LETTING GO

IT WAS COLD AT NIGHT NOW. And it seemed to rain often, long and often. In pelting downpours, our bunkers sagged; dirt soaked through and dribbled out of sandbags perforated by shot and shrapnel. Repeated requests by the marine amphibious unit for concrete, timber, and building materials were, incredibly, still being refused by Washington. No permanent defenses were to be erected at BIA. Our bunkers were a scandal, the best of them only what could be lumped together, and many were without overhead cover. Structural components—wood beams, pallets, chunks of beach matting—had to be bartered for, and the better one’s ability to scrounge, the safer one slept. Now even the best of bunkers were melting away in the rain.

It was decided in November that Green Beach was no longer a safe position. I don’t know what “safe” meant, exactly. The tar-barrel and barbed-wire barricade that separated the beach from the Sidon highway was now looked on as wholly unsatisfactory. Charlie battery had been relocated to the sandstone bluff directly behind Green Beach, and it was decided to move the navy landing force components—Seabees, beachmasters, SEALs, and the marine shore party detachment—inland to the ridge. The beach would be manned during the day, but only a guard force was to remain at night.

This meant the bunkers that seven months of hard work had made deeper and sturdier would be abandoned, and the men on the beach would now be quartered on the ridge in GP tents.

It wasn’t the most popular decision of the tour.

The move required that new bunkers be constructed, and now that the rains had begun it was impossible to dig into the soft ground. Any hole deeper than three feet quickly oozed in on itself and healed like living tissue. Protection was going to be sandbags, above ground: the kind of emplacements we called “delta hotels,” or “direct hitters.”

While new bunkers were being layered together, people built sandbag walls around their cots—the ultimate short-timer’s security blanket, but they really provided insufficient cover. Mortar rounds are delicately fused; anything striking the tent roofs would detonate overhead, spraying sleeping men with molten steel. Heavier stuff, Katyushas and artillery, would blow the tent and its contents into rags. No one had to be reminded that a lot of the shit intended for the beach was sighted by impact on the very hill that we had been ordered to move to.

We learned in November that our tour had been extended. The 24th Marine Amphibious Unit had originally been due to rotate out the last week in October, but our relief had been diverted to Grenada. We wobbled on in what we came to call triple overtime. For some the extension was a punishment. There were others, officers and men, who saw the extra time as penance. The dead required an act of contrition, an atonement, an apology. That burden fell on us, the defeated. We had not been vigilant enough, valiant enough, squared away enough, and 240 had died. Guilt drifted down on us like smoke, and there were times that I felt it, too: We were still here because it was what we deserved.

I got on by telling myself that in a couple of weeks, four at the most, it would be over. For the survivors of BIA, it was a strange time, an empty time. For seven months marines had counted days, marked calendars, and dreamed of getting out, but now, with deliverance at hand, it was almost impossible to take joy in going home. It was as though we had all undergone a collective nervous collapse, fire teams, squads, platoons, and companies made into zombies, each of us with a moment seared into our brain, one second out of an entire lifetime that could never be erased. The bombing was something different to each of us. For some it was the thunderclap that heaved into the bunkers, or the shadow of an immense mushroom cloud rising behind the airport terminal. It was the first time you saw silhouettes blown into concrete—the complete stencils of human beings blasted into mist and plastered against the shattered walls of the BLT. It was the terrible minutes you watched a corpsman shoot morphine into a convulsing body, a marine impaled on rebar, trapped and hopeless of rescue.

The survivors kept to themselves; they were quiet and watched out for one another in a manner that was both forlorn and touching. If you sat down to eat, pulling open an MRE in a muddy foxhole, the marine next to you would reach into his pocket and, without a word, toss over a bottle of Tabasco. Marines you’d never met would hand you cigarettes, dips of Copenhagen, water from their canteens—precious things that were yours because you were still alive.

Twenty-four MAU hung together, and the marines who had reinforced us from Camp Lejeune were scrupulously ignored. Their fresh-issue cammies, farmers’ tans, and like-new equipment marked them out from a hundred yards away as cherries, new meat, tourists. And they knew better than to ask about anything. The place freaked them, and the survivors freaked them, too. The veterans, to a man, had eyes that would scare a crow off a phone wire.

Beirut was no longer a piece of landscape but something not of this world—a twitchy mirage, a thing between geography and nightmare. It had become, even before we left it, a memory to be suppressed, jammed into a box lined in lead and buried in a desert somewhere. We knew we could try to ignore it, but the ’Root would not be forgotten. For the rest of our lives, dreams of that Sunday morning would stalk us, relentless and scary as cancer. We had become mute, staggering battle-fatigue cases, lurching on our feet, running on autopilot, too astounded or numb or stubbornly defiant to lie down, curl up, and suck our thumbs. In the last weeks of the tour, we just functioned. Walked post. Did our jobs. There was nothing else to do.

Fifth Platoon continued to run operations across the beach and sprints north of Beirut into Juniyah, where we would link up with LAF air-assault units and patrol inland to the shattered remains of a soccer stadium that we used as a helicopter landing zone. As we covered the LZ, hulking CH-53s would blow in, the aircraft nearly as big as the soccer field itself, and their crews would push off pallets of medical supplies, food, and artillery shells that would be loaded into trucks and hauled up to LAF batteries in the Shouf. In our last missions we were reduced to feeding the machine.

These were easy ops, and we rarely had contact. We took sniper rounds now and again, and we were getting good at shutting them up with forty mike-mike. Fire was returned coolly, deliberately, and we would occasionally ignore the asshole with the rifle and fire at cars parked in front of the sniper’s hiding place. In their love for the automobile, the Lebanese are very much like Californians. In Beirut a man’s car is a statement, and we made statements of our own. At first we’d just shoot out the tires, perforate the windshields, and aim at the door handles. But later, boredom making us vicious, we used 40-millimeter grenades and API rounds to demolish Mercedeses, Fiats, and Ladas. Our vandalism was a pointed disincentive to the people who allowed the gunmen the liberty of their rooftops and balconies. It was hilarious when we first started to do it. And then it wasn’t funny anymore.

Whatever we did to them, it would never be enough.

IN THE HELICOPTER, the howl of engines and the thump of rotor blades suppressed thought. The flight was a milk run between the ships and Landing Zone Brown at the airport. The passengers were a mixed group heading to fifteen different destinations, to ships, outposts, and the beach. Men stared out the portholes into the sea, infinite gray waves on its surface—fifteen hundred feet below they seemed like scratches on an immense smoothness. Amid the passengers were heaped yellow and red bags of mail, cargo in crates, and three boxes that said THANK YOU FOR BUYING A PRODUCT MADE IN THE U.S.A.

My CAR-15 rested between my knees, muzzle down. I slumped forward, resting my head on the rifle butt, feeling the clatter of the aircraft through my fingers and temples, delighting in the vibration because it made me numb.

I was flying to U.S.S. Fort Snelling, a landing ship dock that had delivered our relief, the Second Platoon of SEAL Team Four. It was eleven in the morning, and I looked forward to lunch aboard the ship.

I was greeted on Fort Snelling’s flight deck by Frank Giffland, who’d touched down a moment before. We went to the wardroom and met the officers who would replace us, Mikey Walsh and Don Tollson. Their platoon had been one behind us in the training pipeline. Mikey and Don were friends, and it was good to see them. They were dressed in khakis, a uniform we hadn’t worn in months, and they looked healthy and tanned. The weekend war had agreed with them.

Mikey was a compact, muscular man with a sandy-brown mustache. Don was taller, had a wry sense of humor and the slightly asymmetrical face of a boxer. They were four or five years older than Giff and I, Mikey a lieutenant and Don a JG, and both were Mustangs. Both had served as SEAL platoon members in Vietnam, Mikey as a Stoner gunner for SEAL Team One, and Don, a member of SEAL Team Two. They shared stories from Grenada and were modest about their missions, though they included preinvasion operations, the recon of Pearls Airfield in the hours before the attack, and a fruitless chase to capture East Bloc advisers as they fled the island. The invasion had been dubbed Urgent Fury in the press, but it was known to Team guys as WWG—World War Grenada. Although SEAL Team Six had suffered casualties, Mikey and Don gave us the impression that SEAL Four’s missions had gone well.

When they asked how it was over here, Giff and I said at once, “It sucks.”

No one asked about or mentioned the bombing.

Frank arranged for a helicopter and offered to give Mikey and Don a tour of the area of operations. A storm had blown in. It was rainy, and the cloud deck was low. Don asked if we should put it off until the visibility was better.

“Today’s a good day,” Giff said. “The clouds will hide the helo.”

“Should we bring sidearms?” Mikey asked.

Frank rolled up the chart. “You need to be in full battle kit,” he said quietly.

They caught a Huey, and I was heloed back to Iwo, where boat crews Charlie and Delta waited as CSAR contingency. The storm had gotten worse, the sea and sky equally drab shades of gray, and it was raining hard when I jogged from the helicopter and into the island on Iwo’s flight deck.

I found the lads below, racked out in a borrowed berthing space, playing cards. The CSAR rotation was our last assignment; after this we would be hauled back to Portland and taken off the line. No one expected anything to happen. We had pizza for dinner. The movie was Tora! Tora! Tora!, and the evening’s entertainment turned out to be prophetic.

The following morning a marine orderly knocked on my door and informed me that my presence was requested in the Flag Plot. Flag Plot was a combat information center set up for the commodore—his war room. I figured I wasn’t being invited for coffee, and on my way up, I stuck my head into the compartment and told the lads to mount out, draw weapons, and get the gear ready to go.

“You’re fuckin’ kidding me,” Bubba said.

“I hope I am,” I answered.

A week before we were rotated onto Iwo, Frank’s boat crews had mounted out to provide combat search and rescue for a large American air strike. Launched from Dwight D. Eisenhower, the air raid was supposed to be a multisquadron attack package, Intruders, Corsairs, and Tomcats delivering a six-pack of whoop-ass called an alpha strike. The entire complement of Eisenhower’s combat aircraft had been loaded with ordnance, launched, and flown toward Lebanon, ready to pummel the Shouf and Bekaa valley. But the air strike never happened. At the last minute Washington pulled the plug. The planes did a U-turn, dropped their bombs into the sea, and returned to the carrier. This aborted strike was the only retribution the Reagan administration was to attempt for the bombing of the marine barracks. The averted air strike was kept secret for years. Its effect on marine morale can probably be imagined.

When I entered the Flag Plot, the chief of staff informed me that there was going to be a second air strike, not American but French. Our gallant allies were going to cash in some chips. In retaliation for the Legion’s dead, Super Etendards off the aircraft carrier Marshal Foch were going to destroy the Hezbollah headquarters and training facilities east of Beirut. The French did not have special operations forces to retrieve downed aircrew and had asked for a SEAL Team to provide search-and-rescue capability.

“When are they going to make the hit?” I asked.

“Two hours,” came the answer.

Once again Giff’s attention to detail would pay off. The CSAR team had already received a warning order and had been briefed previously on the type of mission, general organization, weapons, uniform, and chain of command. The platoon’s standard operating procedures made the short-notice operation possible. As I was working out the communications plan, the boat crews were gearing up, inspecting weapons and equipment; they would be good to go when I returned to the briefing spaces to finalize the orders.

The French plan was audacious. The strike package, six Super Etendards, would launch from Foch, group into a tight formation, and head west, away from land and into the Mediterranean. Remaining in formation, the Etendards would drop under a hundred feet, pull a 180-degree turn, and close the coast. The target was to be approached from the north, the Etendards remaining in formation and flying “nap of the earth,” or treetop level—make that goat-top level—flying down canyons and valleys and using terrain, whenever possible, to shield the formation from radar.

All of this in broad daylight.

I’ll give them this, the French had balls, even if they did come from Yves Saint Laurent. I learned later that the strike package flew as low as fifty feet on the way to deliver their bombs.

The mission would not depend just on gutsy flying. The CSAR helicopter and the Etendards would be accompanied by a navy EA6B Prowler. The Prowler is the electronic-warfare version of the A-6 strike aircraft; it’s capable of spoofing enemy SAM and AAA radars. If everything went according to plan, the Prowler would blind the bad guys during the strike and any rescue attempt.

The weather was an issue. SEALs love bad weather, but pilots generally do not, especially when they’re flying low to the ground. It was still raining hard, but the French were confident they could operate under the ceiling. Better avionics would have helped; the American A-6 was born and bred for this sort of mission. We had the airplanes, but the French had the rocks. Designed in the 1970s, the Super Etendard was hardly state-of-the-art, but it was a capable aircraft. Etendards flown by the Argentineans sank H.M.S. Sheffield and M.V. Atlantic Conveyor during the Falklands War. The French were betting this one on pilot skill, navigational perfection, and Gallic chutzpah. And add the element of surprise. I am certain that no one anywhere was expecting an air strike in this weather.

It’s often said in the military that no good deed goes unpunished. After we had coordinated the CSAR mission, the French came back and asked if we could insert an element to put eyes on the target. They wanted a battle-damage assessment after the bombing run. Recon and surveillance was a different mission completely and would require us to get a hell of a lot closer than I’d have liked.

I checked the maps again. There was a ridge overlooking the Hezbollah compound, and behind it, closer to the coast, was a wadi into which I thought we could insert a team by fast rope. The intelligence estimate indicated Syrian army units in the vicinity of the target. There was also a Syrian armored brigade backing up Suq al Gharb, and the territory north and east was under their control. Hell, most of Lebanon was under their control.

Inserting a team that might itself need rescue—endangering more men and aircraft—was not mission-enhancing. The R&S team would be at greatest exposure, and I was willing to take the job only if it was possible to get in and out cleanly. Judging from the map, which is often not a good idea, it appeared that the terrain on three sides of the observation point was steep and heavily vegetated. The ridge was within visual range of the Hezbollah facility.

The target buildings were set apart in a wide part of the valley, so they would be easy to identify—again, according to the map. Provided the weather did not sock us in, I felt we could get a fair appraisal of bomb hits with binoculars.

Face it, you don’t stamp out the Rolling Stones by bombing their hotel rooms. This air strike had about it an element of payback, but the actual targets were not brick and mortar, they were human. The bombs were intended for Hezbollah leadership. After the hit, the R&S team would monitor the target; the National Reconnaissance Office would snap satellite photos; NSA would listen to the radio traffic; CIA would compile and analyze. These were all discrete bits of information, intel nuggets, to be factored into the puzzle.

Extracting the R&S element from the area after the strike would be the nub of the operation, what staff pukes call “a critical node.” As oxymoronic as this sounds, you can usually expect people to wake up after you hit them. The bad guys would certainly be stirred up, and I selected an extraction site downhill and to the west of the surveillance perch. The primary extract and a secondary location would be screened from the target by the mountains, and if the helicopter was prevented from reaching us by enemy action or weather, we could patrol west to the coast. It would be a long haul to the water, over twenty clicks, but topography and darkness would be on our side. If the recon element had to escape and evade, or E&E, it would be moving through mountainous, broken terrain at night and would be almost impossible to track. It was a decent plan, not perfect but good, and I told the French that I would insert a recon team if the visibility held. I would make that decision when we were airborne in the AO.

That left the question of who to put on the ground. Seven months of combat had taught me that men will not do anything their leader won’t do first. If the job was shitty, I generally did it myself, so I was going in on the recon, without question. Our maxim “One is none and two is one” holds for people as well as equipment. SEALs don’t operate solo, and I’d need a partner.

We had a total of eight operators in the two boat crews, barely enough to cover both parts of the expanded mission. Dave was my point man, my swim buddy, and I felt he was one of our best operators. He was the logical choice to take with me, but I had a problem.

Stan.

I wish I could tell you that I decided to take Stan on the recon, and that he carried out the mission, acquitted himself gallantly, and ended the tour basking in the esteem and pleasant regard of his teammates. That’s the way it works in the movies. It’s not the way it works in the broken-nose world of real combat. Although Stan was the ranking petty officer of his squad, I was not willing to leave him in command of the troops in the helo. Taking him with me wasn’t an option, either. I didn’t trust him to lead my men or save my ass on the ground if the mission went south. Stan was out.

If I was going to put myself on the R&S detachment, I needed someone to take charge in the air and be ready if the CSAR mission was required. I knew I could count on Dave’s ability and judgment. I needed someone who could not only get the CSAR mission done but also decline the job if the situation went totally to shit.

Now you know why BUD/S is so difficult. One bed wetter, one unreliable person, twists a knot in the plan.

I returned to the berthing space. The guys were jocked up and ready to go. I briefed the operation quickly, updating them on the weather, target location, enemy forces, coordinating instructions, and command and signal. I placed Dave second in command and put him in charge of the element that would insert and carry out the rescue. That left the R&S mission. I explained the location chosen for the insertion, and told them that recovery of downed aircrew was a mission priority. If there was contact, the R&S element would be on its own. If they missed pickup, or if the AO became too hot, they would be expected to escape and evade to the coast for pickup. I said I needed a volunteer to spot the target with me. Every hand went up, including Stan’s.

“Okay, Bubba,” I said. “You’re on.”

A big CH-53E was turning on spot two as we exited the greenroom and walked across the flight deck. The bird was completing fueling as we approached, purple-shirted deck apes dragging away the hose that had pumped three thousand gallons aboard the machine that would take us on this last op. We walked into the hot downwash of the rotors, the smell of JP-5 wafting over us. The Sea Stallion was a marine bird, diverted from an administrative flight around the squadron and directed by the air boss to return to Iwo and take on fuel. The 53’s crew had no idea what was about to go down. Undertaking the happy business of ferrying passengers and mail, the pilots had forgotten that their ship was the CSAR contingency bird this afternoon. Like everyone else in the squadron, they had gotten up in the morning thinking that in two days they would be headed home. They were fat, dumb, and happy. The happy part would soon be over.

From the cockpit, the copilot looked up as the boat crews walked toward the helo. He saw the weapons, bandoleers of ammo, parachutes, fast ropes, and eight SEALs decked out in Czech and East German cammies, kufiyahs, and green face paint. His jaw fell. The pilot watched us come on with a look of bewilderment: Oh, shit, not now. Not today. We’re short.

The lads climbed aboard and into the aft compartment. They quickly set about attaching the parachute static line and rigging the fast rope. I ducked onto the flight deck, slipped on a headset, and leaned forward to talk to the pilots. They were both Annapolis classmates of Frank’s, good sticks who’d gotten us into and out of a couple of hot places.

“Shit, Chuck,” the pilot said as he turned around in his seat. “What’s going on?”

“CSAR,” I answered. “The French are launching an air strike in forty-five minutes.”

“The French?”

“Are we shutting down for a briefing?” the copilot asked.

Neither of them looked ecstatic when I said, “I’m going to brief you now.”

I laid out the plan. I will never forget the crew chief’s expression when I unfolded the map to show them where the R&S element was to be inserted. Unfolded it, and unfolded it, and unfolded it. I pointed to a ridge and to the Hezbollah compound, deep, deep, deep in booger-eater country.

“In there?”

“In there.”

We were wheels up in three minutes and on our way. It was still raining, but the cloud ceiling had lifted. We flew directly to the R&S insert point. On the radio, Iwo reported that the Etendards had launched from Foch, starting their roundabout approach to the target. The Prowler was in position and jamming the Syrians on all frequencies. We were a go.

For only the second time in the tour, I had butterflies in my stomach. Not butterflies, fucking bats. We had briefed the op as well as possible in the time allowed, but we had not rehearsed. There were a lot of moving parts, a lashed-up communications plan, shitty weather, and worst of all, it was daylight. This was a short-fused op, and a lot of things could go wrong. Small oversights would be compounded by the enemy, the weather, and Mr. Murphy. This whole thing swung on standard operating procedures and the experience and discernment of the lads. If anything, the speed of the op served to calm me. What was winding me up was that this would be our last one. Everyone sweats the last op of a tour. I had finally come to grips with the idea that I might actually live through seven months in Lebanon, and I was edgy. Not edgy, exactly—let’s just say I was safety-oriented.

As we flew toward the coast, I reminded Dave to play it conservatively, to put men on the ground only if he could be reasonably sure of grabbing the pilot and getting away. Don’t needlessly jeopardize the men and the helo, I told him. He understood. We conducted a radio check, I reviewed the primary and secondary extract points and gave a drop-dead time of four hours for each. If we hadn’t made the secondary extraction point in eight hours, we would be expected to make it to the coast.

I looked around the cabin. I may have been sweating the load, but the lads were not. They were kicked back, dozing in their seats, or tapping their feet as their personality types dictated. Stan was staring at the deck and looked off the back ramp of the helo as my eyes passed over him.

The crew chief leaned in to us and told me we were three minutes out from the R&S insert. Bubba and I stood up, and the crew chief lifted the hatch in the center of the cargo compartment, the “hell hole.” Bubba and I walked over to the fast rope attached directly above it. One hundred and twenty feet of fast rope was coiled like a thick green python at our feet. We pulled on our gloves, and the pitch of the rotors changed, the big helicopter shuddering and the blades thumping as it pitched nose-high and came to a hover over the insert point.

I pushed my AK-47 behind my back, checking that the safety was up against the charging handle and that the shoulder strap was fastened tight. The deck of the helicopter settled, and Bubba and I held the rope, stacking our hands one above another like kids playing “who’s up” on a baseball bat. Through the open hell hole I could see the ground below; I kicked the pile of rope out the hatch, and it uncoiled as it fell a hundred feet. I made sure the end of the rope was on the ground. It was—just barely—and I nodded to Bubba. “GO!” He slid down the rope.

Dave patted me on the leg as I straddled the hatch. “Remember,” he said, “safety is paramount.” It was a standard SEAL Team jab, a bullshit nugget of staff-puke phraseology, one used in every briefing when we were preparing to do something dangerous. It made me smile.

I dropped through the hatch and slid down the rope, feeling the thick green hawser hot on my hands through a pair of leather and Nomex gloves. As I cleared the bottom of the helicopter, the rotor wash swept raindrops up and into me. Ninety-mile-an-hour gusts slammed water drops against my legs like tossed gravel and spun me in a helix around the rope as I slid down. The gusts swirled, and I squinted.

Ten stories below me, Bubba was already on the ground. The rope had come down short of the promontory. Bubba had landed on a steep slope and fallen to the left onto his knees. Still clutching the end of the rope for balance, he looked up at me descending. As I got closer to the ground, I tightened my grip on the fast rope, slowing my descent and increasing the burn factor on my gloves. In the last twenty feet of the run, I could smell burning leather. I landed next to Bubba, somehow managing to keep my balance on the muddy slope. I flashed a thumbs-up at Dave. The rope was quickly hauled back aboard through the hellhole, and the big helicopter nosed down, gathered speed, and flew off toward the safety of the coast.

We were in.

As the helicopter flew away, the sound of the rotors reverberated and faded down the canyon. There had not been time to do a series of false insertions, standard procedure for depositing a recon element, and I hoped the echoing noise would confuse anyone who might try to figure out where we’d landed.

The slope beneath our feet was muddy and much steeper than it had looked from the air. It was still raining—misting, actually—and we pulled ourselves up on hands and knees toward the ridge. Our fists closed over bushes and roots as we crawled the 45-degree slope, kicking into the steep pitch with the toes of our boots, chunking out steps like glacier climbers. The ridge above us was shrouded in wet gray cloud. We made for the top of the wadi, climbing fifty or sixty feet to the ridgeline in about five minutes. At the top the clouds blew onto us, misty, cold, and bleak. I pulled the kufiyah up around my neck, and Bubba followed me down the other side. The terrain on the reverse side of the ridge was less steep, and the concealment of the cloud was comforting, but we needed to get below the clouds if we were to get eyes on the Hezbollah compound.

I looked at my watch. Fifteen minutes remained until the Etendards would be on target. We scuffed downslope through waist-high brush. Finally, the cloud lifted around us. The sun peeked through, encircled by a rainbow, as the bank of rain was swirled up and over the back of the mountain.

Just below the clouds, we emerged onto a dirt road. It was a washed-out track, really, scratched into the slope and hardly passable. It did not appear on my map, and a twang of worry gripped me. I was fairly certain we’d inserted in the right place, only slightly below where I had planned. We’d climbed up and over, the terrain matching expectations, and I could see the valley spread out under the cloudy sky. But there wasn’t supposed to be a road.

All navigation is theory. You follow rules, take fixes, and make guesses. You never know exactly where you are until you get to a place you know. Navigation is the art of reconciling maps to reality, and I was pretty sure we were in the right place. We had to be. It was the goddamn road that was in the wrong place.

The road that wasn’t supposed to be here meandered down to our right and hairpinned away into the valley. We crossed the dirt track in a place where several small boulders had tumbled across it, careful to wipe out our boot prints with a piece of brush. We settled into a large clump of juniper between the hairpins. We tucked into cover, Bubba pulling the boughs over us.

We’d made it into position with a little over five minutes to spare. I laid the AK-47 across my arm, and Bubba crouched, watching the road, as I fished the binoculars out of my pack. I pointed them down into the valley and scanned. There were several structures strewn below: low mud-brick hovels and a few flat-roofed two-story cement-and-cinder-block structures, typical Lebanese architecture. I pulled out my map and tried to puzzle out the location of the target. I wasn’t at this task very long.

From behind us came a clanking noise, something like a cowbell struck out of tune and with no semblance of rhythm. I snapped my head around. Next to me, Bubba silently tapped two fingers under his eyes, the hand signal for “enemy.” As quietly as I could, I snapped down the safety on my AK-47. We scooted lower into our juniper bush. From the washed-out road came the clanking again; it was the rattle of tack and harness on a forlorn-looking donkey pulling a small farm cart. The cart was of local manufacture, the transaxle of a demolished truck mounted under a rough-hewn wooden platform. Bald automobile tires wobbled as the donkey came out of the gloom, and through the branches I caught sight of an old man in a tattered shumagg clutching dully at the reins.

We held our breath. The cart would pass within twenty feet of us as the driver and donkey negotiated the hairpin. Pressed into cover, I lowered my head, chin almost in the dirt. The old man wore a tattered gray suit jacket over a grimy dishdasha. The old fellaheen was leaning back against a two- or three-foot plywood partition separating the front of the cart from the platform. On his feet he wore a pair of Reebok tennis shoes. The counters were broken down, so he wore them with his naked heels out, as though they were a pair of bedroom slippers. As the cart approached, I glimpsed something behind the partition in the back of the cart. The driver was not alone.

Two men in Syrian army uniforms sat facing backward, their muddy boots dangling off the back of the cart. The hoods of their camouflaged field jackets were pulled up, and their rifles, an AK-47 and an RPK machine gun, were laid across their laps. They were sodden from their trip through the fog, and both just sat hunched as the cart rolled down the rutted track.

Head down, the long-suffering donkey shuffled through the turn. We could plainly smell the sharp odor of the old man’s Galloise cigarette as he exhaled. My eyes flicked to Bubba. He watched them, sighting across the top of his CAR-15, his expression completely impassive. His finger was on the trigger, weapon aligned flawlessly with the back aperture and the hood of a field jacket placed square over the front sight post. It was my prerogative to initiate the ambush. If I fired, Bubba would fire; if I did not, he would let them pass.

I weighed our options. We were far up into the mountains, and the sound of gunfire, never an uncommon thing in this country, would probably pass unnoticed. Wherever these guys were going, they would definitely not be expected soon. They were traveling by donkey cart, and we were miles from anywhere. We could kill them easily. There was the question of the old man, obviously an innocent, but it would be no great species of marksmanship to head-shoot the soldiers and not kill him.

Each second brought them closer to the muzzles of our guns. It was not mercy that saved their lives. The decision was purely tactical. This road wasn’t even on my map; I had no idea where it led or how frequently it was traveled. There was no way of knowing who might be traveling with them or coming up the mountain unseen. We might kill the soldiers only to alert some larger patrol behind us in the fog. Our job here was to watch, not kill, and everything that did not further the mission was merely sport. If they did not see us, I would let them live.

It is a queer, affecting thing to hold someone’s life in so fine a balance. There’s power in it, a weird juice that it’s best not to ever get used to. The soldiers and the old man passed almost close enough to touch, and they had no idea that crouched beside them was a pair of bogeymen, emissaries of the Great Satan, slack pulled out of triggers, weapons set on rock and roll. I have done this several times, waited unseen and ready to kill if I was discovered, and it has always struck me as lunacy that the people I am ready to destroy never have the vaguest idea that their lives hang by a thread.

The cart passed, and we watched as the donkey ambled down the road and at last passed from sight. The drama had unfolded in what seemed like weeks. Bubba’s thumb rocked back the safety on his rifle, and I let out a long breath. We had avoided contact by the barest of margins. There was no telling who might come down the road next, and we both pressed as far down into the brush as we could.

We sat, waiting, and rain sprinkled us. I pulled out my map again and looked into the valley. I found the buildings, printed squares and rectangles, neat, straddling wide contour lines, and I imagined taking a pencil eraser and scrubbing them out. Then Bubba tapped me on the shoulder and nodded at the valley. “Showtime,” he whispered. Those were to be the only words spoken between us in nearly nine hours.

I looked over his shoulder. The Etendards were here.

From our left the first plane materialized, moving so low in the distance it seemed at first to be a truck. The faint sun briefly glinted off its canopy, and the fighter flew close on the valley floor, preposterously fast, and utterly without sound. As it banked, setting up on a group of low buildings, we could see its wide swept-back wings, mottled in stripes of gray and green-gray. The plane’s black-tipped nose pointed up, it gained altitude slightly, and then the sound of its screaming engine came up the ridge to us, sharp and angry, the noise of the banking turn it had made a full ten seconds before. As the Etendard passed over a cluster of cinder-block buildings, two dun-colored cylinders dropped away from its underwing pylons. Small white parachutes bloomed behind each bomb, and the weapons pitched down as they fell behind the speeding fighter. The bombs seemed to trail the jet, traveling horizontally as it banked precipitously. The Etendard was traveling at transonic speed, nearly the same velocity as its sound waves, and as it went wings-vertical, the fuselage was engulfed in a cloud of vapor.

In the same instant the Etendard was swallowed by mist, the buildings were torn by fire. Twin hemispheric shock waves blinked up, and at the center of the concussion, a pair of dirty-orange fireballs engulfed the structures. The clouds roiled and swept up into the sky. Another explosion, a secondary from inside the buildings, threw up a column of smoke and fire. Explosives or ammunition stored in one of the buildings had detonated, and the crashing of the three distinct blasts echoed from the valley floor and rolled up to us, sounding perfectly like the sound of a thunderstorm.

The remaining aircraft made their runs. Two came in a pair, close together, and the last arrived in a group of three. All dropped drogue-retarded munitions, and the weapons struck around the shattered remains of the buildings hit by the first plane. Each time the Etendards attacked, it was like watching a Godzilla movie with the sound out of sync. Explosions gushed from the earth without a whisper, and many seconds later, the scream of jet engines and the thudding of bomb hits echoed against the hills.

As quickly as the Etendards had come, they were gone. Clouds from the explosions drifted away after several minutes, pillars of smoke that held together and lifted vertically from the earth. On the valley floor no noise came from the gutted buildings; the day was again silent. We watched, and the only sound was the murmur of wind blowing downslope.

I scanned with the binoculars. Around the rubble, people ran without purpose; vehicles came up the roads, ambulances and trucks full of men, converging on the craters and rubble and dust. Syrian armored vehicles moved in with the rescue parties, ridiculously forming a cordon around the destroyed places. My binoculars brought close gaping holes gouged into the two- and three-story buildings in the Hezbollah compound; great damage had touched each of the dozen or so structures in the complex. As the dust rolled away, I could see ZSU-23 antiaircraft guns rolled out from bunkers, and in the dirt streets swarmed armed men the precise size of ants. They scrambled atop the flat piles of rubble, removing debris with their bare hands. I knew the rescuers would be calling out the names of dead men. I knew the things they would find in the wreckage, things that did not look like human beings, and I knew how it would change them.

I wondered what it had been like for the men who planned the BLT bombing. I wondered if they, too, had watched from the hills while the calamity of an enemy played out in miniature.

It was our turn to watch now. A surfer and a hillbilly, hiding in a juniper bush, struck dumb by the baleful splendor of an air strike.