmare. It had become, even before we left it, a memory to be suppressed, jammed into a box lined in lead and buried in a desert somewhere. We knew we could try to ignore it, but the ’Root would not be forgotten. For the rest of our lives, dreams of that Sunday morning would stalk us, relentless and scary as cancer. We had become mute, staggering battle-fatigue cases, lurching on our feet, running on autopilot, too astounded or numb or stubbornly defiant to lie down, curl up, and suck our thumbs. In the last weeks of the tour, we just functioned. Walked post. Did our jobs. There was nothing else to do.

  Fifth Platoon continued to run operations across the beach and sprints north of Beirut into Juniyah, where we would link up with LAF air-assault units and patrol inland to the shattered remains of a soccer stadium that we used as a helicopter landing zone. As we covered the LZ, hulking CH-53s would blow in, the aircraft nearly as big as the soccer field itself, and their crews would push off pallets of medical supplies, food, and artillery shells that would be loaded into trucks and hauled up to LAF batteries in the Shouf. In our last missions we were reduced to feeding the machine.

  These were easy ops, and we rarely had contact. We took sniper rounds now and again, and we were getting good at shutting them up with forty mike-mike. Fire was returned coolly, deliberately, and we would occasionally ignore the asshole with the rifle and fire at cars parked in front of the sniper’s hiding place. In their love for the automobile, the Lebanese are very much like Californians. In Beirut a man’s car is a statement, and we made statements of our own. At first we’d just shoot out the tires, perforate the windshields, and aim at the door handles. But later, boredom making us vicious, we used 40-millimeter grenades and API rounds to demolish Mercedeses, Fiats, and Ladas. Our vandalism was a pointed disincentive to the people who allowed the gunmen the liberty of their rooftops and balconies. It was hilarious when we first started to do it. And then it wasn’t funny anymore.

  Whatever we did to them, it would never be enough.

  IN THE HELICOPTER, the howl of engines and the thump of rotor blades suppressed thought. The flight was a milk run between the ships and Landing Zone Brown at the airport. The passengers were a mixed group heading to fifteen different destinations, to ships, outposts, and the beach. Men stared out the portholes into the sea, infinite gray waves on its surface—fifteen hundred feet below they seemed like scratches on an immense smoothness. Amid the passengers were heaped yellow and red bags of mail, cargo in crates, and three boxes that said THANK YOU FOR BUYING A PRODUCT MADE IN THE U.S.A.

  My CAR-15 rested between my knees, muzzle down. I slumped forward, resting my head on the rifle butt, feeling the clatter of the aircraft through my fingers and temples, delighting in the vibration because it made me numb.

  I was flying to U.S.S. Fort Snelling, a landing ship dock that had delivered our relief, the Second Platoon of SEAL Team Four. It was eleven in the morning, and I looked forward to lunch aboard the ship.

  I was greeted on Fort Snelling’s flight deck by Frank Giffland, who’d touched down a moment before. We went to the wardroom and met the officers who would replace us, Mikey Walsh and Don Tollson. Their platoon had been one behind us in the training pipeline. Mikey and Don were friends, and it was good to see them. They were dressed in khakis, a uniform we hadn’t worn in months, and they looked healthy and tanned. The weekend war had agreed with them.

  Mikey was a compact, muscular man with a sandy-brown mustache. Don was taller, had a wry sense of humor and the slightly asymmetrical face of a boxer. They were four or five years older than Giff and I, Mikey a lieutenant and Don a JG, and both were Mustangs. Both had served as SEAL platoon members in Vietnam, Mikey as a Stoner gunner for SEAL Team One, and Don, a member of SEAL Team Two. They shared stories from Grenada and were modest about their missions, though they included preinvasion operations, the recon of Pearls Airfield in the hours before the attack, and a fruitless chase to capture East Bloc advisers as they fled the island. The invasion had been dubbed Urgent Fury in the press, but it was known to Team guys as WWG—World War Grenada. Although SEAL Team Six had suffered casualties, Mikey and Don gave us the impression th
at SEAL Four’s missions had gone well.

  When they asked how it was over here, Giff and I said at once, “It sucks.”

  No one asked about or mentioned the bombing.

  Frank arranged for a helicopter and offered to give Mikey and Don a tour of the area of operations. A storm had blown in. It was rainy, and the cloud deck was low. Don asked if we should put it off until the visibility was better.

  “Today’s a good day,” Giff said. “The clouds will hide the helo.”

  “Should we bring sidearms?” Mikey asked.

  Frank rolled up the chart. “You need to be in full battle kit,” he said quietly.

  They caught a Huey, and I was heloed back to Iwo, where boat crews Charlie and Delta waited as CSAR contingency. The storm had gotten worse, the sea and sky equally drab shades of gray, and it was raining hard when I jogged from the helicopter and into the island on Iwo’s flight deck.

  I found the lads below, racked out in a borrowed berthing space, playing cards. The CSAR rotation was our last assignment; after this we would be hauled back to Portland and taken off the line. No one expected anything to happen. We had pizza for dinner. The movie was Tora! Tora! Tora!, and the evening’s entertainment turned out to be prophetic.

  The following morning a marine orderly knocked on my door and informed me that my presence was requested in the Flag Plot. Flag Plot was a combat information center set up for the commodore—his war room. I figured I wasn’t being invited for coffee, and on my way up, I stuck my head into the compartment and told the lads to mount out, draw weapons, and get the gear ready to go.