THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION

HE WAS CALLED “the mad mortar man.” He had no other name, no face. He may have been one man or a dozen. He prowled through Hooterville in a pickup truck in which he had installed a Soviet 82-millimeter mortar. He would drive to spots where he had predetermined the fire solutions, then let fly at the compounds. Sometimes he would reach all the way over the airport and hit Green Beach; sometimes he would hit the BLT and the MSSG buildings. It was up to him.

The worst thing about mortar fire is that it gives no warning. The report of the weapon is so distant, so muffled by surrounding buildings, that you never hear it. The round travels slowly up, up, up, and then straight down on top of you. You never knew about it until it was in your shorts.

The mad mortar man was special, and his work was as unique and identifiable as his signature. He always fired just a few rounds, maybe four, in rapid succession. Then he would shift fire, driving his truck to some other spot and hitting a different part of the airport. That would be a day’s work, nothing colossal; most of the time he wounded no one, but it was always enough to cancel the movie and the rounds of the chow truck. He really was an annoying son of a bitch.

It was a hot afternoon a few weeks before the Israeli withdrawal, and the hills above the city had been quiet since sunrise. Carrying my rifle and body armor, I walked from Rancho Deluxe down the berm toward the causeways. I was preparing our Zodiac for a patrol of the anchorage, a daily occurrence we called “hassling fishermen.”

The causeways were a floating set of piers anchored to the beach sand, and they were Green Beach’s raison d’être. Daily, landing craft disgorged trucks, jeeps, and trailers onto the piers, supplying the troops with bullets, beans, and butt wipe. Green Beach was the main link to the American, British, French, and Italian warships offshore. The causeways were the logistical nexus of the operation and would become a favorite artillery target of the Druze, PLO, and Syrian troops who occupied the high ground around us.

It was a little before noon, and I was walking along the second section of causeway, nearly to my boat when I heard it. The slightest sound, but definitely the sound of a mortar round—incoming. When they are fired from a long way off, and if the wind is just so, sometimes you can hear them. As they fall, mortar rounds make a sound like a child whispering “woof-woof- woof.” It is the sound of the tail fins cutting the air. If you hear it, the round is right on top of you, and there’s not an instant to do anything but pucker and die.

I closed my eyes and thought: I’m dead.

The round slammed into the water next to the causeway section I was standing on. I don’t recall the explosion. I don’t remember hearing anything except the small sound of the round dropping in on me. But the causeway section was blown into the air, and so was I.

The explosion ripped my shirt off my body. A huge geyser of sand and water shot into the sky, and the seawater that rained down on me was the temperature of blood. I made a perfect two-point landing—on my head and shoulders. Remarkably, I’d turned a somersault with my CAR-15 held tight in my hand. I got to my feet, reeled two steps, and fell. I was soaking wet. I thought it was with my own blood.

Under me, the pontoon section was punctured and sinking but was still connected to the rest of the causeway. As I staggered off it, dull thuds echoed from the hills above the airport. More rounds were on the way, and I had to find cover.

As I crawled off the causeway, I saw a Seabee lying facedown in the sand in front of me, and I grabbed him by the elbow and started to drag and pull and finally run with him back to the bunkers.

Then it came again: woof-woof-woof. The beach exploded as half a dozen more rounds straddled our position. As we scrambled across thirty yards of beach, rounds hit all around us. Ass over tea kettle, we fell into the bunker. I was covered with sand and soot, and my hair was singed on the left side of my head. I looked like Wile E. Coyote on a bad day. As I patted myself down, checking to make sure my parts were still connected, the Seabee yelled for a corpsman.

I stood trembling in the bunker and did the math. The burst radius of an 82-millimeter round is nearly fifteen meters. In plain English, any person within a thirty-meter circle may reasonably be expected to be vaporized, killed, or crippled by the explosion. The round had detonated under five feet from me. I should have been turned inside out. But there wasn’t a scratch on my body. To have survived was astounding. The chances of surviving a near-direct hit without a nick were infinitesimal.

This was the moment that I abandoned atheism.

My conversion was not an epiphany; it was more an exercise in the scientific method. Until this moment, for me, God had been an unlikely hypothesis. That hypothesis had now been supported by an experiment. A mortar round had knocked me on my ass and spit me out alive and unharmed.

In Beirut my call sign was Bad Karma. Although I was not cosmic-enabled at the time, I accepted my nom de guerre with an eye to the universal consequences of being a combat soldier. The game was life and death. I ran my operations and was as available to destruction as any person in the city. I knew that the sword of karma swung both ways.

OUR TACTICS EVOLVED as the summer progressed. As militias coalesced in Hooterville, marine combat posts outside the perimeter came under increasingly frequent attack, and the slums surrounding the Beirut airport became deadly with concealed shooting positions and ambush sites prepared by an ever expanding coterie of bad guys: Druze, PLO, Hezbollah, and Amal. The marine CPs (combat posts) offered fixed targets the militias could fire on when their mood suited. By the end of August these attacks happened several times a week.

A sign was posted at the main entrance to the airport, a blue-and-gold-stenciled piece of plywood autographed by the cast of the television show Hill Street Blues. It said: HEY, BE CAREFUL OUT THERE. It was right next to the checkpoint where a marine sentry made sure your weapons were unloaded before you left the American sector. When we passed the sentries, holding back the charging handles of our weapons to show we were in compliance, they would pass us a look like “You guys are unloaded, right?” I always smiled back as vapidly as I could. I was not about to write a letter to the mother of one of my SEALs, explaining that I was the officer who got her son killed riding around West Beirut with an unloaded rifle. Multinational force regulations to the contrary, our standing orders were for SEALs to show empty at the checkpoints, drive around the first corner, and put one in the chamber. Locked and cocked, fuckin’ A.

Intelligence reports indicated that Hezbollah surveillance posts and bunkers were being built inside houses, making them both difficult to detect and harder to attack. Snipers often engaged marine targets from the windows of occupied buildings, trusting that American peacekeepers would be reluctant to fire back at an apartment block filled with women and children. As the attacks on the CPs picked up, foot patrols were very often curtailed or canceled, and vehicle patrols became the norm. Our routes through town varied; and in unpredictability there was safety.

One of the principal tenants of naval special warfare is that SEALs pick the time and place of combat. We engage the enemy on our terms and in the place of our choosing, or not at all. But this was peacekeeping, and we found ourselves increasingly the hunted, not the hunters. Adhering to the rules of engagement meant we were not free to ply our trade as we wanted, so we maximized what tools we had: surprise, deception, and firepower.

We varied our routes and the time of patrols, daylight and predawn, and moved in convoys of two or three jeeps (not Humvees). Jeeps were everywhere, and heaped with equipment. A dirty American jeep looked pretty much like a dirty Druze jeep.

SEALs are given wide latitude in the selection of weapons and equipment. In short, we use what works, no matter who made it. American weapons, particularly the M-16, have a distinctive outline. When Russian-made AK-47s and RPGs, or rocket-propelled grenades, came into our possession, we carried them on patrol. Packing the weapons of the bad guys was one way to lower our profile in town. Our woodland-pattern cammies were also distinctively Yankee. Instead of out-of-the-bag American uniforms, we often wore a mixture of desert and woodland patterns, blue jeans, and camouflage smocks from Czechoslovakia and East Germany. Our Mad Max outfits were less obvious for being eclectic, and made us look like generic Beiruti militiamen; American flags Velcroed to our shoulders kept us within the Geneva rules governing combatants and uniforms. Arab headdresses rounded out our attire. We wore the black and white Palestinian kufiyah, or the red and white Arab shumagg, depending on the neighborhood. Most often we wore the cloths tied around our necks or tucked into the collars of our cammie blouses. Occasionally, we wore them in high style, snugged down on our heads with black ropelike Ogal, very T. E. Lawrence. The purpose of the costumes was to buy us time. To anyone bumping into us, we’d look, at least at a distance, like an indigenous patrol. Even a ten-second delay by our enemies was sufficient time for us to react. Sometimes the props and costumes worked, sometimes they did not.

We had flexibility in our selection of weapons, and we generally carried heavy. The ability to lay down a withering counterbarrage, what we called a “base of fire,” was the only tactic that would allow us to extract from an ambush. Each four-man boat crew deployed at least one M-60 machine gun or a Russian-made RPK-squad automatic rifle. We each carried a minimum of ten thirty-round magazines for our M-16s. In addition, my CAR-15 was fitted with an M-203 40-millimeter grenade launcher. The 203 was capable of lobbing HE/DP grenades (high-explosive/dual-purpose fragmentation and antiarmor projectiles) to a range of four hundred yards. I patrolled with a round of “beehive” chambered in my grenade launcher, a specially designed round that turned the 203 into an extremely large shotgun. Instead of buckshot, the beehive round was filled with two hundred finned nails called “fléchettes.” At the press of the trigger, the beehive would deliver a cloud of nails traveling at five hundred feet per second. It could be extremely persuasive at close range.

To designate targets for helicopter gunships, I also carried a magazine containing thirty rounds of red tracer, the color used by NATO forces. It is the wise operator who remembers that tracers work both ways. Thirty red fireballs would clearly indicate what I wanted the gunships to shoot at, and just as plainly the location from which I was shooting. I carried a second magazine filled with green tracer, the preferred color of our enemies. More than once, booger eaters stopped firing when they thought the green tracer flying back at them meant they’d opened up on friends. In addition to our combat loads, we carried radios, aircraft ID panels, smoke, frag and stun grenades, water, and first-aid kits. The weight, all told, amounted to about forty pounds per man.

As ambush attacks and vehicle bombings became more frequent, we relied increasingly on the Seafox and helicopters to insert into and extract from the city. By the last weeks in August, we stopped jeep patrols entirely but continued to visit allied positions, particularly the French.

In the French sector, a battalion of Legion Etranger (foreign legionnaires) kept the hammer down. The Legion battalion was comprised mostly of Eastern Europeans, Cambodians, and Vietnamese. There were some Germans, principally escaped East Germans, and at least one American, who translated for us. Their officers were, to a man, Saint Cyr–educated. The discipline of the outfit was strict; the troopers were professional and squared away. The French forces were augmented by a detachment of Commando Hubert, French naval commandos, and we were often the recipients of their gracious hospitality.

At Green Beach we subsisted on a fairly steady diet of MREs. Only when the chow truck was able to negotiate the perimeter road did we eat hot food. Dining with the French was an enchantment. One afternoon, after conducting a harbor sweep with the Commando Hubert, we were treated to rabbit, haricots verts, green salad, fresh-baked bread, and strawberry crepes. After dinner the corporal chef apologized to me, saying they would have had something better if they’d known we were coming. American MREs consisted of squeeze packets of chicken à la king and worse. French rations looked like they’d been put together by Martha Stewart—one I ate contained canned pâté, potted mushrooms, preserved pears, and a flavor-locked package of Gruyère cheese. In each French ration box were small bottles of red and white wine and a fortifying shot-bottle of cognac. Vive la France.

One afternoon boat crews Alpha and Charlie combined with members of the Commando Hubert to run an antisniper room-clearance operation against the demolished Holiday Inn downtown. Together with the Legion’s Night Movement Company, we conducted a floor-by-floor search of fifteen stories of smoke-blackened, gutted rooms. We had no contact, but the event was a nail-biter not made any easier by the copious amounts of wine the French had served with lunch.

EACH NIGHT THE THUD of artillery fire would tumble down from the hills and drift across the outposts by the perimeter road. “Stray rounds,” we were told. Rounds “unintentionally” fired in our direction crashed into the fields around us on a regular basis. Occasionally they fell on Green Beach itself. These were reportedly accidents, the gratuitous leavings of someone else’s fight. It was a common bitch that this didn’t get us hostile-fire pay. Across polished tables in Washington it had been decided that this was not hostile fire; it was somehow more benign, gentle, unintentional. Half a world away, premeditation was figured into the Druze firing solutions.

Cease-fires came and went, and rounds fell with increasing frequency onto the American positions. Apparently, what occurred beyond the wire was not our concern, and that which fell into our sector was taken in the magnanimous spirit of peacekeeping.

In a hole along the perimeter, “stray rounds” were perceived in an entirely less forbearing way. There would be a red, silent flash in the hills, a small blink sometimes among many others, but it was a sight that the wise and the living learned quickly to recognize. It meant that a rocket-propelled grenade had been fired, and you watched for the telltale red glow of the traveling round. When the RPG was fired across your field of vision, intended for someone else, it seemed to move slowly, a red dot crawling across the sky, limping like an incredibly deadly fat man toward its target. Even when it was fired directly at you, it was sometimes possible to see it coming. When it was about halfway between the fuckers who shot it and you, the sound of the launch, a kind of bumpfff, would drift down from the hills. If you had seen it fired, there would be time to get down. If you hadn’t seen or heard, there would be only the consuming red blast of its detonation.

While you’re waiting, sweating the incoming round in the bottom of your emplacement, time seems to dilate. The sound rolls away, and the night twists silence into the beating of your heart and the dry sounds of breathing. Sometimes there was no explosion; sometimes the RPGs hit cement taxiways and skipped off. Sometimes they thumped into dirt embankments and failed to detonate. Then there would be nothing, like a switch had been thrown. Slowly, you would open your eyes. Your senses would assemble themselves in a stammering swirl, and you would realize that you were alive. The hills would then be still, and the dust would drift away into a single thought that seeped into cognition from the lower centers of your brain: stray rounds.

Before we knew the names of the players, the bad guys were a faceless lot, any of the nearly half-dozen militia organizations fighting against the Lebanese armed forces. When we were fired on, the joke was that the perps were Jake and Abdul, the Druze Brothers. But now, the summer half over, things were different. We knew somebody up there in the hills, a name, and “Wally” was always watching. The head of the Druze militia was Walid Jumblat, and it wasn’t hard to imagine his hypothalamic eyes constantly watching, round like an owl’s, noting our movements, shelling us, shifting fire, hitting us again. It was his game, and we were made to play it.

The Police song “Every Breath You Take” became something of an anthem for us. When it was played on the local stations or broadcast from the navy mobile detachment station at the airport, people would sing along, changing the words just slightly to fit this very peculiar summer affair:

Every move you make

Every shit you take

The bunkers you create

Wally’s watching you.

Oh, can’t you see

He’s got the RPGs

And when you hear that sound

Here comes another round

Wally’s watching you . . .

The little white jets of envoys came and went from the airport and, in the Shouf artillery, beat out a tempo. I bought a book of stamps, intending to write anonymous letters to my congressman, but for no reason at all I changed my mind. It became difficult to write at all. My letters from this place were a study in the descent of consciousness into sunstroke. I had written often this summer to Margot, and less often to my parents. To them all, I wrote only about the weather and the bad food, idiotic travelogue. I never mentioned the shellings, our missions, or how fucked up the place was becoming.

I am certain the inanity of my letters was a tip-off. My dad sent me long missives telling me to be careful, take care of my feet, and not to be afraid to call bullshit on stupid orders. Sage advice that served me well. My mother sent tin cylinders of Danish butter cookies and gift boxes from Hickory Farm: wax-wrapped lumps of cheddar, saltine crackers, and gelatinous canned hams. Normally, these were Christmas gifts you sent to people you didn’t like. In Beirut they were delicacies devoured at once. Margot sent a picture of herself in a blue string bikini, sitting on a towel in Virginia Beach. “Hurry home,” she scribbled on the back. “I have a surprise for you.”

I had a surprise for her, too, believe me.

BY MID-AUGUST THE IDF had nearly completed the readjustment of their line. Forces were redeployed from the Shouf, south to the city of Sidon into a long oblique that was to form a new buffer between the borders of Lebanon and Israel. On the promontories above Green Beach, columns of smoke loomed over their burning supply dumps as IDF convoys rolled south. In the city their barracks and depots had all been abandoned. Only armor and a rear guard of infantry remained to cover the withdrawal and to work the checkpoint on the coastal highway.

The last remaining IDF position occupied a slight hillock two hundred meters south of the Lebanese university in the Shuafat. The Star of David fluttered from a staff atop a two-story building that was surrounded by bunkers, foxholes, tanks, and armored personnel carriers. The marines referred to the Israeli position as “Fort Apache,” and it looked like the sandbag capital of the world.

During the ponderous course of the IDF pullback, this position became increasingly exposed and removed from the bulk of the contingent. In microcosm it played out the course of things to come: daily snipings, rocket and mortar attacks, car bombs. But the Israeli response to these attacks differed qualitatively from our own—the Israelis got even, right away. When IDF positions took fire, their reaction was always the same: a twenty-five-minute full-on barrage into the neighborhood from which the rounds had come. A chilling tactic had come to replace response in the Israeli military vocabulary: collective punishment. They would hose down the three-square-block area from which the fire had originated. The IDF fire was so intense, so instantaneous and well aimed, that even across the Shouf you seemed to sense the anger in it. These tactics did not engender any sort of community feeling, and as the IDF pulled back from Fort Apache, there was an escalation in exposure to the marine company occupying the grounds of the Lebanese university. The marines would soon inherit the annoyance felt for the previous landlords.

The folks back home might have thought that America and Israel were fast allies. Certainly the impression of the Lebanese was that America had intervened to shore up the IDF’s occupation of Beirut. The fact that the marines did nothing to restrain Israeli excess bolstered this impression. In actuality, relations between the marines and the IDF on the ground remained touchy.

There were several instances of deliberate IDF provocation, of armored vehicles being driven into American-held positions, and more than one marine had pulled a weapon on an Israeli tank commander. We’d had a few run-ins ourselves. For us, it was mostly trouble at vehicle checkpoints, where IDF armor blocked the street and would deign it inconvenient to allow us to pass. Doubling back over roads we had just driven was more than a hassle. It was dangerous. We took to calling the IDF “God’s army” and other things much less complimentary.

Once, aboard the Seafox, we’d been ordered south to intercept a high-speed contact. The blip turned out to be an Israeli navy patrol boat heading hell-for-leather north into the American AO. We were ordered to deflect him. Provided with courses and speed by U.S.S. John Rodgers, our intercept brought us into contact with an IDFN Dabur-class patrol craft. We did our best to wave him off, but we were soon engaged in a game of bumper boats, the Israeli refusing to slow or fall off until finally, weapons were pointed at each other and we both went to all-stop.

The Israeli patrol boat was a sixty-footer, bigger than us by half and armed with 20-millimeter cannon. If he opened fire, we’d be shot to pieces in a matter of seconds. I stood on the middle deck of the Seafox with my rifle hanging around my neck. For a moment we bobbed there, guns manned, waiting for someone to blink. Then, from the bridge of the Dabur, the Israeli officer in charge swung a megaphone at us. In clipped English he informed me that if I continued to block his way, he would sink us. I answered that if he proceeded any farther north, he’d be on a very short trip. I gestured over my shoulder. U.S.S. John Rodgers, all three hundred feet of her, was bearing down on us, bow wave brilliant against the blue water. John Rodgers’s five-inch .50-caliber gun was swung to port. She meant business, and so did we.

“I advise you to withdraw, Captain,” I said.

The Dabur turned slowly back the way she came. As the Israeli PB motored insolently south, I took some smug comfort in thinking that at least around here, we were still God’s navy.

Back on the beach, the assignments were varied, but a creeping monotony was digging in. The only antidote to boredom was not giving a shit. I had secreted a surfboard in one of our load-out boxes before we left Virginia. Of my quiver of surfboards it was my primary weapon, a six-ten cherry-red Lopez Lightning Bolt, a rounded pintail shaped by Gerry Lopez himself. I got it ashore in a body bag. I had Bubba, Cheese, and Dave help me carry it off the helicopter on LZ Brown. In a combat zone there is one thing people look at but don’t see, and that is four SEALs carrying a body bag. The “body” was driven down to Green Beach in the back of a deuce-and-a-half truck, and I stashed it in one of our connex boxes outside Rancho Deluxe. The surf is not epic in Lebanon, but sometimes it comes up. Mostly knee-high mush, but I would ride the right-hand break on the south side of the causeway sections. Two of our counterparts in the Commando Hubert were also surfers, and they came down to ride occasionally. The conditions were not always pleasant. To the fundamentalist Islamic mind, there must be something inherently offensive about surfing. One afternoon the waves were up, and I paddled out. Twenty minutes after I got in the water, three Katyusha rockets straddled the beach and the coast highway. I unassed my board and ran back to the bunkers in a crouch. SEALs, Seabees, and beachmasters all cheered me. Two weeks later, it happened again. I was working a short section by the causeways when the shrieking howl came out of the sky. This time the rounds hit the beach close and south, by the Seabees’ tents. As I ran to the bunkers, no one was cheering. I dove into Rancho Deluxe and a close round fell, compressing and rarifying the air around me. As the dirt came down on top of us, I heard one of the Seabees saying, “That shit ain’t funny no more, man.”

The implication was plain. Surfing provoked Wally. When Wally got pissed, he lobbed rockets. Rockets put holes in the water tankers, shrapnel through tent flaps, and shut off the rounds of the chow truck. I stopped surfing after that.

Over the summer we provided security for a variety of junketing VIPs. There seemed always to be one or two of them about, undersecretaries of something or another, one-star generals, or, most offensive of all, congressmen. We walked with them, Vuarnet sunglasses covering our eyes and weapons hung around our necks. Sometimes we deployed sniper teams on rooftops overlooking vainglorious press conferences. Most often it was one or two, and on occasion it was a package deal, half a dozen of them in a gaggle, their staff-officer escort herding them through the positions. It was customary to give them cammies while they toured the sector. Ostensibly, it was to reduce their signature, though I doubt a plutocrat in a three-piece suit looked any more appealing in a sniper’s sights than a fat man in camouflaged utilities. They were ludicrous in their immaculate out-of-the-bag BDUs, but they wore them, always. Wore them to be photographed at the outposts, shamelessly posing with men who wore the uniform for a living, marines who often had been ordered to make themselves available.

When the hand of one congressman was put out, I took it, hot and damp, into my own. Our eyes never met, and as I prepared to say something, the hand was taken from mine and put into Frank’s. The eyes passed over Frank in a like manner, quickly, emptily, and as the politician walked away, I looked down. His new camouflaged trousers had been drawn up and bloused like a trooper’s, but they were tucked into black nylon support stockings and shiny black loafers.

We provided security for the visit of then vice president George Bush. After he was heloed back out to the flagship, I was in the MSSG building and saw on a public-affairs office bulletin board a freshly developed photograph of the vice president shaking hands with the president of Lebanon, Amin Gemayel. It was a standard propaganda shot, but a cartoon thought bubble had been drawn above the smiling face of President Gemayel. Just like the kids in Hooterville, Gemayel’s thoughts were on American goodies: “Hello,” the thought bubble read, “What’s your name? Give me cocoa.”

IF THE DAILY HAPPENINGS of the Lebanese civil war could be known up to the second, the precise mission of the multinational peacekeeping force was less well defined. It was written somewhere in a pamphlet entitled “Lebanon,” printed and distributed by the MAU, but the mission statement was vague, buried in page after page of nonsense about the local climate, geography, and agricultural history. A very nebulous line like “to establish a climate in which the Lebanese armed forces may carry out their responsibilities.” Potentially heavy stuff.

There were maps in the handbook as well, fairy-tale renditions of the positions occupied by the major players. The Druze were shown to occupy a circle five miles in radius that did not even touch Beirut. Other potential hostiles were shown in similarly sterilized posits, and the Lebanese armed forces, the LAF, was gallantly depicted as controlling the capitol. The maps offered up a Lebanon that America wanted to force into being, and had precious little to do with the reality of the war.

Becoming the mentor of the struggling Lebanese Republic may have been a noble ambition, but it proved eminently shortsighted. This was a multilateral civil war, and although the several protagonists clearly enjoyed fighting one another, they each had separate axes to grind with the existing government. Increasingly, our peacekeeping efforts involved separating everyone and allowing the LAF to attack whomever they wanted. We had undertaken nation building as a half-assed collateral task. America’s pretense of neutrality was slipping away fast. That fig leaf would soon be abandoned outright.

After weeks of burning supply dumps, the Israelis evacuated their last positions in Beirut on the night of August 28. The Israeli withdrawal created a dangerous vacuum that drew together the major players in a bloody land grab that reverberated through the Shouf. Everyone involved, Druze, Amal, LAF, everybody, seemed to fire at the marines. The shelling raged for days. As the sun lifted over the Shouf, Beirut sweltered under the bleak haze of cordite. In endless gray afternoons, the hills shuddered with the thumping blasts of barrage and counterbarrage.

The pretense of near-misses was abandoned for the outright bombardment of the airport. Days passed in the brief intervals between shellings. We moved uneasily in the compounds. Standing more than four steps from hard cover became something of a reckless thrill.

In the bunkers, men sat soaked with sweat, eyes round like the eyes of children in a thunderstorm. They sat for hours, grinding their teeth at the shriek of wind through the tail fins of careening rockets. Close impacts would lift sleeping men six inches off the damp floor, dropping them roughly into the rudest of all possible wake-ups. In the middle of the most accurate barrages, it was impossible not to find this all a horrendously poor joke. Perception changes under fire: Senses become keen; sight, sound, and smell are made infinitely more acute by megalevels of adrenaline and simple fear.

I had ways of passing the time then, filling my imagination with the names of dogs I might own, plans I had, the cruel things that might be said of old lovers. In these days the sunlight seemed to take on a faint, almost apologetic quality. Light cowered through the doorways and vent holes, a pasty, almost palpable something that reminded me more of luminous mud than sunlight. The shellings seemed an incredibly violent meteorological phenomena, a kind of killer weather. And when it broke, what spilled down upon us was this vaguely repentant sunlight. These are thoughts best comprehended by a mind four days without sleep.

There was frustration, furious madness, looming in the eyes of the men in September’s bunkers. Watching shells surround the positions my friends occupied, feeling the shock waves, pressed to the floor of my own ditch, I felt it, too. Microseconds of homicidal anger flashed across my consciousness, the kind of indescribable hatred you can feel only for treacherous motherfuckers who daily rain metallic death upon you. Nothing could be made of this rage. It had no outlet, no constructive or destructive end. The madness of the bunkers dissipated itself in nothing. It was spent in the Zen of sitting with a sandbag between you and oblivion, with your thoughts streaming down your face in huge, dirty beads of sweat.

For days the Phalangists battled the Druze for Bhamdoun, in the hills above East Beirut. There was much fighting, day and night, and American positions on the north perimeter took rounds incidentally and deliberately. From the fields of the Ash Shuafat, LAF artillery pummeled the Shouf and the north-facing hills beyond in an endless symphony of thuds.

Eventually, Druze forces managed to overrun the Phalangist position in Bhamdoun. In retaliation, the LAF 8th Brigade, a mixed Christian and Muslim unit, was ordered forward. Not much was expected of this attack, but to the shock of all—and the chagrin of the Druze, PLA, Hezbollah, and Syrian army—8th Brigade managed to penetrate as far as Suq al Gharb. It was at this point that the Syrian-led resistance stiffened and the LAF called for American naval gunfire support. As I am led to understand, the politicos, led by Special Ambassador Bud McFarlane, were in enthusiastic agreement. Closer to the ground, the marine commander, Colonel Tim Geraghty, was not so hot on the idea. There were more than a thousand artillery pieces in the Shouf overlooking the Beirut airport, all of them owned by people unhappy with the United States. Actively siding with the LAF would put the marines squarely in the sights of those guns. For as long as he was able, Colonel Geraghty prudently declined to call for naval gunfire support of the LAF.

Frank and boat crews Alpha and Bravo operated in the vicinity of Suq al Gharb during these weeks, conducting reconnaissance and locating targets, principally hostile artillery positions and command bunkers. On September 16, several shells were fired at the American embassy in West Beirut. In response, Alpha and Bravo, assisting ANGLICO units, directed naval gunfire against Druze artillery positions in the Shouf. On the nineteenth, Frank’s squad helped direct fire as U.S.S. Virginia, Bowen, and John Rodgers lob-bed in an additional 350 shells, this time in support of LAF units around Suq al Gharb.

The fight was on, and the United States had picked sides.

There were now French, British, and American aircraft carriers off the coast. Occasionally, they would come in, looming like great gray beasts on the horizon. Their war planes, Etendards, Buccaneers, and Tomcats, daily roared over the Shouf, always in twos. Low and very nearly at the speed of sound, they would come in off the water, banking over the airport, roaring through the foothills too low, too fast, for the AA guns to track.

It was a show put on for the grunts. The governments of England, France, and the United States all threatened air strikes if the shellings continued. The overflights were a warning to the guilty and a belated show of resolve to the men in the bunkers. The airplanes spent probably thirty-five seconds in the same air that daily rained rounds on our heads. Bank, thunder, and blast off. As quickly as they had come, they would disappear back over the sea to the carriers. In the vernacular of the marines, they were “weasel dicks,” escape artists.

But in the last part of summer it didn’t matter. Nothing really mattered. The hills that had once seemed so like San Diego were now familiar, malevolent, and distinctly Lebanese. In the compounds marines had developed a sensitivity to sound so acute that they could detect incoming rounds almost as soon as they were fired. Walking was done with an eye to the nearest bunker. Into every man’s spinal cord was programmed a leaping dive for cover, a reflex triggered by the sound of falling shells. It was something that you did not think about. It was a response housed in the low centers of your brain, with the same dark processes that made you breathe or sweat.

When it was explained in print, laid plain in ink and photographs between the covers of some slick news magazine, Lebanon was a distant outland that could not be heard or touched or smelled. In such descriptions it remained a distant, incomprehensible struggle, a war among a dozen distinct enemies, less a civil war than a well-equipped free-for-all. Before I came to this place, I stared into the black ink against the white page, the photographs of shocking destruction, and none of it could make me sense one instant of what the place would be like. In words and white space, there was not a breath of the country, of its people, or of the simple tragedy of this war.

It is not the purpose of newspapers to print ephemeral bullshit like ambience, and the facts were sensational enough for the folks back home. In the Shouf, the war was printed in the blackness of the Lebanese nights. From a position on the perimeter, the white crashings in the hills were nearly as meaningless as the pictures in the magazines, but to marines inside the wire, this meaninglessness differed from the meaninglessness of the war at home. Here, violence was the overwhelming reality. It was what you lived, breathed, and ate. Here, only the abstraction of the play-by-play was missing. Tracers are tracers, rocket fire is rocket fire, and the grunts normally had no idea who was shelling the airport or why. Sometimes, weeks later, they might read it in a magazine. It might even be explained in a letter from home. In Beirut there was no program, no scorecard. In the long months of the deployment, marines would come to know some of the players, the ones with grudges, but that was all. The vagaries of Lebanese politics would remain to them as fleeting as sunspots.

The fighting filled your senses, made you sweat, made you dig bunkers and fill sandbags. The Lebanese civil war was not a thing elegantly laid out for you to comprehend. It was something only half understood, and every marine fully comprehended the part that would kill. The rest didn’t need explaining.