Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL (37 page)

In the days after the bombing, the rules of engagement changed. Marines received shoot-to-kill authorization. An astounding bit of news.

Now that the cows were gone, someone made damn sure that the barn doors were closed. At the south end of the parking lot, bulldozers had heaped great piles of red earth, vehicle barricades, in a series of staggered mounds that required passing vehicles to weave through a number of small openings under ten miles an hour. A deuce-and-a-half truck was placed across the road by the checkpoint, and a .50-caliber machine gun covered the approach. But there wasn’t a building there anymore—just a pile of rubble.

Behind these new barricades, the wreckage of the BLT loomed, jagged and forlorn. When the wind came from the north, the abominable stench of the place would drift down onto the checkpoint. The smell of bodies blasted into atoms. The marines would pull cravats and neckerchiefs from beneath their flak jackets and place them over their faces to cut the smell. Then they looked like a mess of dusty, dumb-fuck deputies guarding a bank that had already been robbed.

The wreckage of the building became an archaeological dig. When an FBI explosive team arrived, their leisured, careful probing had an almost academic air about it. For a week a dozen marines dug through the crater, probing, poking, and sifting. Three FBI explosive experts huddled together under the blown-out girders that held aloft what remained of the second floor. Now and again a marine would come up from the pit carrying a scrap of metal. The FBI agents would look at it and either throw it away or tag it. Half a piston. Pieces of a water pump. A small portion of an engine block. Pieces of the truck that had detonated in the lobby. A remarkable amount of it was recovered from the fifteen-foot-deep hole it had blown into the earth.

Forensics, like hindsight, is all-seeing. Starting from the moment of detonation and working backward, the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and National Security Agency were able to discern exactly what happened, how it happened, and who was responsible. Information that was extremely fascinating, but not one speck of it as valuable as a warning.

Blast-damage assessment revealed much about the bomb itself, a masterpiece of destructive engineering. It was first thought that so sophisticated a device could have been constructed only with Russian assistance. It is now known that the man who designed the bomb was an Iranian-trained member of Hezbollah named Imad Mugniyah. The intrepid Mugniyah would go on later to impress Osama bin Laden, who would take a page from Hezbollah’s operational handbook and coordinate even more spectacular attacks against multiple targets. In decades to follow, Mugniyah would come to specialize in the demolition of U.S. military barracks, again constructing purpose-built bombs, most notably the tanker-truck weapon detonated outside the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. That 1996 blast would kill 19 Americans and wound 170.

The bomb that destroyed the BLT was an elegant weapon purpose-built for its target. Loaded aboard a two-and-a-half-ton Mercedes truck, the bomb consisted of nearly six thousand pounds of C-4 plastic explosive, boosted by three hundred gallons of compressed propane gas. The cargo bed of the truck was lined in marble, and the explosives were loaded to form a shaped charge, focusing the blast up and out for maximum effect. The bomb was actuated by at least three mechanisms: a thirty-second timer initiated by the driver; a radio-controlled safe and arming mechanism actuated by an observer in the airport parking lot; and a dead-man switch on the steering wheel, which activated the bomb as soon as pressure was released by the driver.

The explosion vaporized the first two floors of the building and collapsed the remaining three stories. It blasted a crater forty feet in diameter and threw off an eight-hundred-foot mushroom cloud. The explosion could be heard as far away as Sidon, thirty miles to the south. The FBI determined that the bomb produced one of the largest nonnuclear explosions in history.

The operational planning for the attack was equally impressive. The driver, a Hezbollah member, had been cultivated, vetted, and specially selected for a martyrdom operation. Seventy virgins awaited him in paradise. Photographs were taken of the BLT, and the explosive payload was mea-sured to fit through the overhang and portico at the front of the building. The bumper of the truck was reinforced to plow through the steel-and-concrete fence that separated the BLT from the airport parking lot.

After the blast, satellite photos revealed that in the Bekaa valley, the bombers had marked out facsimiles of the BLT and the surrounding parking lots. They put together exact copies of the fences, tar barrels, and sandbag bunkers surrounding the building. Practice runs were made against a mock-up of the target, rehearsals were timed to the second, and the detonators and fusing mechanisms were rigorously tested.

Nothing was left to chance, and nothing would go wrong. All of these preparations went on under the noses of almost daily American reconnaissance flights. Two identical truck bombs were constructed at a Hezbollah installation in the city of Baalbek, one intended for the French, one for the Americans. With the complicity of Syrian military intelligence, the weapons were driven into Beirut on the evening of the twenty-second. An all-night artillery barrage, carried out by units of the Syrian army, made certain that the marines would be exhausted and that large numbers of them would still be asleep when the attacks were carried out at 6:23
A.M.
Sunday morning.

The operation and its execution were flawless. The crater was testimony.

THE AIR FORCE TRANSPORTS
that took the bodies of the battalion landing team returned in three days with fresh troops, another half of a marine amphibious unit that had been packed off piecemeal from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and dropped into our life. “We’re here to bail you fuckers out,” I heard one of them say.

They were integrated into our positions, their companies assuming emplacements on the perimeter and there digging bunkers, filling sandbags, starting from scratch. To me they seemed so incredibly
pink,
and young, and their uniforms were crisp with starch like they had just stepped out of recruiting posters.

With the starch and boot polish, they brought with them a massive case of attitude, like they had arrived on white horses and we were somehow damsels in distress. To an extent that may have been true. But nothing could prepare them for what they found over here, a situation more fucked up than a Norwegian bullfight. The rules of engagement alone were enough to blow their minds. And you could read it all over them, see it plainly as they moved, wide-eyed, through the positions or smelled what was left of a four-story reinforced concrete building. Even the old ones, the gunnery sergeant Khe Sanh veterans, found this place on the other side of believable. The survivors were like zombies, walking around taking close rounds and sniper fire like it was nothing: marines who had timing down to such a high art that they ducked only when the shit was right on top of them (“It just ain’t cool to get down sooner”).

Scariest of all was an elemental transformation of the chain of command. What mattered out on the wire wasn’t rank, it was experience. The survivors were alive because they were cagey. They were here because they knew how Wally operated, and they had adapted. The newly arrived marines were discernible not only for their fresh uniforms and incredulous expressions but for their dangerous naïveté. Our replacements were untested and therefore unreliable. Newly arriving officers and noncoms often found their orders ignored, especially when they were life-threatening. To a man, the survivors of 24 MAU supported the chain of command, often to the point of gallantry, but they obeyed their own. Soon the new guys learned to watch and learn. Some of them died anyway.

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.