LOSING THE BUBBLE

IN WAR, BIGGER IS BETTER, and the battleship New Jersey was both. By the end of September she had completed a transatlantic voyage and joined the squadron of warships stationed off the coast. Sixteen-inch guns, armor plate, cruise missiles—she was the big stick in a language that everybody could understand. In a chow line, someone had said to me that bringing New Jersey to Lebanon was like taking a bazooka to a bullfight. It was definitely a weapon that could win, but it wasn’t the right weapon. Looming on the horizon, the ship was an impressive sight—long, lean battle wagon—but it didn’t fool anyone.

New Jersey’s sixteen-inch guns fired projectiles the size of Volkswagens, two thousand pounds of high explosive at ranges in excess of twenty miles. One such shell could vaporize a city block. Clearly, the devices that turned Pacific islands into lunar landscape were not the weapons of choice in a densely populated city. Firepower and brimstone had brought down the Axis, but were not applicable to the chores of hard-core peacekeeping. Bad guys here did not congregate large bodies of troops, nor did they shell us from static massed-weapon positions. They offered no targets for such a heavy hitter.

It was not merely a coincidence that when the New Jersey arrived, the tactics of our antagonists underwent a dramatic change. Previously, Druze and Syrian gunners set up on isolated promontories and whaled away when they felt the urge. Now the stakes were higher, and the consequences of establishing a battery in the open were 100 percent lethal. Offshore was a ship that could alter the geography of this country. Overnight, promontory shooting ended and “shoot and scoot” began. In the civilian centers there was safety, there was cover, and in the first part of October, fire came almost exclusively from the most densely populated areas of the city. Indirect fire weapons, mortars and Katyusha rockets, were brought to bear from vacant lots and roofless buildings in the heart of Hooterville. Sixteen-inch shells would take out the mortars, but they would also get everyone else in the neighborhood. Not exactly a transaction in the spirit of peacekeeping. So it went, round after round, in the early autumn.

Offshore the ships coasted silently, indifferently turning north and south into the fire-support areas and out to sea in unending circles. No one pretended to take comfort in their presence. The ships would never be used the way the grunts wanted—guns fired furiously until their magazines were exhausted, until the Shouf was ablaze and sand was all that was left of this fucking place.

Ah, fire superiority.

It was a dream, only a dream, and in hot afternoons the low shapes of the warships trundled about, sometimes close, sometimes hull down on the hazy horizon. It was not possible to look at them without tasting the bitter frustration that was starting to poison our every breath.

It could eat you up. A kind of cabin fever that arose from confinement in the compounds. Routine became an enemy, and there was nothing, nothing, except the exact same things you did every day at the exact same time. It took possession of will and reason. But we were lucky. We frequently ran operations, recons mostly, and we counted ourselves blessed. Walking patrol at night in the Shouf, even surrounded by six varieties of bad guys, was better than sweating it inside the perimeter.

It was the shellings that imparted another sensation, a very real, very opposite perception. It was the feeling that welled in your guts when you ran for cover. Ran for your fucking life in this same dusty, well-known, and now boring place. Ran in the endless shriek of falling rounds. Boredom and fear tangled themselves together in the heat of autumn, and in the end, it was boredom that was the most dangerous. A crushing tedium that removed any other emotive state, any other possible feeling. It was boredom that made you forget to close up your body armor. Boredom that made you want to drive the perimeter road. Now almost nothing mattered except having enough insect repellent. The heat continued, endless and maddening.

Each afternoon Lebanese armor transiting south on the coastal highway drew fire from Khalda. These attacks became so routine that the LAF simply returned fire from the road, stopping on the median strip to allow civilian traffic to pass as they let loose with .50-caliber guns. Showers of red tracers passed up the highway, exploding fiercely into the concrete sidewalls of the town. One-hundred-round bursts were aimed by the white flashes of impact and hit nothing but buildings that had been hit a million times. In this manner, fire was traded over the course of weeks.

The return fire could shift without warning onto Green Beach. Sometimes the distances were great enough to give us a few seconds’ warning. From the pillbox on left flank, binoculars brought close the damage, low-rise buildings pocked like plague victims, black streaks up their sides from smoldering fires. It ran like this for days on end.

One afternoon was memorable. There had been pitched firefights all day, and at about five o’clock, the Lebanese APCs withdrew. It was Miller time. Return fire sputtered off and finally stopped. From Hooterville in the northeast, the sounds of other, more distant firefights drifted to us on gusts of favorable wind. Our show seemed to be over.

We were not fed dinner because the perimeter remained on Condition One until 1900. On Green Beach the quiet led many to break cover, and tables in the leeside of bunkers filled with men tearing open MREs for dinner. Quite suddenly, dinner ended. A burst of 7.62 machine-gun fire spat from Khomeiniville and traveled the length of the beach. It impacted a tableful of Seabees at the north end. There were wood splinters and ricochets, MRE packets shot out of people’s hands, but incredibly, no one was hit. In the time it took to breathe, small-arms fire redoubled. Discernible were the quick bursts of M-16s and FNs, the staccato bleating of Kalashnikovs.

I took cover in the rifle pits attached to Rancho Deluxe. Doc was sitting in the bottom of the hole, leisurely shaking Tabasco onto a dehydrated pork patty. He was eating it dry, without water, crunching on it like a candy bar.

“Getting a little hot out there?” he asked, continuing to munch the freeze-dried pig rectangle. Doc was utterly unruffled, like he always was. As though it were perfectly appropriate to be ducking machine-gun fire at dinner.

“I’m gonna see if I can get a shot at the snipers,” I said.

“Waste of time,” Doc answered. We’d been shot at so much recently that tonight’s shenanigans hardly rated a response. “The marines aren’t gonna want you to start a war,” Doc said.

“It’s already a war, Doc,” I answered.

“It’s just fucking Wallys. They’ll mellow out when the sun goes down.”

He was right, but I was no longer in a peacekeeping mood.

“I’m bored. I’m gonna try,” I said.

Doc continued to chew. “Nothing too heroic, Diawi,” he said.

I ducked into the bunker to get my CAR-15. The rest of Delta and Charlie were sprawled on their cots, reading or sleeping. Another burst of fire skipped over the top of the bunker and banged into the vehicle barricade with the crisp sound of hammer strikes. No one even looked up. In the bunker, the guys were as blasé as if this were a thunderstorm.

Cheese peered at me from over the top of a comic book about naked vampire chicks. “You want some help, Uncle Chuck?” he asked casually, as if I were carrying two bags of groceries.

Since the extraction on the corniche, the platoon had taken to calling me “Uncle”: Frank was the old man; I was the old man’s kid brother. With the exception of Doc, Stan, and Tim, none of the platoon was older than twenty-two. I was twenty-six, and I was an uncle.

“You want to see if we can shut that guy up?” I asked.

“Sure,” Cheese said, “I’m game.”

He got his rifle and combat vest as I took down a pair of binoculars hanging from a nail over my rack. I grabbed the poodle shooter, a clip-on plastic bipod, and my shooting vest.

We waited for a lull and ran to the machine-gun position at left flank. Crouching against the side of the emplacement were the marine shore party OIC, a nice guy named Leo, and an army warrant officer who was trying to get to some other position, Charlie battery, I think. He was forced to remain here when the position went to Condition One. There were others about, sprawled against low cover, strangely inhuman shapes in helmets and Kevlar armor.

Cheese and I took cover, shifting our legs awkwardly, lazily trying to keep our weapons from touching the dirt.

“What the hell’s going on?” Leo asked.

“I thought you knew,” I said.

Leo spit a wad of tobacco. “It looks like Wally’s between the runway and Khomeiniville.” He pushed back his helmet with a thumb. “I told Battalion we were taking direct fire. We have permission to engage.”

That was mighty nice of them, I thought.

Two marines sprawled behind the M-60 in the pillbox, and maybe half a dozen more marines were aiming across the open stretch of beach toward Khomeiniville. No one was firing.

“Why haven’t you gone hot?” I asked.

“I can’t see the shooters. I’ve been calling ‘no joy,’ and Battalion said the LAF is going to send somebody to handle it.”

“Who are they gonna send,” Cheese sneered, “Batman and Robin?”

I lifted my binoculars and peered through the rifle slit. I saw only a jumble of houses. Leo told his radio operator to find out if Alpha Company was shooting. Some of the weapons we heard were American-made, M-60s and 40-millimeter grenade launchers, but these were also used by the bad guys, so it wasn’t possible to really tell. Long bursts of machine-gun fire passed over our heads and spattered the pavement behind us. We all tried to look cool as we kept down.

After about five minutes there had been no answer from Alpha Company, and Leo peered for a brief second over the top of the bunker. “Not enough fire for Alpha Company.” He spit again. “They’ve been taking a lot of shit lately. If they were under orders to return fire, they’d be raising hell.”

I agreed, but I didn’t feel like looking over the top of the bunker to prove it to myself.

“Somebody’s raising hell,” the warrant officer said.

There came the sudden whistling of falling artillery, then nothing. We had time only to screw up our faces in anticipation of the impact.

“They miss?” the warrant officer asked.

“They suck,” Cheese answered.

“I hate that sound,” I said.

In an earnest and perturbed way, Leo said, “Fuck these people.”

The sun was slipping down. We were losing the light. I put my binoculars on the jumble of houses, scanning carefully. I saw nothing. Leo got on a field telephone to Battalion and told them he was still taking sporadic fire but was unable to pinpoint the source. We spoke about guard rotation, placing additional men, his and mine, on the perimeter that night.

A runner came panting up and dived into the bunker. “Sir, there’s a whole mess of troops on the highway south of right flank,” he puffed.

“Bad guys?”

“We don’t know who they are.”

Fucking brilliant, I thought. We’re being surrounded.

“Well, that’s it,” Leo said, brushing the dirt off his shirtfront. “I’ll go take a look.” He crouched to his feet and prepared to leave.

“I’m going to stay here,” I said. “You mind if we take a crack at the machine gun?”

“Your guys?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“How many?” Leo looked concerned.

I smiled. “Afraid we’re gonna wake the neighbors?”

“Fuck the neighbors,” he said. “Do me a favor. Let me know if you’re gonna fire any antiarmor stuff.”

“Nothing nuclear, I promise. Just me and Cheese,” I said. I didn’t need his permission to engage, but we were neighbors, and seeking a consensus was considered polite.

“Knock yourself out,” Leo said. He waited for a lull, then ran back to the pillbox at right flank. His marines followed.

Cheese and I snuggled down into the bunker. I handed him the bipod. He clipped it to the gas tube of his M-14 and steadied it against the sandbagged rampart. I laid my CAR-15 next to it and scanned with the binoculars as Cheese settled in behind his rifle. Small arms and artillery continued to pass overhead. In the still evening, the bullets and shells sounded exactly like the war movies I had seen as a kid. The sun was almost completely submerged in the Med. The sky at zenith was becoming a deep shade of cobalt, the horizon powder blue and dappled with clouds turning orange.

Half a dozen bullets and a couple of tracers hit the side of our pillbox. Half a second later came the sound of the weapon, a rattling echo out of Khomeiniville. It was probably an RPK machine gun.

“I can’t see shit,” Cheese said, sighting down his rifle.

I couldn’t see anything, either. The snipers were getting better. When we first arrived, Khomeini cowboys would hang out of windows or shoot from backlit rooms. These operational procedures did not lengthen their careers as snipers. Darwinism functioned, and soon the snipers who remained learned to stay in shadow and fire three or four feet back from the window.

Actually, it was a stretch to call these guys snipers. My friends in the British Special Air Service had told me about monthlong countersniper operations against the IRA in Belfast. SAS marksmen would be smuggled into buildings in steamer trunks and spend a week drilling a hole out under the eaves of a building, all the while setting up on an IRA shooter doing the same thing four hundred yards away. A sniper duel. That was craftsmanship. What we had tonight was a booger eater with a machine gun.

“Watch for muzzle flashes,” I said. I kept the binoculars on the row of houses. The sun was down now, but the sky continued luminous. It was nautical twilight and still too bright to use the NVGs. We had fifteen or twenty minutes until dark.

The RPK fired again, missing our sandbags and striking the pavement just short of us. Ricocheting tracers wobbled into the sky, burning out at low altitudes. I hoped the RPK’s muzzle blasts would give him away as the sun slipped lower.

From the Lebanese checkpoint south of the beach, a pickup truck loaded with LAF soldiers screamed past us, heading north with its lights on. There was no way to warn them or tell them to stop. As they headed for Kho-meiniville and the line of houses, I could see troopers charging their weapons in the back of the truck.

“Oh, fuck,” Cheese said.

When the truck was two hundred meters north, the RPK opened fire. Taillights flared, wavered, and were extinguished. The fire reached a crescendo; the truck had driven into the teeth of an ambush, and rounds skidded down the road in weird whistles. They’d been hammered.

The RPK kept firing long bursts as the soldiers sought cover behind their vehicle. As the tracers poured out of Khomeiniville, the window of the shooting position blinked white, a perfect strobed rectangle against the line of houses.

“I got the shooter,” I said. I kept the binoculars to my eyes. The RPK fired again. “Second row of buildings, middle of the block.”

Cheese had him, too. Pressing his cheek against the stock, Cheese drew a breath and exhaled slowly, then fired a single round. In the bunker, the report of the weapon was a deep, chest-pounding thud. His ejected round bounced off the ceiling. SEALs don’t often fight from underground bunkers. As my head pounded with three more shots, I made a mental note: Shooting from pillboxes can give you a migraine.

Cheese fired half a dozen more rounds on semiauto as I watched. The first two struck the building low. The last four made no sparks. They went into the window. For a few seconds there was silence. Then four or five shots rang out from the wrecked LAF truck. There was still someone alive.

The RPK opened up from a different window. He fired maybe twenty rounds in a long burst. As the light continued to fade, his muzzle flashes were plainly visible. The first rounds hit the sand in front of us, and we both ducked. The bullets thumped the bunker, then ripped into the vehicle barricade. Some pretty fair shooting.

I opened the M-203 grenade launcher slung under the foregrip of my rifle, slid out the beehive round, and dropped it into the cargo pocket on my cammies. From my vest I took out an HE/DP round. “How far do you think it is to the houses?”

“Too far for forty mike-mike,” Cheese said.

The max range of the grenade launcher was approximately four hundred meters. I figured the house was almost that far. I hoped it was a little closer.

“I thought all you officers played golf,” Cheese said.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“You know, man, estimating range.”

“I don’t play golf,” I said. Another note to self: Join a country club when I get home.

To fire the 203 to maximum range, I’d have to point my weapon up at an angle of approximately 45 degrees, something I couldn’t do from inside the bunker. I locked the round into the tube. Cheese changed magazines, then scrambled out of the pillbox after me. We took cover again outside as another long burst flew over us—tracers, beautiful as they flew over our heads.

I rolled the quadrant sight on the side of my CAR-15, setting it to maximum range. In more ways than one, this was going to be a long shot. Cheese watched me as I snicked the safety forward on the M-203. “Say when,” he said.

We popped over the top of the bunker, Cheese holding his rifle offhand and firing steadily in semiautomatic. I saw the window, pointed the sights, and awkwardly angled the 203 up. I pulled the trigger, and the grenade launcher fired with a hollow, loud pop. Cheese ducked back immediately, but I crouched above the bunker to see where the round fell. The grenade lobbed through the air, traveling, incidentally, about as fast as Tiger Woods can hit a golf ball. The light from the sunset made the grenade glow coppery as it flew. I watched the projectile slam into the roof of the sniper’s building. Sparks swarmed from a dirty puff of smoke. Three quarters of a second later, the report came to us: crack-bang.

“Too high.”

The RPK fired again, this time at the truck. It apparently didn’t occur to Wally that we might be lobbing grenades, and he kept shooting the soldiers pressed low under their vehicle. Tucked behind the bunker, I ejected the spent round and pushed another of the fat 40-millimeter grenades into the launcher.

We popped over the top of the bunker again, Cheese laying down cover while I aimed and shot. The RPK was silent this time, and we watched the grenade slam into the wall to the right of the sniper’s perch. The armor-piercing round blew a fist-sized hole into the cinder blocks. Cheese and I remained standing as we reloaded. I took long, careful aim and squeezed the trigger. Again a deadly copper-colored golf ball sailed through the air. When the grenade was halfway to the houses, the RPK opened up again, right at us. He was shooting fast and high.

I don’t know why, but I just stood there watching as the tracers flew at me. The grenade pitched for the building, and Cheese ducked, like a rational person, but I stood there as the tracers sizzled over my head. I watched the grenade until I lost the small glint of the flying projectile and it found impact. This time it passed through the black space of the window and detonated inside the building. The explosion was muffled by the walls and came to us as a ringing thud. Cheese and I crouched and waited. Nothing. The silence lengthened.

Cheese grinned. “You got him.”

There was no more firing. I watched the LAF soldiers from the truck emerge from cover and pull a dead body from the cab. The sun was down now, and the gathering darkness was made sinister by a translucent haze of dust and fire smoke. Set alight by tracer and grenade fire, one of the buildings was starting to burn.

As we walked back to Rancho Deluxe, a Lebanese APC clanked past us on the highway, heading for the ambushed truck. From the top hatch, one of the crew casually fired a big .50-cal machine gun, aiming at a zip code, just hosing bullets as they closed in on the ambushed vehicle. I turned around and looked north. Jagged white explosions bloomed all at once across the buildings. Explosions like raindrops tore the city block from where the sniper had fired. Half-inch bullets ripping into rooftops windows and stairwells—a cyclone of lead.

As the APC passed, the gunner lifted two fingers, waving his hand back and forth, grinning in his tanker’s helmet, and flashing us a peace sign.

IT WASN’T DIEN BIEN PHU, but it wasn’t good, either. We didn’t get it every day, but often enough. Often enough so we knew what was coming and who fired it the instant we heard it. We’d learned the sounds of RPGs, mortars, and Katyushas. We knew the crack of dud artillery rounds slamming into the runway, and where to find them after the barrage, stuck into the asphalt, busted-up Russian 122-millimeter shells that dumb-ass Druze artillerymen had forgotten to screw fuses into.

Beirut was a weird goddamn place, but it wasn’t half as strange as Washington, D.C. As the shells whistled in during mid-September, the commandant of the Marine Corps, General P. X. Kelly—certainly a man who should have known better—told Congress that “there was not a significant danger to our marines.” He went further to convince himself, adding that there was no evidence any of the rocket or artillery fire had been specifically directed against the multinational force.

Maybe he was right. Maybe they were shooting at our vehicles.

It was becoming apparent that Lebanon was a fixed idea in Washington. Who wanted it worse was also becoming obvious. The marines and sailors in the bunkers had no love for this place, and there was no love for us in the stinking, sweltering slums outside the wire. The multinational force no longer even pretended to control what happened in the city. The combined arms of an entire marine amphibious unit had not even been able to subdue Hooterville. In the Pentagon someone, somewhere, must have known how fucked and deadly this situation was becoming. There must have been one colonel, one captain, one prescient, fast-tracked major who looked at the pie charts, view graphs, shiny white papers and asked, “What the hell are we doing?”

But we were in, and politicians don’t like to pull out. Pulling out makes you look weak on communism, terrorism, fanaticism, or whatever “ism” it was that we went there to be hard on. So we stayed, and things quietly, insidiously, and inexorably got worse.

It happened very suddenly in October that the summer ended. There had been some rain before, just a little, but quite at once the days were cooler and the nights damp and cold. Dust turned in now-frequent rains to mud. And in the bunkers, rain beat into the sandbagged roofs with a comfortable, almost dreamlike sound. When the showers ended, the air was clear beneath broken clouds. The hills, which had simmered brown and distant in summer haze, were close and green, their roads shining wet, almost silver, in moments of sunlight. These were the pleasant days in which cease-fire after cease-fire deteriorated into a monotony of sniping, rocketry, and ambush. In the brilliantly fresh air, the sounds of gunfire carried with an effulgent clarity.

Like everybody else, I’d had my fill of this crazy six-sided war. The tour was telling on the lads as well. They were quieter. There wasn’t as much grab-assing as there had been at the start of the tour, and often they would just sit quietly in the bunker, eight of them, together. No one would say a word until I came down into the cool, quiet underground and gave a warning order for a jeep run or a recon. Then they would mount out, collecting gear and weapons and ammo like a platoon of mutes. It was dangerous outside the wire, but it was as dangerous inside. They weren’t fearful or disaffected, just tired. Oddly, we looked forward to operations, thinking, rightly, that we were safer in the bosom of the night than we were squatting in the bunker.

I had only one problem case: the assistant leading petty officer, Stan. He had done well on our Honduran adventure, but he’d been in a pointed decline since we landed. By the first weeks in October, he was useless to me and alienated from his platoon mates.

Stan had been an operator, but the whole Beirut trip had put him in the hurt locker. Although I’ll make no apologies for his conduct, it might not have been too difficult to argue that he was shell-shocked. In most other conflicts, SEAL Teams operated from secure rear areas, staging and planning missions, then penetrating enemy territory and returning to a safe haven. In the rear with the gear and the beer. In Beirut we operated against any of several antagonists, but our position on Green Beach was open to almost constant fire. With the exception of the occasions we staged from the ships or patrolled in the Seafox, we were constantly in harm’s way. We had certainly taken enough shit, but the only one who seemed to break down in it was Stan.

He was a small man, short and skinny in a juvenile sort of way. Although he was one of the older members of the platoon, his fair skin and black hair gave him a youthful, almost boyish look. Wally-world was no place for a family man, he would say. Making a show of pretended courage, he was sullen, sometimes overwhelmingly so, depending on the mail. He was the kind of guy who could not string together three sentences without mentioning his wife, his dogs, or his kids. The platoon had no interest in his family; to young bucks out in the world, wives and children are incomprehensible entanglements, and Stan’s family was simply another trait that set him apart.

During the shellings, he always took deep cover, sometimes curling up under his rack, wrapped in two flak jackets. Early in the deployment this earned him the nickname Mr. Safety. And it was only this epithet that gave him notoriety. The barb in it seemed lost on him. He cultivated the name, referring to himself as Mr. Safety again and again, until everyone was sick of it.

As the summer wore on and the sniper fire became more intense and accurate, he volunteered for nothing. Any reason to move beyond the vehicle barricade was “stupid” and the officers who gave such orders were just “looking for medals.” His pouts and ass-dragging were usually sufficient to piss off everyone around him. Sometimes the act was enough to get him removed from detail. He was an E-5, an electrician’s mate second class, and the platoon thought he was yellow. Sometimes his boat crew went to maneuver against snipers without him. After a while no one would even ask where he was during firefights. The squad would return to the bunker, someone would kick sand under his rack, and he would be there with one flak jacket over his chest and one over his legs.

In this way his authority gradually deteriorated until he had no effect on his men. If he even tried to give an order, Dave, Cheese, Rudi, and Doug would simply tell him to fuck off. Stan was a nonentity, and he knew it; this increased his isolation.

One October morning he ate breakfast with the boat crews, boxes of cornflakes and Parmalat milk, on the benches behind Rancho Deluxe. He spoke to Rudi and Dave, saying he’d had a dream, and in it the squad had been picked apart by a sniper and only he was left unwounded. He said that in the dream he had moved forward under fire, single-handedly taken down the sniper, and captured the weapon. As he spoke, I noticed quick glances between Rudi and Dave: Oh, Jesus, quit pissing on my shoes and telling me it’s raining.

I listened without speaking, and when his story was over, no one said a word. The only sounds were those of plastic spoons shoveling cornflakes. There had been heavy fighting the night before, the Druze and LAF in double overtime, and although only the usual shit had hit us on the beach, Stan had stayed buttoned down in the bunker while everyone else deployed to right flank in an attempt to spot artillery.

There wasn’t a person in the platoon who thought Stan could have such a dream. Cowards do not dream brave deeds. They dream of staying alive. Fear is the blood in their veins, and courage does not very often lie in weak hearts. His dream was a lie, and to the members of his squad, eating cornflakes on this blustery morning, it was only a lie like any other they had been told.

It was now mid-October. The French had launched air strikes against the Shouf, and U.S.S. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s aircraft, Tomcats and A-6 Intruders, roared overhead daily on recons. It was little more than an air show. As the overflights picked up, it was decided that the SEAL rotation should now include a boat crew staged aboard Iwo Jima as a combat search and rescue team. Frank took the first shift. Boat crew Alfa went aboard, staging parachutes, ammunition, arranging messing and berthing, and working with the CTF61 staff to prepare E&E (escape and evasion) plans in the event that we were deployed after downed aircrew. Every day a long-range CH-53E helicopter was designated as the CSAR contingency bird. Aboard Iwo Jima, the CSAR job was like being a fireman. The on-duty boat crew slept late, polished gear, and waited for an alarm. After months in the bunker, clean sheets, hot water, and good food aboard Iwo were a blessing. We came to look at the CSAR billet as our R&R. Iwo’s call sign was Crosswalk. When the CSAR billet was established, we started to call her Cakewalk. Doc led Bravo aboard the next week, got the drill, and settled in. We were next, and I promised myself that once aboard, I would embrace the philosophy of Epicurus and eat seven grilled-cheese sandwiches. The day before we were to rotate, Stan asked to speak to me. He asked if he could go aboard Iwo permanently as the CSAR petty officer.

“What do you mean, ‘permanently’?” I asked.

“I want to get off the beach,” he said, “until the end of the tour.”

“Everybody wants off the beach, Stan.” I started to walk away, but he followed me.

“I used to work in air ops,” he kept on. “I’m the best-qualified guy to check and maintain the parachutes.” He did his best to appear enthusiastic. “I could be the permanent CSAR team leader.”

“Steve’s got more experience in air ops,” I said. “I want you to stay with your boat crew.”

“Why?” he asked.

I wasn’t used to people answering my orders with an interrogative. Stan was passing from annoying to pathetic. I was blunt. “I don’t think I can count on you to lead a mission.”

“I could do it.”

“Then start acting like it,” I said.

That was that until a few weeks later. The shit continued, and one afternoon we assisted in the medevac of a badly wounded marine. We covered the LZ, a task made dodgy by the snap, crackle, and pop of incoming rounds. Dodgy and absurd, because during the dust off we did not receive permission to shoot back.

We popped smoke, and a Cobra gunship hovered nearby as the Huey put down, and from the BLT came a pair of marines carrying a stretcher. A navy corpsman in battle dress ran with them, crouching at a trot beside the dark litter. We jogged to the helo as the wounded man was shoved aboard. The marines ran back to the BLT across the cratered parking lot, and boat crew Delta jumped in through the Huey’s sliding doors. I was the last to board, giving the crew chief a thumbs-up as the engine howled, lifting.

Then, in the helicopter, the corpsman put his fingers on the bloody stretcher, turning the wounded man’s face so he could see it. My eyes were on Stan, pale, shaking, his gaze locked on the blood oozing across the deck. He gripped his rifle with both hands and closed his eyes. As the helo banked, I looked through the doors, out of the cabin at the beach, which flashed beneath us, the white surf, then water, green fading to cobalt. In the swirling wind of the cabin, the stretcher was now pooling with blood, an astounding amount of fluid, and I looked down at the wounded man’s hand. On it there was a gold wedding band.

The medevac touched down aboard Iwo Jima and then took us to Portland, where I was to meet Frank. Our uniforms were spattered, so I had the guys go below, change into new BDUs, get showers, and grab a hot meal. I was in my stateroom, having wadded up my blood-soaked uniform, showered, and changed. There was a knock on the door.

“Come,” I said.

It was Stan. He was still dressed in the cammies he’d worn during the medevac. “I need to talk to you,” he said. His voice was quavering. The knees of his trousers were still black with blood.

“Why don’t you get changed? Get some chow and come back.” I wasn’t trying to put him off; I knew that clean clothes and a meal would help him.

Stan stood there shaking. “No. I have been trying to get a chance to talk to you. I don’t think I can handle this anymore,” he said quietly.

I nodded at a chair, and he fell into it. He suddenly seemed lost in the folds of his cammies. A child pretending in the uniform of a soldier.

I didn’t know what else to say, so I asked, “What’s going on?”

“It’s everything. It’s being ashore.” His voice trailed off. “You don’t understand,” he murmured. “I don’t belong here. I have a family.”

“We all have families.”

“I mean kids.”

I wasn’t in the mood for a counseling session. I didn’t have any gung ho left in me, either. I wasn’t going to tell Stan to buck up and be a frogman: No one should have to put up with the kind of shit we were going through. We were targets. In two hours, when we left Portland, we would be targets again.

For a long time Stan sat looking at the deck. A tear rolled off his nose. “I want off the beach. I want to stay on the ship. I’ve had it.”

For a split second I was disgusted—pissed that one of my operators was sitting here begging to be placed into safety. But the anger went away in an instant, and it was not sympathy, kindness, or pity that settled me. Stan was nothing to me; over the last few weeks Stan’s fear and weakness had made me totally indifferent to him. I was calmed because I recognized what had made me angry. It was not the weeping, broken young man slouched in front of me. I will claim no supremacy of valor—I was reacting against my own fear.

Cowardice disgusted me because I feared it in myself. I did not hate weakness; I feared it. I feared that I would not be brave enough to lead my men. I was afraid that I would not be gallant enough, or wise enough, or proficient enough to safeguard the lives entrusted to me. My feelings for Stan had to be put aside, and I will tell you honestly that I cared nothing for him. His failings endangered men who daily did their best and better. My feelings for Stan were without even a leaven of pity, but his life had been entrusted to me as well.

There was no reason to woodshed him—Stan was right, Lebanon was no place for a family man. He was of no value to me, our mission, or his mates. The wrong man in the wrong place. We both knew he was simply meat, cannon food, a walking bull’s-eye.

But we all were. All of us equal, all of us dancing on the drumhead together, and he deserved no special treatment because he was afraid.

“Look,” I said. “I’m scared, too. I wake up every day in the bunker same as you. I wonder every day if this is the day I’m gonna get it.”

“I can’t take it anymore,” he said.

“Neither can I.” If Stan expected a pep talk, he wasn’t going to get one. “Fuck the mission,” I said. “Fuck Lebanon and fuck the multinational force. But we’ve got a job to do—just Fifth Platoon. That job is to get through the tour and keep each other alive. We’re gonna do it—together.”

“I’ve done my best,” he said.

“You haven’t done shit,” I said flatly. Stan looked up, and I lowered my voice. “What matters to me is the effect you have on the platoon.”

“I know what they think about me.”

“They pull your weight. They do the things you won’t do or can’t do. And it isn’t right. You want some downtime?” I continued. “Get out from under your rack once in a while. I’m not gonna reward you, take you off the line, because you’re scared.”

Stan blinked at me. “The SDV guys don’t go ashore,” he said. “Why can’t we stage off the ship? Why can’t we just move the platoon back onto the boat?”

He was right. The SDV detachment we’d deployed with was a bunch of athletes. They’d been ashore only twice since we’d been here. They spent their days lifting weights, tinkering with their minisub, and watching movies in their connex box. They lived in air-conditioned comfort ten thousand miles from the eye of the shit storm.

“I’m not in charge of the SDV detachment,” I said.

“I want to talk to Mr. Giffland.” Stan wiped his nose.

“Go ahead.” Then I heard the sound of my own voice, low, quiet, utterly without feeling. Like it was playing somewhere on a transistor radio. “I don’t expect you to lead, Stan. You don’t have it in you. But I expect you to haul your weight. As long as you’re in my squad, you will. You’re going to pitch in, you’re going to quit bitching, you’re going to quit second-guessing my orders and start hauling your load, or I’ll make sure you’re on every patrol that leaves the wire, every antisniper detail, every hot medevac, every shitty job I can think of.”

Stan stood.

“The helo will be on the flight deck in two hours,” I said. “You’re gonna be on it.”

Stan walked out. I don’t know if he ever spoke to Frank. I didn’t mention our talk; I didn’t have to. Frank was a good enough officer to know that Stan was losing the bubble. The problem was in my squad, and I was left to handle it myself.

Stan remained in the platoon, and he stayed in the rotation, doing his time ashore just like the rest of us. He did so quietly, ostracized, disregarded, and ignored by his mates.

I have no idea what courage is: worth through valor, duty over self-preservation—don’t ask me. I don’t know where it comes from, I don’t know why some people have it and some do not. I do not know why it deserts people suddenly; I have never been able to figure out how some people find it when it is needed most. Stan had lost whatever small amount he brought to Lebanon, and I could understand why. This place was insane. It was criminal, a grotesque lampoon of a war in all things except cruel death, and I hated it.

I knew that I could have been more forgiving to a man who had simply been broken. But I was not because I was slowly being broken myself. There was certainly a better way for me to have handled this. I was not then the person I am now. I now think that I was callously short with Stan, peremptory in my evaluation, and smug in judgment. Inside, I was as beaten up as he was.

We feared different things, showed our fear in different ways. Had different nightmares. But we were both afraid. I was too strung out, too pissed off, and too cynical to say the right things. Maybe there was no right thing to say.

The platoon was what I cared about, more than my own life. Stan was a part of the platoon, but he was the weak part, the part that could make it all fail, make us sink, make us all get sucked into caution, foreboding, mistakes, and death. For that I despised him. Not because he was a coward, but because his weakness made it harder on us all.

I felt many times in Lebanon that I held seventeen lives in my hands. These men, their flesh and blood, became my life. Stan was a problem only because he diminished the whole. He pissed and moaned and placed doubts in hearts already near breaking. Stan was a problem because he showed us that we were all scared shitless, he showed us that we all just wanted to go home, and we all wanted just to live.

In this fucked-up, hopeless place, Stan showed us that we were still human.