Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL (42 page)

In the name of God,

the infinitely compassionate and merciful.

Praise be to God, Lord of all the worlds . . .

Before me was the ocean, and beyond it, a different world revolved. In the mosques and on the streets, in the hovels of wrecked buildings, on prayer mats, knelt the faithful, all facing Mecca. Their prayer was now my own.

Guide us on the straight path,

the path of those who have received your grace;

not the path of those who have brought down wrath,

nor of those who wander astray. Amen.

I
’M NOT SURE THEY KNEW
what to do with us when we came back. I am certain we did not know what to do with ourselves. It was odd enough to return from a war; it was stranger still to realize that almost no one in the United States seemed to have the vaguest concern about what had happened in Lebanon. There were no flag burners, no flag wavers; there was nothing.

The lotus-eating had apparently spread even to our own command. On my first day back, I had the amusing experience of trying to convince a Filipino disbursing clerk that I was still alive. I came home to discover that my pay and allowances had been suspended for seven weeks. Unbeknownst to me, and mercifully never discovered by my family, the navy had listed me as dead on October 23.

Although we’d sent a situation report within minutes of the bombing requesting that SEAL Team Four notify our relatives that we were all right, the Team did nothing. As a result, the entire platoon was carried as “missing” for thirteen days. During this terrible time for our families, no one at SEAL Team Four bothered to pick up a phone or lick a stamp.

Distraught, my father managed to pull navy connections to send me a message, but it didn’t reach me until a week after the bombing. By then my family had endured a daily parade of television crews camped on the front lawn, hoping to catch the delivery of bad news. My mother bravely told the assembled vultures that her son was a marine lieutenant assigned to the multinational peacekeeping force, and she hoped that they would be kind enough to respect our privacy. She did not mention that I was a SEAL, or that the navy had told her nothing.

It had been just as bad for Margot. Perhaps it had been worse. As news of the bombing splashed across the world, her phone stopped ringing. Friends and acquaintances avoided her, and even my own friends at the Team had no news to give. In this time before e-mail and long-distance phone service from the battlefield, Margot found out I’d survived only when she got a letter from me—two weeks after the blast. Until then she had floated in a half-gray limbo of grief.

The fiasco was a symptom of the command climate to which we returned. There had been a regime change at SEAL Team Four; our former CO had been kicked upstairs to the Pentagon. We also had a new XO. The new proprietors were bean counters, and Fifth Platoon was called to task for the amount of equipment we had lost, destroyed, or traded during the tour. Frank was on leave when the new XO, a guy I’ll call Skip, called me in to apply a dose of real navy. He started in and I put up my hand, an extremely rude gesture for a junior officer.

“Did you read our after-action report?” I asked.

“I haven’t gotten around to it,” he said.

Our AAR, a folder almost three inches thick, sat on the corner of his desk. It detailed hundreds of patrols, dozens of countersniper operations, and half a dozen recons up and down the coast, against Syrian and Israeli targets.

“Why don’t you read it, sir?” I asked.

The next day a chief from supply presented me with an MSLR, a materiel lost or stolen report. It listed nearly a hundred items large and small, platoon equipment valued at considerably more than I made in a year. The chief wanted me to sign the form and assume financial responsibility for the lost equipment.

I looked at the list. There was a PRC-77 radio, handset, and antenna that had been blown out of the Zodiac by a mortar round. There was an M-16 rifle dropped while its operator was being extracted by helicopter. In the classic definition of a hot extract, the weapon was lost because the red-hot gun barrel had burned through the weapon’s nylon sling. A pair of night-vision goggles was listed as “returned, destroyed.” No excuse there. They’d been smashed by a .51-caliber bullet after being negligently left atop a bunker while I ducked to consult a map. Uniform items, swim fins, boots, MK-13 signal flares, magazines, ammo cans, empty ammo cans. Batteries for our diving rigs. Web belts and dive socks. Office supplies and the antique Blue-Ray machine we used to print beach charts. The Blue-Ray bit the dust when it broke out of its locker during our passage through the gale.

The supply chief clicked a ballpoint and held it out to me. “Right on the dotted line, sir.”

“I’ll get back to you, Chief,” I said.

I took the half-inch-thick stack of single-spaced pages into the platoon office. The MSLR was crap, and this was a classic case of shit rolling downhill. Our losses had been combat-related, and we had documented each piece of equipment. For supply to make good on replacement gear would require even more paperwork. The easiest thing for them to do was try to hang it on us. I didn’t want to disturb Frank at home on leave, and it turned out I wouldn’t have to.

The enemy’s weakness is always our strength. Skip was a bean counter, and all I had to do was give him the kind of beans that he didn’t want to count. The kind of beans that would give him nightmares for the rest of his life.

We had returned with a connex box full of East Bloc weapons, war booty from our peacekeeping mission. Some of the weapons we had captured, some we had traded for, some we had acquired through a back-channel equipment swap brokered by Beirut’s CIA station chief. In short, this stuff was spooky, it was hot, and it stank, bad. Parked behind my office in a ten-foot-by-ten-foot fiberglass cube was two tons of career killer. Whoever possessed this stuff was immediately open to charges of weapons smuggling. Open to charges, indeed, because we had gotten the weapons back into the U.S., listing the locked, sealed, and inventoried container as “classified communications equipment.”

I prepared an 1149, another form, the kind officers fill out when they take receipt of government equipment. With Doc’s help, I relisted all the items we’d brought home. AK-47 assault rifles subcategorized by state of manufacture, Russian, Chinese, Romanian. Machine guns of similar provenance; Dragunov sniper rifles; snappy little AK-74s; Marakov pistols; Mosin Nagant sniper rifles (with scopes); Russian, East German, and Czech uniforms; RPG-7, RPG-16, and RPG-18 antiarmor weapons. Rocket grenades and motors. Syrian army uniforms (stained),
kufiyahs
and
shumaggs,
and Symtex plastic explosive traded for MRE battle rations. My favorites I saved for last; a pair of nasty little Skorpion machine pistols, the favorite weapon of the Red Brigades and the Bader-Mienhof gang. I recorded the serial numbers of each weapon, noting with an asterisk those we’d acquired during the CIA trade. You know, the ones with the serial numbers ground off.

I also prepared a memorandum for the record stating that we had been verbally tasked to acquire foreign weapons during our tour to augment the training armory of the Team. This statement was true, and I named names, dates, and times. I further indicated that I no longer wished to be responsible for this equipment, as I was fully aware of the regulations applying to spoils taken in battle. The entire document I classified
SECRET, SPECAT, NOFORN,
meaning “secret, special category, not for foreign dissemination.” I knew that the yeoman of the watch would have to log the document, so my list and letter would not go astray. I dropped the file on top of Skip’s in basket and went home for the weekend.

By Monday afternoon a flatbed truck from SPECWARGRU-2 had picked up the connex box and taken it away. No one at SEAL Team Four had signed for the weapons, and the armorer chief at the group had declined to sign the copy of the inventory I’d prepared. He said he’d send me a copy after he made his own count of the weapons. That never happened. I never heard about or saw the inventory again.

I’d won the first round, but I would go on very quickly to lose the war. This was a staff game, a war of memos, modified orders, and paper fortifications. It was a battlefield where inaction held the keys to victory, as sure as fire superiority did in the real world. Foolishly, I thought I’d put one over on Skip as the platoon scattered for Christmas leave.

I had toddled into an ambush.

When we returned from Christmas, we were squarely in the sights of the head shed. Indolence would be their initial weapon. I was supposed to assume command of the Fifth, and Frank was to transfer. Frank was kept on, seemingly indefinitely. When he asked, there seemed to be some inexplicable delay in his orders. That delay was essentially that the Team would not let him go. Frank was to join the MILGRU, the military advisory group, in El Salvador, another plum combat assignment. His orders stated that he was to proceed no later than January 15, and Skip made sure he stayed put until January 14 at 2355 hours. This bit of discourtesy denied Frank the traditional week’s leave and proceed time, and allowed him twelve hours to pack, change continents, and jump into another war. But at least Frank got out. He was grinning like a monkey when I dropped him at NAS Norfolk.

“See you in Malibu,” he said, lobbing a mock salute back at the terminal.

I shook his hand and then gave him a hug.
“Via con huevos,”
I said.

“You’re a dope,” he said. “Get out of there as soon as you can.”

Escape proved impossible. The head shed got even, pronto. Instead of allowing me to assume command of the Fifth, they disbanded the platoon. We were suddenly all orphans, off the line operationally and out of the training pipeline as well. The new operations officer, Mad Dog Walker, took pity on us. The Fifth was broken up, but Mad Dog took pains to make our exile bearable. Five or six of the guys, including Dave, Doug, Cheese, and Rudi, went with me into the cadre. Doc was diverted to medical. The rest were scattered to departments, ordnance, engineering, intel, diving, and first lieutenant. It could have been worse. All of the lads except Sandy had received decorations and commendations in Lebanon, and these had been forwarded by the Sixth Fleet staff. The medals and commendations had been awarded by COMSIXTHFLEET, Admiral Martin, and were to be presented by the commanding officer, SEAL Team Four.

You know, the guy I had just pissed off.

The medals sat in the captain’s safe for six months. It wasn’t just the fruit salad that the guys wanted; the lads had earned valuable advancement points for the decorations they’d received in combat service. They wouldn’t get the points until they got the medals. The points made the difference in promotions, and promotions meant money. But the medals sat. The battle between Fifth Platoon and the front office might sound great in the retelling, but in truth, our bosses were fighting a lot of paper battles. They probably didn’t even have it in for us, particularly. Some of what happened was the result of spite, but much of it was due to simple bureaucratic inertia.

I was pissed about what was being done to the lads, and I was pissed about what they’d done to Frank. But the bullshit at the Team, I realized, was just bullshit. I knew also that I’d brought it on by firing back with the 1149. I had opened an engagement against a superior force with no plan of continued attack and no way to retreat. I was screwed. I took it as best I could. Doc took it better. “Don’t sweat the petty stuff,” he’d say. “Pet the sweaty stuff!”

We took what pleasure we could in not being shelled every day. The Fifth hung together as much as we could, but the departments and our assignments kept us all going in different directions. I tried to keep an eye on the lads. They all drank harder than ever, and so did I. While we were gone, the Casino had been bulldozed, which might have been a good thing.

Sleep, for me, was an almost impossible thing to come by, and when it did come, it gave no peace. The week after Christmas I moved into Margot’s bungalow on the beach. It was an amazement to me to wake in a bed, and it was a delight to feel her sleeping warm and sweet next to me. I was glad not to be alone.

In 1984 post-traumatic stress disorder had not yet widely entered the lexicon, but I was familiar with the concept of survivor’s guilt from school. I was a textbook case. I asked myself often, like every marine and sailor who served in Lebanon, “Why did I live when so many good men died?” Finally, I accepted the fact that I had lived, in part, because I was merely lucky. I was lucky I was not at the BLT that morning. And lucky I hadn’t been killed on the corniche, or in the Shouf, or in half a dozen sniper fights, or on the causeway. I consoled myself by thinking that I had helped keep sixteen men alive.

There were things that I struggled to put aside; oddly, others did not trouble me at all. I do not know exactly what this says about me, but I felt no grief for the people we killed. Their faces do not haunt me and never have. Some I remember as motionless lumps facedown in the street, legs crossed oddly, hands open, and weapons lying where they had fallen. I remember returning days later to one place we had contact, to find the bodies swollen and black with sun. In the street, trash blew around the corpses. I felt as little then as I feel now. I did not care that they were dead, and it seemed fitting to think that no one on earth had bothered to even drag them from the road. Others I can still see, turned in surprise, strobed as they tumbled back in muzzle blast, men who a second before had intended the same fate for me.

I was aware then, and am aware now, that I took human life. This will sound flippant, perhaps even nonchalantly cruel, but there are some people who need to go to hell and stay there. I watched a gang of PLO thugs drag a wounded Phalangist behind a truck until he was a bloody bundle of rags. I found the bodies of executed Palestinians, hands bound, left in the rubble for dogs to eat. I saw Druze gunners deliberately shell a hospital full of women and children. Whose side do you get on? Whose atrocity do you excuse, and whose do you come down on with a B-52?