THE ’ROOT

TWO SIX-WHEELED armored cars were angled into positions that faced north and south, up and down the Beirut-Sidon highway. Around each, bulldozers had pushed up six-foot piles of debris and dirt to form barriers. The Lebanese crews straddled folding chairs in the small patches of shade afforded by ponchos strung from the main gun of each car’s turret. Some of the soldiers held Belgian-made FN rifles across their laps; other weapons leaned against the tires or simply lay in the dirt at the soldiers’ feet.

All day they watched the flow of traffic down to Sidon. Trucks, cars, and buses in an endless stream between the capital and Lebanon’s second largest city. Sometimes for hours on end the soldiers would do nothing but breathe back the stale dust and wave flies away from their faces.

That was sometimes. Now and again one of the soldiers would step into the road, shoulder his weapon at the windshield of an oncoming car, and wave it over to the side of the road next to the checkpoint. Sometimes they would open the vehicle’s trunk, yank out the seats, and feel up the passengers.

Sometimes a little money changed hands, baksheesh, and the car would be allowed on its way without the indignity of a search. When you passed their position in an American jeep, they would bid you on your way in the dullest manner imaginable. Other times Lebanese soldiers would flash peace signs and call, “Hello! U.S.A. good.” On the radio antenna of the vehicle, the Lebanese flag would hang absolutely limp in the hot afternoon. It always seemed to me the sorriest and most wrung-out flag in the whole world.

Lebanon is the most beautiful and fucked-up place I have ever been. For an idea of sample geography and climate, imagine La Jolla or maybe Capri. On much of the coast, mountains plunge directly into Homer’s wine-dark sea. In winter, the mountains above the city wear a dusting of snow. The land is handsome, mountainous, and fertile. Beirut has been called the Paris of the Middle East, an epithet you can almost still believe.

The city itself is perched on a low sandstone bluff sticking like a thumb into the eastern Mediterranean. Loomed over by the Shouf Mountains, it spills away in jagged clumps to the foothills inland, and south to the camps. Beirut’s much-fought-over airport lies on a sprawling level stretch south of downtown, runways arrayed in a giant X. Around the tarmac are scattered garbage dumps, refugee camps, and teeming slums.

It was not just war that gripped Lebanon but a vicious, sectarian civil war. To be honest, to this day I have no goddamn idea what the United States of America was doing in Lebanon. It was absolute folly to think for even an instant that we would somehow do any good.

More marines would die in Beirut than at Khe Sanh. By the end of my tour, what was left of the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit (MAU) would be crushed, humiliated, and hunkered in rat-infested bunkers. Snipers would fire on anyone, anywhere, within the American positions. Twenty-four MAU was sent into half a war—the wrong half—the part that involved holding a piece of flatland against enemies with high ground and artillery to spare.

This was peacekeeping, Lebanese-style.

Almost wholly ignored by the press back home, the marines, Seabees, and sailors of 24 MAU would endure almost seven months of snipers, car bombings, rockets, mortars, and artillery attacks. These marines and sailors would sustain America’s most shameful military defeat since Pearl Harbor, the massive truck bomb that was to destroy the battalion landing team headquarters at Beirut International Airport. In one dreadful instant on an October morning, 243 men would be blown into very small pieces.

At the beginning of my tour in May 1983, that terrible Sunday morning was six months away. I have been warned against characterizing world affairs as they relate to my story. That warning is especially cogent when talking about Lebanon, whose politics are deadly, convoluted, and probably incomprehensible to an American mind. My own world politics were then coldly neutral. I was a commando. Naval special warfare was my profession. When ordered to accomplish a mission, I would plan, give my opinions on the merits of the tactical arrangements, then carry out my assignment. I cared for the safety of my men, my chances of success, and little else. SEALs are operators. Not policy makers.

We all knew our operations had political ramifications. War is politics. Our missions didn’t just contribute to foreign policy; sometimes they were foreign policy. We were all volunteers: If I was given an operation I did not want to carry out for reasons of ethics or personal safety, I could quit. We all could.

When we first received orders to Beirut, I thought only: Well, at least we’ll get some work. I could have no idea how much work we would actually get. Civil war is an almost congenital problem for Lebanon. If you were trying to design a petri dish to incubate a national self-destruction toxin, you couldn’t do better than Lebanon. The country is a lot like the cartoon character Jessica Rabbit: She’s not bad, really, she was just drawn that way.

After World War I the Ottoman Empire’s possessions were carved up by the victorious allies. The area that now comprises Lebanon and Syria fell into the possession of France. The present-day Republic of Lebanon was cobbled together from the region’s two dominant religious groups, Mar-onite Christians and Sunni Muslims. The Christians were concentrated in an area around Mount Lebanon, a bastion they shared with the Druze, a mysterious sect of Islam whose religious beliefs are a closely held secret. Sunni Muslims predominated in the coastal cities, Sidon, Tyre, Tripoli, and Beirut. A minority of Shiite Muslims were sprinkled in the countryside. Of the religious groups, the Christians and Sunnis tended to dominate economically.

By 1920 France had established a Greater Lebanon. Within this gerrymandered territory, Maronites comprised a little over 51 percent of the population. That was fine with France and fine with the Lebanese Christians. It is fair to say that the Shiites and Sunnis had been more or less dragooned into this artificial nation. Muslim allegiance and interest more naturally lay in a merger with Syria.

When France capitulated in World War II, Lebanon was controlled by the Vichy French government. A Free French and British force invaded unopposed in July 1941 and declared Lebanon an independent republic. As Europe burned, nobody paid much attention to Lebanon.

A series of political compromises eventually led to an agreement called the National Pact. I have read that this pact, a founding principle of the Lebanese nation, was never even written down. In purest measure, the pact was a political giveaway. In exchange for certain prerequisites, the Maronites would allow Lebanon independence from France and would acquiesce to the concept that Lebanon was an Arab country. To make sure Christians stayed on top, a 1930s census was used to draw up representative districts, resulting in a permanent Christian majority in parliament. It was further agreed that the president of the republic would always be a Maronite; the prime minister would be a Sunni; and the speaker of the parliament would be a Shiite.

This arrangement worked until 1958, when shifting census numbers made Christian dominance no longer demographically viable. In May 1958, opposition to President Camille Chamoun led to riots in Tripoli and Beirut. Chamoun appealed for western military intervention, and U.S. Marines landed for the first time in July 1958. Chamoun left office, and a shaky peace returned. U.S. forces were withdrawn in the autumn. America’s first intervention in Lebanese affairs had come cheaply. The second intervention would cost us dearly.

Lebanon sat out the 1967 Arab-Israeli war but increasingly became an unwilling haven for the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Israel complained that Lebanon made no attempt to stop attacks launched from within its territory. In 1968 the Israeli defense forces (IDF) began a string of reprisals, air strikes, and incursions into Lebanon. These attacks have continued to the present day.

In 1970 and ’71, the PLO was routed from Jordan after a bloody series of clashes with the Jordanian army. Large numbers of PLO members fled into Beirut and southern Lebanon. The guests quietly set about taking over. Tens of thousands of refugees filled camps around Beirut and other cities. PLO militias and splinter groups abounded. They opened offices and bought apartment buildings. PLO members manned roadblocks and shook down passing motorists. There was little the Lebanese could do.

Lebanon wisely declined participation in the second Arab-Israeli war—the Yom Kippur shindig—in 1973. During and after that conflict, the PLO operated freely from southern Lebanon. Again the Lebanese army made little effort to curtail PLO operations. In fact, the government in Beirut was less in control of its own territory. No one was in charge. Christians, Shiites, Sunnis, and Druze formed militias, and fiefdoms spread through the country. The rule of law bowed down to the Kalashnikov.

Civil war erupted again in 1975. Tragically, an estimated hundred thousand Lebanese became casualties, and hostilities ended only when a Syrian force invaded in 1976, halting Palestinian, Muslim, and Christian forces. For a while. The conflict resumed. This time think Apocalypse Now. The world watched in horror as a modern nation devoured itself.

Throughout 1981, Christian militias continued to battle the Syrian army. In retaliation for continued PLO attacks, the Israeli air force pummeled Beirut at will. The country was in ruin. Lebanon, as a sovereign state, had ceased to exist. Parts of Beirut began to resemble the surface of the moon.

In June 1982, in an operation called Peace for Galilee, the Israeli army invaded, ostensibly to rid the southern section of Lebanon of pesky individuals prone to lobbing mortars and Katyusha rockets at the towns and kibbutzim of northern Israel. The IDF rolled up the coast, swatting aside the Lebanese army, the PLO, and whatever Hezbollah, Syrian, or Druze forces decided to show their faces. In a matter of days, the Israelis occupied the southern suburbs of Beirut.

Yasser Arafat and what was left of the PLO cowered in the cellars of West Beirut, cornered. It is probably true that Yasser Arafat needs Israel, and Israel needs the PLO. For whatever reason, the decision was made to let Arafat and a large portion of the PLO escape. Under the supervision of a multinational force comprised of U.S. and European troops, five thousand Palestinian fighters boarded ferries and evacuated to Cyprus. The multinational force withdrew. A detachment of Navy SEALs personally saw to the security of Arafat as he passed out of Lebanon and onto Cyprus. The PLO hauled ass. The Israelis stayed and would continue to occupy parts of Lebanon until 2000.

Through this all, the Christians held on to the presidency of Lebanon. In August 1982, Bashir Gemayel was elected president. He was killed three weeks later by a car bomb that took out an entire city block.

Following his death, Christian Phalangist militiamen crossed Israeli-occupied territory in South Beirut and entered the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatilla. More than a thousand men, women, and children were killed in an orgy of destruction. The Israelis watched the murderers come, and then they watched them go. If the Israelis were not accomplices, they were at least cheerleaders. International condemnation fell on Israel’s then minister of defense, Ariel Sharon.

The condemnation faded. The martyrs of Sabra and Chatilla were mostly forgotten. The bodies were bulldozed into a dump north of the airport, and Bashir Gemayel’s brother, Amin, was elected president on September 21, 1982.

Another multinational force, this one composed of U.S. Marines, British army, French legionnaires, and Italian soldiers, landed. The marines dug in at the airport and along a stretch of beach south of downtown. The British took a section in the foothills. Italian marines from the San Marco battalion and a detachment of French legionnaires occupied parts of West Beirut. In the West’s eyes, this NATO force was intended to provide stability. In the Arabs’ view, the infidels were obviously intended to support a continued Israeli occupation.

Then, in April 1983, the American embassy in Beirut was truck-bombed. Americans started dying. The players in this free-for-all began to choose sides relative to the presence of United States Marines at the airport.

Uncle Sam’s hand was being dealt, and he didn’t even know it.

The United States brokered a treaty with Gemayel and Israel in May 1983. The compact stipulated the withdrawal of all foreign troops. Having retreated to the Bekaa valley and the mountains above Beirut, Syria rejected the peace agreement. The Syrians knew the Israelis were not about to fight uphill to throw them out. So it sat: Israel eyeballing Syria, Syria eyeballing Lebanon, Lebanon at the mercy of its own militias.

In May 1983 Fifth Platoon of SEAL Team Four was delivered into this mess by U.S.S. Portland, a landing ship, dock—a big troop-carrying amphib. The trip across the pond was uneventful. Aboard Portland, it was just us, the spec-war detachment, and about three hundred marines, mostly headquarters elements of the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit.

Two days into the passage, we got a dose of real navy. Portland’s captain was a screamer, a martinet and petty tyrant named Zimanski. Captain Zimanski’s principal hobby, besides sleeping in his chair on the bridge, seemed to be dressing down his officers at meals. The wardroom on a warship is supposed to be a place of sanctity. Manuals on etiquette specifically caution junior officers against discussing work, politics, or religion during meals. It’s often said that a ship’s wardroom is the officers’ living room. Not so on “Sweet Pea.” Zimanski had no politics other than self-interest, and his religion was himself. That left work.

To the teeth-grinding embarrassment of the entire wardroom, Zimanski would begin by lambasting the ship’s executive officer. No punches were spared, and every meal seemed to erode the man’s authority and respect. The XO of a warship is next to God in the chain of command. All the poor man could do between bites was sit there and take it. Zimanski ordered his officers to be present for all meals, and he often sent the messenger of the watch to retrieve skulkers who tried to miss meals when not actually on watch. After demolishing the XO, Zimanski would switch fire onto the operations officer, the chief engineer, the first lieutenant, and so on, all around the table, until he had chewed out every single officer. This went on meal after meal. The only officers spared the ritual were the SEALs and the marines. As embarked troops and not ship’s company, we fell outside the captain’s ambit. That did not stop him, however, from offering opinions.

Frank Giffland and I took to flying to Iwo Jima whenever possible and eating as much as we could on the mess decks with our guys. Two things have to happen in a bully-victim dynamic: One person has to play the bully, and the other person has to volunteer to play the victim. We weren’t Zimanski’s victims, and that was going to make for an interesting cruise. Our equipment, boats, minisub, and heavy weapons were to be stored aboard Portland, so we would have to thrash out some sort of working relationship.

Fifth Platoon had been assigned to Mediterranean Amphibious Ready Group (MARG) 2-83. Our wire diagram connected us to the commodore of Amphibious Squadron 8. In fact, as SEALs, we were a “theater” asset. That meant we could be, and would be, called upon by the EURCOM (European Command) commander in chief to conduct special assignments.

Afloat, we were navy, working for the commodore. Ashore, operating in a USMC environment, we worked for the commander of the landing force. We did it all. Or basically, we did what we wanted. Our lines of command and accountability were nebulous, a fact all SEALs exploit to full advantage. It was our game to play the commodore off the colonel, and the general off the admiral.

Frank and I deployed with a full platoon, and we were loaded for bear. Two officers, four fully manned boat crews, a chief petty officer, and a first-class leading petty officer. In addition to our four F-470 raiding crafts, we had at our command a Seafox-class patrol boat manned by a detachment of special boat unit sailors.

The Seafox was to be our workhorse. Though it had some serious design flaws, namely sea-keeping, crew comfort, and the location and scope of its weapons suite, the Seafox was fast, had decent range, and was armed with .50-cal and M-60 machine guns. It had radar, encrypted radio capability, and an IFF, or identification friend-or-foe system. Made from carbon fiber and radar-absorbing materials, the Seafox was one of the earliest maritime applications of stealth technology. In what was a closely guarded secret at the time, the Seafox was invisible to radar.

Also attached to our unit was a detachment from Underwater Demolition Team Twenty-two. They operated an eight-man wet submarine, an SDV, or SEAL delivery vehicle. This platform gave us great options in the insertion and extraction departments. Four other ships, Austin, El Paso, Harlan County, and Iwo Jima, delivered to Lebanon the remainder of fifteen hundred grunt marines, transport and attack helicopters, amphibious personnel carriers, Seabees, bulldozers, tanks, and artillery. America was back in Lebanon, in a major way, and what we found there was enough to blow your mind.

Into a nation the size of Connecticut were jumbled together several occupying armies, a UN peacekeeping force, five mutually antagonistic Lebanese militias, and the rump section of a PLO rent by mutiny. It was the business of intelligence officers to monitor the activity of these diverse entities, and to that end captains and majors tended maps that showed troop movement and recent terrorist activity.

Snipers, car bombs, mines, and kidnappings were common fare. During the initial part of our deployment, such surprises were reserved mostly for the Israeli army. In the serenity of the headquarters area, these shenanigans were reduced to red tape on topographic maps: real-time items of intelligence to be collected, correlated, and filed.

In the early days of the multinational peacekeeping force, the U.S. occupied the airport and a string of emplacements in Hay es Salaam, the slum surrounding the north end of the runway. Fifth Platoon came ashore with the Seabees and quickly looked for a place to set up shop. Frank and I took a jeep up to the battalion landing team headquarters, a four-story cement building located 150 yards north of the airport terminal. Several factors recommended this place as our new home. For one thing, it was made of reinforced concrete.

The building had been a PLO hospital before the marines assumed it. Four levels of galleries and balconies all faced in to each other above a tiled central courtyard. It had once been a beautiful building, but it was burned and gutted by either the advancing Israelis or the retreating Palestinians, and on its vertical surfaces, inside and out, were dark streaks from fire smoke. The interior was ravaged, ceiling tiles and marble facings torn away, exposing inert electrical wire and air-conditioning vents.

The rooms were filled with field desks, radios, maps, mosquito netting, and aluminum cots. About 350 marines lived and worked here. The headquarters units slept beside their desks. The offices of operations and staff officers were marked with hand-lettered signs. A stenciled sign in front of the building said BEIRUT HILTON. Nobody called it that; the place was always called the “battalion landing team headquarters,” or simply the BLT. This was the building that the world would come to know as Beirut’s marine barracks.

Frank and I looked around. There were empty rooms. Plenty of space to stow our gear, hot food, latrines, and showers—occasionally even hot showers—out back. The walls were solid, and that meant we wouldn’t have to dig a hole for cover.

As we checked the place out, we got the hairy eyeball from every marine who passed us. SEALs do not wear rank or tridents (the badges that identify us as SEALs) on our combat uniforms. Frank’s jungle boots were not bloused into his trousers, and I wasn’t even wearing boots—I was wearing high-top canvas coral shoes. Our hair was long. We both had Fu Manchu mustaches. We were carrying CAR-15s, not M-16s. We were not wearing the starched four-peaked “covers” marines and sailors are expected to wear with their battle dress uniforms. Pushed back on our heads were floppy jungle hats, and the front of mine was folded like Paddington the bear’s. Marines have a great affinity for spit and polish. SEALs do not.

“I detect a potential lifestyle conflict,” Frank said.

I agreed. Compared to the way our platoon dressed, Frank and I looked like recruiting posters. If we moved into the BLT, it wouldn’t be long until some marine major blew a gasket.

On the drive back to the beach, Frank and I came up with a dozen sour-grape reasons why we wouldn’t move into the BLT.

“Too far from the water,” I said.

“Too close to the brass,” he said.

“Too many jarheads.”

We both knew this meant we’d have to build a place on Green Beach. “Build” meant digging a bunker and foxholes. And Green Beach, though close to the water, was far from a perfect position. It was exposed as hell. If—no, when—this place went to shit, we’d be open to the elements.

The American position at Green Beach occupied a strip of coastline along the Beirut-Sidon highway, maybe four hundred yards from the terminal at Beirut International Airport. The position was separated from the highway by three hundred fifty-five-gallon drums filled with tar. This barrier ran the length of Green Beach, sequestering the seventy marines, Seabees, and SEALs stationed there from the busy coastal highway. A twenty-foot watchtower stood at beach center, and the northern and southern approaches were sandbagged machine-gun nests, barbed wire, and cement tank traps.

Still, no one stationed at Green Beach took comfort in the defenses. The marines at the airport and the outposts had buildings to shelter in, and the troops north and south of the runway could take consolation in what was left of the perimeter fence. But Green Beach stood alone. It was isolated from all other American or allied positions. Green Beach was backed across the highway by a fifty-foot sandstone bluff. Although the terrain provided some cover from snipers, it also screened us from supporting fire from the other marine emplacements.

Put tactically, we were in an unsupported position. Put in grunt lingo, our shit was in the breeze.

Although the tar barrels were adequate defense against small-arms fire, any vehicle with sufficient momentum could careen off the highway, crash through the barrier, and come to rest by the flagpole. This was not just a theoretical possibility: The American embassy had been truck-bombed just a month before, and a marine trained an M-60 machine gun on every car that passed on the road. It was cold comfort to think we would probably get the truck-bomb driver who got us.

There were tents at Green Beach, but they were strictly for show. Snipers and artillery attacks were something we lived with seven days a week. Sleeping accommodations were underground. Under Frank’s direction, the platoon dug an eight-by-fifty-foot hole in the sand, reinforced the sides, and roofed it over with Marston matting and two layers of sandbags. We christened our underground condo Rancho Deluxe.

We were safe six feet under, and the rancho was home. Over the coming months, our tents, left nearby as a diversion, would be gradually reduced to ribbons by snipers, ricochets, and shrapnel. By the end of our tour, Rancho Deluxe was a vermin-infested cesspool, but it held up through rocket and artillery attacks and would survive the massive truck bomb that was to destroy the marine barracks.

We settled into the somniferous beginning of our tour.

Our detachment was responsible to the commodore for the security of U.S. naval vessels within the anchorage and for the ships under way in the Beirut AO, or area of operations. We would also be available for tasking from the commander of the landing force (with the concurrence of the commodore). Those odd jobs included reconnaissance, calling in naval gunfire, air strikes and artillery support, courier runs to the embassy, liaison with allied and Lebanese forces, explosive ordnance disposal, diving ser-vices, ship-hull searches, parachute operations, direct-action missions, and underwater demolition. In short, everything that SEALs do. Our AO ran from Sidon in the south to Tripoli in the north. Hundreds of square miles of ocean and a like area of land.

Frank decided on a rotation of forces. Doc Jones and I would take boat crews Charlie and Delta. Frank and Tim, our LPO, would take boat crews Alpha and Bravo. Two boat crews equaled a SEAL squad—eight shooters. Eight guys, for us, were considered a pretty good-sized group of men.

The arrangement worked like this: One squad would do a week at Rancho Deluxe, the other a week out on the ships and in the Seafox. The squad at Rancho Deluxe would handle land ops and water security in the immediate area of Green Beach; the other squad would take blue-water ops, long-range coastal patrols, and ship security. We’d operate for a week and then switch. The platoon would combine for bigger operations, recons and direct action, countersniper ops, or deep penetrations into the hills. Later, when airplanes started getting shot at, we would establish another rotation, a detachment aboard the helicopter carrier Iwo Jima. This team would work directly for the battle-group staff and provide combat search and rescue (CSAR) for downed aircraft and aircrew.

Again the arrangement was pure Giffland. He generously split the command, placing great faith in me and my two boat crews. Our assignments rotated, and through them all, I enjoyed Frank’s confidence and a terrific latitude for self-expression. I have heard of few other SEAL elements, anywhere, that were allowed to function in such a joint-command mode. The arrangement worked well. At the beginning of the tour, we never did the same thing long enough to get bored.

By the end of summer, boredom would not be an issue.

HOLLYWOOD PREPARES YOU in a certain way for war. The set design of the movie Saving Private Ryan typifies the war-demolished building as imprinted on the American psyche. It bears little resemblance to the destruction of real war. To the uninitiated, devastation not fitting the Hollywood stereotype is at first perceived as surreal, even fake. It is only after considerable exposure to real battle damage, legitimately bombed buildings, and authentic death that the vapid images of Hollywood are forsaken.

Until you look into a building hit by artillery, or see with your own eyes a house chopped open by rocket fire, you have only a film director’s impressions. These are the gutted provincial buildings of World War II Europe, their raised stone walls burned on ragged edges and roof tiles broken and scattered about the street. In Lebanon I was constantly amazed by the resilience of the buildings. Almost every structure in the city had been touched by battle, and most showed an astounding stubbornness against destruction. Into the sides of single-story houses would be punched neat two-and-a-half-foot holes, the leavings of 105-millimeter tank rounds. Through these holes could be seen utterly obliterated interiors. Walking by a targeted building, I noticed that the holes appeared to have been punched with a blunt instrument, as though the ends of a telephone pole had been jammed through the walls. The damage to the exteriors would often appear slight. The real shit happened inside, where the people were. All traces of human habitation were blown to tatters by the shaped charge effect of armor-piercing shells. Often a house would stand through four or five hits. When there was no secondary fire, the edges of the entry holes looked like wet cement.

We came to learn that the Lebanese civil war was a struggle unique in modern warfare, a contest continually escalated and abated, an ongoing battle among a minimum of five sworn and ruthless enemies. Alliances in this war were brief and utilitarian, and of the several sides, none enjoyed any distinct numerical or tactical advantage.

In Lebanon considerations of terrain and technology short-circuited the fundamental precepts of maneuver warfare. There was little daily change in forces or position. With the rare exception of those times when the U.S. built a fire under the Lebanese army, there were almost no attempts by any side to capture ground. Druze, PLO, Amal, Hezbollah, and Phalangists all had a piece of the pie, and none seemed particularly disposed to take from his neighbor. So it went month after month, each of the major players controlling one part or another of the capital city, leaving the central government of the Lebanese Republic paralyzed, ineffectual, and beholden to seventeen-year-old kids working roadblocks at city street corners.

Each of the antagonists maintained a bastion of terrain, either mountainous or urban, unassailable citadels that were the respective power bases. These areas remained undisputed, defended chiefly by spectacular canyons or the raw human arithmetic of attack and defense in urban terrain. Such considerations made it inopportune to bring ground forces to bear. Without infantry to seize and control territory, the players remained static, dug in and unwilling to make the sacrifice of an assault.

This stalemate engendered a wholly original form of warfare, a kind of megasniping in which mobile long-range weapons were key. From deep within the sanctity of home turf, rockets, artillery, and mortars were used to drop high explosive on troop concentrations and area targets. When legitimate military targets were not available, opposing gunners were content to hammer a rival’s “hostile” civilian centers. Neighborhoods, schools, and markets were hit, requiring retaliation in kind. Other neighborhoods would be hit, leading to an escalation of targeting, the second tier more outrageous than the last. Inevitably mosques, churches, and hospitals came under the gun, leading to more vigorous retaliation, more civilian casualties, etc. The cycle was arrested by cease-fires that came and went like daydreams. Breaks in the fighting frequently lasted less than an hour.

In the media the daily passage of shells from place to place was called an “artillery duel,” a careless and inappropriate metaphor that somehow conjured the image of two noble adversaries aiming at each other’s guns. As though it were good guy against bad guy, not lunatic militiamen hammering the living shit out of women and children huddled in the basement shelters of their homes.

At the start of the tour, there were plenty of opportunities to observe the interface of architecture and artillery. Foot and jeep patrols through the slums around the airport were especially educational. Spreading to the east and north of the runways was an area the marines soon named Hooterville, after the ramshackle heap of buildings in the cartoon of the same name. A warren of dirt streets and tumbledown cinder-block structures, Hooterville was probably the most frequently shelled urban area on the planet.

In the time before the Israeli withdrawal, marines made daily excursions from the airport, north, east, and infrequently, south. SEAL squads occasionally accompanied these daylight patrols to learn the arrangement of the streets, visit the outlying marine outposts, and generally get the lay of the land.

The other units within the multinational forces also walked the beat. North of the airport, in West Beirut, the French Foreign Legion patrolled aggressively. East of the runways, in the foothills of the Shouf, a British reconnaissance company was stationed. A no-nonsense outfit straight from a deployment in Northern Ireland, the Brits used armored cars called Ferrets to conduct daily sweeps. Immediately north of the airport was a wild no-man’s-land, untroubled by the Italian San Marco battalion who rarely, if ever, stepped from their walled compound. The Italians let the locals party hard. The Italian sector came to be known as Khomeiniville, and patrolling through it, or just flying over it, would become more and more of a thrill as the summer ground on.

Since the bombing of the U.S. embassy in April, the American and British legations were doubled up in a well-guarded and heavily fortified compound along the corniche in West Beirut. Hostile activity in Khomeiniville frequently closed the coast highway and prevented vehicular and foot traffic from moving north. The embassies were often cut off from the troops that were supposed to protect them.

In the beginning of the tour, the admixture of French, Italian, British, and American sectors was made livelier by the presence of the Israeli Defense Forces. Dug in to positions south of downtown, IDF armor and infantry units manned pillboxes, roadblocks, and fighting holes scattered through the Italian, American, and British sectors. These emplacements signaled the high-water mark of Israeli conquest during the Lebanese-Israeli war. In the time before the multinational force became the prime target, the IDF was sniped at constantly, which kept a constant volume of steel in the air. It was the prudent peacekeeper who knew where the IDF was, and where might be their enemies, lest one become embroiled in an argument not of one’s making.

Before the lid came off, the marines patrolled twice daily, ostensibly keeping order in the sector around the airport. Peace in the city was a dream that would sour into a lurid nightmare. Walking patrol in broad daylight with half a company of marines was a trip. A gaggle of forty men is a parade for SEALs, not an operational force. Besides working in much smaller units, SEALs almost never operate in daylight and would never do so by choice. But this was peacekeeping, and the rules were different. Sometimes the patrols were as unreal as moonwalks. We usually moved parallel to the main body of troops, or sometimes parallel and trailing, so we might be able to react and envelop any opposing force. We were in our spec-ops battle kit: flop hats, combat vests, and individual radios, the eight-man squad packing two M-60 machine guns. Each M-60 gunner carried six hundred rounds, and the squad deployed at least two M-203 grenade launchers, as well as a pair of AT-4 antitank rockets and M-14 sniper rifles. The firepower carried by the eight SEALs nearly matched that of the marine platoon.

It was not merely a question of armament. Marine tactics were to muster up, line up, and walk the route. Period. Their patrols were not arrayed or prepared for combat. If there was danger, the marines would be the last dumb fuckers on the face of the planet to know it. In flak jackets and rucksacks, with their weapons slung and unloaded, they couldn’t react. Accompanying the marines into Hooterville, I always had the feeling that the patrols were the bait and we were the hammer.

Much of the way, we hugged walls, walked backward, and leapfrogged boat crew upon boat crew, covering intersections and rooftops as the patrol lumbered on its way. Covering and moving, we’d jog five steps to every one taken by the marines. In close alleyways, there would be not a breath of wind, and the air would lay so thick that just breathing was a dull labor to which you applied the greater part of your thoughts. The heat burrowed into your skull, numbed your senses, and made simply walking an effort.

Checking doorways and alleys, we’d trot through grimy neighborhoods where shell-smashed buildings hunkered beside half-constructed ones. Above us on walls and balconies poked hand-lettered signs in Arabic saying God knew what.

In some parts of town, children clamored by us, saying in English, “Hello! What’s your name? Give me cocoa!” To the delight of the kids, we’d hand over packages of hot-chocolate powder from our MREs. They would swarm around, touching us, laughing, doing weird dances. There were toy pistols, cap guns, everywhere. They poked at you, in the hands of children, from around corners and behind walls. At first they would stop your heart, and then you’d seen a million of them, and in the hot afternoons, you got numb. Some marines didn’t even look. They just walked.

In Khomeiniville the hostility of the people was another kind of heat. Predominantly Shiite Muslim, the people there did not dig the multinational force. They held a separate, religiously mandated hatred for Americans. It was here that we really walked patrol. Each face was a blade. People spat at us, made contemptuous gestures, and pushed their kids indoors. As we approached blocks of houses, the women would ululate to one another in the high, trilling lu-lu-lu-lu that was a signal of both warning and contempt. The sound would echo off the buildings, a bizarre, stuttering howl. It made your skin crawl, and mercifully, American incursions into this part of town were short. But sometimes we were in longer than we wanted to be.

In the narrow, serpentine streets, it was not difficult to become disoriented. In the labyrinth of buildings and blind alleys, you could believe that your compass was screwed, then, trusting your sense of location, press on in some inane direction until you were hopelessly and completely lost. Wandering patrols might emerge in places Americans were definitely not supposed to be. When patrols stumbled through market squares that had never in history been profaned by the boots of Christian infidels, the eyes of the locals were like saucers. Whatever was going on would stop outright. If fruit vendors were in the process of making change, they would freeze, clutching money and merchandise like statues until we left. Whole streets would halt, and the people would stand and gawk as though the patrol were from Uranus. Other times people would only laugh, smile, and point; it depended.

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.