Ramblings of a Damned Mercenary
By DasTim 

Chapter One: Remembering the Valley

I remember thee oh Lebanon, my time in hell
A young man then... grew old in The Lebanon
A mercenary for Haddad's FLA
A soldier in a ragtag militia

I from Canada, to escape a deadly father
Others from everywhere... adventurers, deserters, fugitives
A brotherhood of arms and arrack
Fighting the PLO, scorpions, and dysentery

Lousy pay, lousy food, rusty rifles
An old FN rifle... and 26 rounds to patrol with
Forty year old Sherman tanks than can't run
For $3.17 a day plus spam and rice

I am the medic, tending the butchery
My medical supplies... I stole from the Israelis
To call it a hospital is a flight of optimism
I do the best I can

I remember the Litani Valley, dark night firefights
We fought over the same rocks... always the same rocks
Necklaces of tracers hang in the gloom
Paraflairs cast their eerie shadows
Men die... as it was... and ever shall be... Sadly...
* * * *

Marjayoun, Lebanon – Oct 1982

“Viva le morte, viva la guerre, viva le sacre mercenaire....” We downed our glasses

Around the room were the rest of the foreign volunteers, some recent arrivals like the Yank Major, others had been around hell for awhile like myself and Mad Max. A mix of emotions cut though the booze-sodden haze as we said our goodbyes.

The Israeli Peace in Galilee operation had broken the five year stalemate in Southern Lebanon. The illusion of peace is in the air and the South Lebanon Army has told us we are free to go. Some guy from the Mossad approached us and said “Tim, if you liked Lebanon you’d love Eritrea.” Some of the guys decide to check it out. Others head for Angola, and the Yanks try and talk me into joining the Contras.

“Do I fight in your stupid war? Or don’t I? Hmmm....” I was lucky this time. Would my luck hold out given how much of it I’ve used up over the past 16 months?

The fact that someone with no real military training to speak of could stay alive in this insanity just goes to show how fucking important luck is....

Backside of Beufort Castle: August 82

 
A damn hot day. Four of us are searching for arms caches. The signs of battle that raged around Beufort are mostly gone. Bodies buried, abandoned weapons hauled away. Still the bunker with the triple 23mm automatic cannon is still there. The PLO is long gone, or have they just gone to ground. The locals smiled the smile of someone who is only waiting for you to turn your back. Looking at the men my finger tightened on the trigger of my new M-16. I wondered how many were in the PLO before we and the Israelis took the place in June.

Some kid came up to us. Friendly. Too friendly. “PLO bad, Israel good.” He chanted the current refrain, I’m sure it was the other way around up to a few months ago.

“You look for Kalashnikov and RPG? I know where there are some.”

“Show us.” Our patrol leader asked.

“In building across field.” the kid pointed to a dilapidated half-collapsed shed.

“Lets check it out.” Our patrol leader ordered.

So we started across the field. Pretty idyllic. Sun-dried wild wheat, a couple of Olive trees. warm breeze, and... “Holy Shit! Freeze.” I spotted metal prongs near my right foot. I point towards them.  Mush points over to another set of prongs. “Fuck we’re in a minefield!”

We stood rooted for what seemed forever scanning for prongs and trip wires. Saw more prongs. I had a barely-controllable urge to piss myself.

“Could be some pressure plated ones too.” The PLO loved to mix and match.

“Slowly retrace your steps.” Our patrol leader ordered. I was afraid to even try and turn around. So I looked back to find my last step. I did. I slowly took it. Painstaking, stressed out retraced step after step. Finally we made it out.
The kid was nowhere in sight. Tried to find him so we could blow him away.
Nada.

We found out later that the mines were PROM-1’s, a Yugoslav-made bouncing betty style of mine. If you trip one it shoots up to chest height and goes off, flinging ball bearings out for about 30 meters. One would have taken us all out.
Guess God didn’t want anybody to die that day. What a novel concept!

And that wasn’t the only minefield I’ve found myself in. I’ve also been shelled, rocketed, and shot at more times than I can remember, not to mention the close calls with snakes and scorpions. Yet my heart is still pumping and I have my full compliment of body parts.

This is more than I can say for some of the others who have entered the Valley. Over 630 SLA fighters lay buried.

Sixteen months ago I entered the Litani Valley. Joining the South Lebanon Army was my Plan B, Plan A was the French Foreign Legion but I failed the eye test. It seemed like it was meant to be because my eyes weren’t that bad. Ended up in Marseilles, then off to Israel.

Metulla, Israel: May 1981

Met Major Haddad at the Hotel Arazim in Mettula. A pistol shot distance from Lebanon. The Major was cool and I ended up really liking the Major. I’d put him up for the Warlord of the Year Award if there was such a thing. His English was impeccable as were his motives, or so I thought. Back when the civil war started he commanded the garrison at Marjayoun. Getting sick of the PLO running amok, he tossed them out of the town and set up his own army.

It was that army, the South Lebanon Army, which was still known at the time as the Free Lebanese Army, that I was joining. Fortunately the physical requirements were rather modest. I could hold a rifle and see well enough to know which direction to shoot it. So I was in. Since I knew standard first aid he decided to make me a medic. God help my patients, as I certainly can’t...

MERCENARY TIP: Anybody can become a mercenary. The question really is why would anyone do that to themselves? Oh yes, never admit to knowing first aid.

It was May 17, 1981. I sat on the hotel patio drinking a Maccabie beer. I was a bit scared, after all it’s not every day that one goes to war. Didn’t know what to expect and wished to hell I knew some Arabic. I hoped like hell my French would be enough in this ex-French colony. In some ways I think I knew what to expect, since I’d read an article in the Soldier of Fortune magazine on the Free Lebanese Army. But nothing preps you for the reality.

And there it came.  A beat up gray three-quarter ton pickup pulled up and out stepped Captain Abo A, 40 going on 60, in Lebanese Army fatigues with a slung folding stock Kalashnikov.

He seemed to know that out of the pack of tourists I was the crazy fuck who just signed up for the party up in the valley.  Yee-Ha its off to war I go. Man if all those gun shop commandos at the range could see me now. Thought it would be cool to fight in a war. Boy was I a naive, clueless, dumb-ass back then.

Back in the old country I used to hang out with a bunch of mercenary wannabies down at the range. Copies of Soldier of Fortune and Gung Ho magazine everywhere. They’d talk about going off to be a mercenary. About Rhodesia, about Angola, about the latest war-du-news. When they were not talking about it they were ooing and awing some guys new assault rifle. Course that was back before Canada made it illegal to own anything other than a sling shot.

My plan A, which they thought was cool, was to do a stint in the Legion then hook up with Colonel Denard’s mercenary unit. But Plan B was cool too. Talk is cheap but it takes guts to walk into the valley. Then again it probably has more to do with stupidity and ignorance than guts.

My new Captain certainly looked like he’d been around the track a few times with the scars to show for it. To my horror he only spoke Arabic. So much for getting by with my French.
Just bloody marvelous!

I’ve got a commanding officer who I can’t communicate with. I’m doomed for sure. I could see it now. Getting shredded by a coil frag ‘cause I didn’t understand that someone just shouted “grenade!”...

MERCENARY TIP: Learn the friggin language! Especially the important words like “Duck!”

Arabic pop music on the radio as we drove through the Good Fence. They sure loved that Arabic pop music, played it all the time in the APC’s and at the outposts. Ended up acquiring a taste for it.

We were waved through and I was in Lebanon.

Holy crap!

I’m here!

Now what!

Well I’m committed now.

He offers me a cigarette and I accept it. I didn’t know a cigarette could be smoked so fast until we drove along that road to Marjayoun. Something to do with seeing all the craters and shot up buildings.

This was it.

The real deal.

I was going to have my big chance to stay alive. Sure hoped I wouldn’t fuck it up.

We pull up to this cracked, shrapnel-scarred concrete building set in the middle of a shell crater garden that  passed for a restaurant. He buys a falafel and beer for both of us. The beer is OK an Israeli brand that is, well, ok. So I have what I pray is not my last meal. The owner is in uniform, an FN propped in the corner.

So we continue my own rendition of the journey in to the heart of darkness. Driving along a very exposed ridge. To my left I see the valley. On the other side on top of a ridge is Beufort castle. My captain points over to it “Murharib. Philistini”.

I felt very naked on that ridge as the range looked about right for a 100mm AT gun. Philistini is Arabic for Palestinian. “Go forth and slay the Philistines,” said the Good Book.

I was indeed going forth. However, the question as to whom would slay whom was yet to be answered.

I felt my blood congealing and my guts curdling as we drove though a small village.. The signs of war were everywhere. Show me something that had no bullet and shrapnel scars everywhere and I’ll show you something that was built this morning. There is a local joke that goes like this. “Why is it called the holy land? Because everything is shot full of holes.” Well, you had to be there...

A few well used ex-Israeli Super Shermans and APCs were parked along the streets. Most of the men were in uniform, a mix of Israeli fatigues and cammoes that I assumed were from some Arab army. I saw too many people with missing legs. Gotta watch out for those mines. I would learn to joke that there were still mines left over from the crusades.

The reality was sinking in. This was no fucking war movie. This was the real deal. I could get killed out here. Hell, I probably will get killed out here!

What was I thinking of!

Guess I wasn’t! I don’t know what scared me most. Dying or living.

Would I cut it? Or would I cut and run? Come to think about it, what the hell was wrong with cutting and running. Seemed pretty sensible when you think about it.

The desertion rate among the mercs was pretty dismal. It got to the point where they confiscated everybody’s passport and would only hand out day passes to Metulla. Problem was a lot of wannabies couldn’t hack the reality of war in the Lebanon. Guess they weren’t fucked up enough as they had something to desert to. I didn’t. Guess sometimes it takes more courage to run than to stay and possibly die.

MERCENARY TIP: War is a good way to find out what you’re made of. Especially if you take an RPG in the chest.

Marjayoun. Capital of Free Lebanon, a thin strip of SLA-controlled Lebanon that hugged the Israeli border. In some places it was thin enough to shoot across with a heavy machine gun. At that time the SLA was a coalition of the Christian militia based out of Marjayoun and the Shiite anti-Palestinian Amal militia based out of the string of Shiite villages to the west. To that mix was a smattering of Druze hillmen and pro-west Sunni Muslims. Now add one Canadian, shaken not stirred...

We drove up to the old French fort that served as the armory and based a platoon of Israel Commandos. I was marched into an office where a scruffy overweight, 40-something SLA ‘officer’ looked me over with that look a fisherman has when he is deciding if what he just caught should be thrown back in. I was a keeper, guess they were real desperate for fresh meat. He slid a form across the desk and said, “You sign”. The first English I’d heard in this country.

The form was in Arabic. He noticed my puzzlement. “Say you stay for six months. You obey orders, if not, or run, we shoot you.” Actually if you were a foreigner they just deported you. Though this ex-Norwegian submariner was caught spying for the PLO and was hauled off never to be seen again.

Well I was here. More importantly, I was broke with my only alternative being picking oranges on some kibbutz. So I signed.  In retrospect, picking oranges would have been a far superior alternative. The ‘officer’ took my picture with a Polaroid passport photo camera. Hand wrote an ID card and stapled my photo to it.

I was in.

Captain Abu A slapped me on the back and took me to the armory. I was issued a couple pairs of Israeli fatigues, jacket, sleeping bag, foam mat, web gear, empty medic bag, and the best pair of boots I ever wore. One year or 10,000 kilometers guarantee. No socks though.

Time for a weapon. I saw a rack of funky Soviet submachine guns and pointed to one. The quartermaster shook his head and handed me a filthy beat-up Israel heavy barreled FN that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since the Six Day war and five even filthier magazines. Bloody marvelous. Medics are supposed to have a light weapon, not something that weights 12 pounds not counting the ammo.

Then it was off to what passed for a hospital in these parts. There I met one of the many Georges. He was part medic, part-lab tech, and keeper of the medical supplies. He parted with a few for my empty medic bag. Now I had a half-empty medic bag and a second job at the hospital. This was fine by me as I might learn something that would allow me to actually do some good. What a novel concept!

And so started my time in the valley...

Chapter Two: No Country No Honor

I am the forgotten warrior.
There are no memorials, no remembrance day.
For I'm a stinking mercenary,

A loser who fought in somebody else's lost war.
Le Sacre Mercenaire
A right wanker am I.

So they say.
But I fought for what I thought was right.
For the side I thought was right.

For me it was Lebanon.
For others, Biafra, Rhodesia, or the Contras.
We are the brotherhood of lost causes.

My pain is as great as the Nam Vet.
But I have no wall with my buddies’ names.
I have no day where I can march proud.

I knew that was my fate.
The price to pay,
But it hurts none-the-less.

I feel so alone.
No support group for me.
I am the forgotten warrior.
* * * *
I spent sixteen months in that valley. Maybe I should have stayed. I had the option of taking on a gig teaching English, that would have lasted a semester before the illusion of peace proved to be just that as in the spring of 83 Lebanon got ugly again. Then back to the midnight firefights in the valley. Of course I could’ve followed the other mercs to Eritrea, Angola, or the Contras. Even turned down a chance to hunt pirates in Indonesian waters.
But I chose to go home instead.

I found out that I had no home, not that I had much of one in the first place... Given the psychopathic father I ran from.

The war destroyed what little of it that I had. I am a stranger in my own country because of it. As for my old non-mercenary friends, I might as well have been speaking ancient Babylonian when trying to get them to understand.

Vancouver: October 1982

When my best friend’s father, a WWII vet of the jungle fighting in Burma asked me how it was. Maybe if I was alone with him I would have given a better answer, then again maybe not as I wasn’t ready to ‘own up’ to the real answer. So what I did was give some trite answer that I can’t even remember what it was.

The answer I would have given would go something like this…

What the fuck I was thinking when I went there is beyond me.  Why the fuck I stayed beyond my initial six month contract even more crazy. Really I should have went back into Israel, joined a Kibbutz, became Jewish, and join the IDF. At least I would have been in a real army. Better answer is I wish I’d asked the Legion when they turned me down for my eyes, if they took people with glasses, which I found out that they do when I was too old to join , got them, and tried again. But I didn’t.

Then I would talk about how I ended up on the verge of cracking and how it took all my will-power to buckle on my web gear, grab my rifle and medic bag, and head out.  I would talk about the tremors in my hands and how I puked the last time I worked on someone. How strong the urge to run screaming became. It felt like touching fire to go out on patrol or man a checkpoint.  

After Peace in Galilee the opportunity to fight for the Eritrean rebels presented itself. Several guys took it. I didn’t. The opportunity to fight for the Contras also presented itself. I again I didn’t. Deep down I knew I would be useless in a fight, useless as a medic as I have nothing left to give and all my emotional reserves were spent.

It almost destroyed me emotionally. When the Peace in Galilee operation wound down and we were not needed any more by the SLA I honestly feel like I was one firefight away from breaking. The urge to run screaming into the night was getting stronger. Pulling the trigger became harder. Coping with the horrible wounds that bullets, shrapnel and mines cause was becoming almost impossible. Yet a sense of loyalty and not knowing what else I could do kept me from leaving until the war seemed over (which is wasn’t).

I developed ‘mange’, I crawled into a bottle and a hash pipe when off duty. I couldn’t sleep and the images kept playing in my mind.  I did things I wasn’t proud of. That I was following orders wears pretty thin and I carry lots of guilt over my sins of commission, omission, and the sin of surviving.

It soon struck me that I had to debrief if I wasn’t going to get fucked up by what I went through. That’s what I noticed about the Israeli squaddies. They talked about it, so Israel didn’t have the fucked up vet syndrome that the US had back then. Of course the Israeli vets were respected by their people. They had a home. And their honor.
So I tried to share, sort of... I felt ashamed and scared of the mess in my head and put on an air of bravado to cover it up. I wanted to come across as a badass mercenary, not some shell-shocked wreck that was on the verge of turning coward. So what I shared was what happened at a superficial event level, not what happened at an emotional, visceral level. Which really would do nothing to exorcise the demons. Guess I wasn’t ready to lay my emotional guts on the table.

Big fucking mistake sharing even the events! I can’t help but wonder if they believed me and supported me, then maybe I would have started sharing at an emotional level. Oh, well!

Some of the gun shop commandos didn’t believe the casualty rates. The SLA's strength averaged between 2200 and 2500 men, and 621 were killed in the course of the war according to the official records. Do the math...

Others didn’t believe simply because I was talking about it. After all real vets don’t talk about it. Maybe real vets don’t because they tried and soon found that no one wanted to hear about it... and would shut them down by denying their experience or branding them criminals. Like the US Nam vets who were called baby killers when they got home.

Then in some college class I took the Instructor rants on about the glory of fighting in a people’s revolution. Of course he never did. I bit my tongue, though I really wanted to challenge him to spend six months in some people’s army then talk about the glory of being sprayed by your comrade’s brains, or watching him stuff his shredded, bloody, shit-oozing guts back inside himself. Yes sur-ree, lots of glory in that! But I didn’t, figuring he and the class would be blinded by the fact that I fought for mercenaries in the pay of the Zionists.

So I shut up and the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder cancer really grew in my soul. It does when left locked away in the dark recesses of the mind. I was cut adrift from the present. There was nothing to anchor me to the present. No purpose, no goal, no place. So I sunk into my past, desperately trying to recapture the sense of place and meaning I once had.

But all I recaptured was the fucking pain and guilt.

Reliving the mistakes. Caught in an infinite loop of regret.

Reliving the helplessness.

An all you can eat buffet where I gluttonously fed my sense of helplessness and self-hatred.

And I was alone, adrift in the sea of my dark brooding thoughts. No one to relate to, no one to share my pain with.
I found out about a Nam vet support group but vets of other wars need not apply.

Speaking of Nam, weird as it may be, I adopted the Vietnam War Memorial as my own and seeing it always brings on tears. We mercs don’t have one of our own and most of the causes we fought are lost so the sides we fought for have none either. The winning side always tears it down. That’s what happened to the SLA’s war memorial when the Hezbollah took over.

That makes it that much harder. Having no focal point for my grief. No place of honor for those that served, for those that met their end in the valley. Only a vet can truly understand how important these things are.

I wished that I had been accepted into the Legion. I would’ve had a place of honor. I would’ve had an association. People who called me their own. People to share with.

As it is, the other SLA mercenaries, those that survived whatever war came next and the wars after that, are God knows where. The Lebanese I fought with, those that survived and not rotting in some Lebanese jail, are in Israel.  Maybe I should look them up. But I’m too pissed off at Israel to ever want to set foot in it.

So what do you do when you have no home? I thought about finding another war. I’ve had my fill of it. Don’t want to push my luck or sanity. Though whenever the latest war-du-news comes around the thought of signing up briefly flits though my mind. Thought a lot about the Bosnia and Kosovo when the Serbs were running amok.

MERCENARY TIP: If you’re thinking of finding another war, lie down until the feeling passes.

Didn’t fit in here, didn’t feel like dying there. So ended up somewhere in between. A weird limbo of past realities and future fantasies, with the present no more substantial than the contents of a vacuum tube. Which really sucks when one is trying to piece together a life in the present.

Heard that Spain, with Franco dead and buried, finally honored the International Brigade vets, foreign volunteers who fought for the losing side back in 36. The survivors all got Spanish citizenship and they now had their parade and memorial. Wondered if I’d live long enough for the pro-West Christians in Lebanon to get back in power and do the same. Hell even if they did it would last like, maybe, for the entire five minutes that it would take for Syria and Iran to stick their noses back into Lebanon’s affairs.

Alone.

Guess I’ve always been an outsider. Never had a place other than for the sixteen months I spent in Lebanon. As a kid my family was too fucked up to keep me, so I had an even more fucked up foster family that went out of their way to try and make sure I was even more fucked up than they.

Guess all mercs grew up fucked up in one way or another. Can’t think of why any normal person would do this. Unless they had no country left, like all those Waffen SS vets who joined the Legion after the war. Surviving the Russian front only to die at Dien Ben Phu, or on some patch of sand in Algeria.

MERCENARY TIP: If you become a mercenary odds are you’re going to fight on the losing side. Get used to it. Hey it could be worse, after all there are degrees of losing. Think about the poor bastards who signed up for the French SS. They took ninety percent casualties in the Battle for Berlin and the survivors were sentenced to hard labor for treason. Talk about suffering a third-degree loss!

One way or another we are all losers, the damned, the homeless. Refugees from defeated families, defeated armies, and defeated lives. In the wrong place at the wrong time. Criminals and misfits. Fit only to fight somebody else’s war in the course of our desperate search for meaning and belonging. Yet there is a sad sort of honor in that. We’re good for the morale of the locals, for somebody gives enough damn about them to share a foxhole with them.

Of course once they found out that we were getting paid the same as them, they figured we must be fucking crazy. Who the hell would fly half-way around the world to put their life on the line for the princely sum of $3.17 a day, the pay for an SLA private at that time. Still they humored us. Made us feel sort of welcome for the most part.
For the first time in my life I felt like I have a place and a purpose. Something to believe in. I clung to that long after it became apparent that there were no good guys, just varying shades of bad guys. But still they were my bad guys and I felt I had a place in their scheme of things, even if that place was as a private cannon fodder second class.

Which is more than I can say about the vacuum of being that I found myself in when I came home. Is it any wonder that my eyes kept turning eastward to the Lebanon for the longest time? Reminds me of the Bible passage about a dog returning to its vomit.

Chapter Three: Confusion Eyes

Marjayoun, capital of Free Lebanon. The name means confusion eyes. Very fitting when you contemplate Lebanese politics. Lebanon doesn’t work because it never really worked for everybody with a long tradition of semi-autonomous warlords running back to the days of the Ottoman Empire. The Christians never identified with the Arab world, and in fact felt insulted if called an Arab. They were the true Lebanese descended from the Phoenicians; the Arabs were interlopers who took over with the Christian defeat in the crusades. Or so the Marionite myth goes.

Between French favoritism and the 1932 National Pact that favored the Christians, the distribution of power and wealth left the Christian minority in a dominating position. The tensions between Christian, Sunni, Shiia, and Druze that resulted because of this were further fueled by the mass migration of Palestinians to Lebanon in both the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and Black September in 1972. The Palestinians ended up founding a country within the country, controlling a good chunk of the South while the Lebanese did squat about it.

The 1973 Yom Kippur war came, and the Muslims were seriously pissed off when Lebanon did not join the attack on Israel continuing the Lebanese government’s fine tradition of doing squat. The Christian president and Christian head of the army were viewed as traitors to the Arab cause and the pot of Lebanese stew was coming to a boil.

Meanwhile the Syrians, who consider Lebanon to be a national province of Syria were stirring the pot fast and furious, exploiting the real and perceived grievances of the Lebanese Muslims The Israelis joined the pot stirring in a bid to exploit Lebanese Christian fears of the growing Muslim militancy to their own ends.

Arms were being openly shipped into Lebanon by the boatload. And we’re not just talking rifles here. The various warlords and political parties were shipping in tanks and artillery by the shipload. Still the Lebanese government did squat. By the time 1975 rolled around the Lebanese army was only the forth largest armed group in the country, with the PLO, the Christian Phalange, and the Druze PSP fielding larger forces.

Then in April 1975 the pot boiled over into full-scale, multisided civil war. Lebanon became totally unglued. By 1981, Lebanon contained 261 separate armed groups, counting the Israeli and Syrian armies. The Lebanese army was then, and still is, an impotent irrelevancy. Twiddling their thumbs yet again during the 2006 spat between Israel and the Hezbollah. Beyond me why they bother having an army at all. Or even a government for that matter, as no one seems to pay much attention to it, or to its borders for that matter.

To call the Lebanese Civil War a religious war is being simplistic, as it was a confused mess of ever-shifting alliances blended by bouts of infighting. You had the pro-Syrian Christian militia of the Franjieh family as well as the pro-Israel Christian militias. The Shiia has the anti-Palestinian Amal versus the Iranian-backed Hezbollah. The Druze PSP would back whoever seemed to be winning at the time. Palestinian factions would fight each other on occasion. In fact I remember spending a few nights watching distant firefights on the other side of the valley as the Palestinians fought among themselves.

Sad really, as Lebanon was a really nice country before they decided to blow themselves up. When I finally got up to Beirut, I saw why it was once called the Paris of the Orient.

As for Marjayoun itself, well it looks like it’s been around forever and it probably has. I half-expected to see some sign that said “Jesus slept here.” The town sprawls along a ridge and slopes down towards the Valley of the Springs. Population was around 5,000.  The Souk is book-ended by two bars, both run by guys named Joseph. We mercs referred to them as Joe’s top bar and Joe’s bottom bar. Beer and cigarettes were the equivalent of twenty-five cents. Joe’s bottom bar was known for a pizza-like dish that was a favorite among us mercenaries.

Initially, I lived in a bunker next door to Captain Abo A’s house along with the rest of his APC’s crew. A couple of APC Georges, Butros, Basaam, Saleem, and Sameer. Much to my relief, there was enough English and French between them for me to communicate. Entertainment was doing the rounds, visiting the various friends and neighbors, as well as hanging out at Captain Abo A’s place. Butros would often sing and Basaam play the Arab Bongo drums. Both were damn good.

The day after I arrived I experienced my first shelling. I was standing outside with Captain Abo A and several of the APC crew when I heard a dull crump of a distant artillery piece. Everybody’s ear perked up to the ever-increasing whistle of the incoming round. My panic mounted as the whistle became louder. Oblivious to what everyone else was doing, I hit the dirt. The shell landed about a kilometer away.

Laughter snapped me out of my panic and I looked around to see everyone else on their feet. I was mortified and my pride was mortally wounded. They just kept laughing as a second round landed near the first.  I got up on my feet, praying a silent thanksgiving that I had not been further embarrassed by pissing myself. I stood and watched as four more rounds landed. Then silence. Guess they just wanted us to not forget they were still around. In any case I eventually became real good at telling where a shell would land. Or maybe it was just pure luck and I only think I was good at telling where the shells land. Hmmm...

MERCENARY TIP: Watch what the locals do and do likewise. They must be doing something right as they’ve survived this long.

     Captain Abo A had a couple of daughters, the eldest in her early twenties. She had zero looks and minus ten personality. He tried to marry her off to damn near every mercenary that came along, me included. Guess he had ran through all the Lebanese. He even offered a share in his muffler business. There were no takers. In a way I really felt bad about the woman, but not so bad that I was willing to marry her.

Chapter 4: The Killer Rabbit

Kleth-meiah-wahad under attack
APC driver guides us into the valley
Machine-guns chambering rounds
Cold sweat glistens in the paraflairs glow
Death shadows dance... rocks or men

Rock and rolling Kalashnikov's and FN’s
RPG explodes... echoing through the valley
Bitter taste of fear
I breathe... for how long
Waiting for that bullet... or that rocket

As we go down into the valley...
* * * *
Captain Abo A was an interesting character, no formal military training, picking up the little he knew along the way. He started fighting the PLO and other terrorist riff-raff back in 76 and eventually became a Captain simply by staying alive and killing enough of the enemy to make an impression on the Major. He’d been shot seven times over the years, but all that did was just make him hate more. Most of the time all he commanded was the APC as the fighting was mostly at the squad level. His call sign was Arnab, which meant Rabbit in Arabic. A killer Rabbit with a big pointy machine gun.

We would be on call 24 hours out of every 72, though if things got really crazy we’d be on call all the time, like the time the PLO and Syrians pounded us for eleven days straight. But normally it is a day on and two days off. During the day it was pretty quiet and, unless the town got shelled, we’d hang around the Captain’s house or muffler shop and do squat. After all it takes only so long to clean your weapons. Occasionally, though more often for the mercenaries, we would get volunteered to string field telephone wire or barbed wire, other times we’d be down at the fort unloading supplies.

It was after the sun set that it got interesting. It would be absolutely suicidal for the PLO to try and infiltrate during the day. During the night it was only semi-suicidal.  Since the Israelis started formally supporting the Christians in 78, the PLO had given up on large-scale attacks. As for our side, Major Haddad saw our role as purely defensive so we were not about to start anything. Not that we were actually capable of finishing anything we started. That the Israelis held that opinion was confirmed by just how short a leash they held the SLA on.

So the war had fallen into a dreary but deadly routine, mostly centered along the part of the valley outside the UN Buffer Zone, of the PLO either trying to infiltrate through us to get to Israel, infiltrate into the SLA’s territory to lay some mine or hit a soft target, take pot shots at an outpost, or ambush a patrol. And we would be trying to stop them. We had a string of outposts along our side of the valley, with patrols roaming in between. A PLO squad there would bump into a patrol or hit one of our outposts and a short, sharp firefight would break out. Our APC would be called out to intervene and either drive off or finish off the PLO. If we were lucky they were not trying to lure our APC into an ambush. Sometimes we weren’t...

July 81: Road leading to Outposts 301 and 302, about one am

     We crested the ridge as the light from the last set of illumination rounds faded; the APC was tear-assing down the dirt road. I braced myself as best I could while hanging on to the lip of the open top hatch with one hand and my rifle with the other. The other three guys in the main fighting compartment were in the same predicament. Only the old Nam style flak jackets kept our ribs from being cracked as we were bashed against the lip of the top hatch. The bucking was so bad that the .30 cal machine guns’ ammo belts bounced out of their boxes, whacking on the hull, knocking rounds right out of the belt.

Sameer and Basaam swore as they tried to wrestle the belts back into their boxes. Fucking futile that effort was. The captain sat in the commander’s hatch, one hand on the belt of the .50 cal. keeping it from bouncing out. It was your typical bone-jarring tear-assing ride into the valley.

I looked down towards outpost 301, green and red tracers tore through the night sky like fireflies on speed. More illumination rounds popped, lighting up the valley.  I swallowed and re-swallowed my fear. We went deep and deeper in to the valley. We drove around the bend that took us through a shallow gully with bolder-strewn slopes. 
The flair of an RPG

“Muharrib” I shouted over the intercom.

The damn thing streaked over us as green and red tracers streaked everywhere. The sound of Kalashnikov fire mingled with rounds ricocheting off the right side of the APC.

I fired wildly. More hope of hitting the moon than the ambushers. Maybe I’d get lucky

Basaam fired his .30 cal as the Captain reefed his .50 cal over. Butros pulled every ounce of speed out of the aging diesel engine,

“Kesuktic” Bassam swore. His .30 went silent as the weapon fed an empty section of the ammo belt.

Another RPG streaked out and exploded about ten meters in front of us. Thank God the guy with the RPG was a crappy shot.

Basaam wrestled with the .30 cal, threading an intact section of the belt. The Captain finally got his .50 around. The heavy hammer of the .50 rose above the din of the .30, my FN, and the PLO’s Kalashnikovs.

Green and red tracers whipped between us and over us. It was a fucking miracle that none of them found a home.
Don’t think any of our rounds were finding a home either. My shots were still going wild due to the bucking of the APC. Can’t complain as it made us harder to hit.

Finally we drove out of the gully and tear-assed away from the kill zone. The captain was blathering away in Arabic.

The whistle of incoming.

The loud explosion of 130mm HE reverberated as the flash lit up the gully.

More 130’s exploded in the gully, giving our ambushers something to think about.

The Captain had ordered artillery. Don’t think he had the time to use a map. Must know the fucking coordinates of every rock in the valley.

Anyways we had other fish to fillet as we circled wide around the PLO firing on the outpost. Unlike the ambushers they were too close to call in artillery so we had to take them out the hard way.

Lucky for us they were too focused on the outpost to notice us flanking them. Amazing considering how bloody obvious we were about it, cutting damn near in front of them before looping around.

Well what they don’t know will kill them as the Captain spotted one hunkered behind a boulder firing away at the outpost. The poor bastard was exposed to us as he was between the rock and our APC.
Butros slowed the APC.

It became stable enough to actually have a chance of hitting something.

The Captain cut loose with the .50, walking the rounds over the poor bastard, catapulting him right over the rock.
The Captain, Bassam, and Sameer raked the rocks with their machine guns as I watched our collective asses.

The surviving PLO fighters cut and run chased by our rounds. It was over. Though the artillery was still pounding the gully. In between the explosions, I could hear the groans of some wounded PLO fighter.

We drove to the outpost to see if any of our own was wounded. One guy was grazed on the shoulder. No big hairy deal, a few stitches were all he'd need, and then back on duty. A round of cigarettes and thanks. We hung around in case the bastards came back. Plus the ambushers might still be out there.

The Captain called off the shelling as the ambushers would either be dead, or have long since cut out of the gully.  We didn’t have the luxury of wasting shells.

It became damn quiet. Except for the groans of that wounded PLO fighter. Couldn’t be bothered to go after him, the son of a bitch probably would try and kill me anyways. If he wanted to live bad enough then he could drag his sorry ass back across the Litani River. If not, he could give our regards to Allah. The guilt wouldn’t hit until after I left...

The rather odd term of monotonous terror comes to mind to describe these sorts of engagements. The terror part, of course, is obvious. Hey one could get killed any time, and killed in pretty ugly ways. An RPG hitting the APC could cover the crew with burning diesel fuel. It happened to others and I knew, with a bit of bad luck, that it could happen to me. Came too damn close too many times.

While burning to death scared the shit out of me, my actual reoccurring nightmare was being ambushed in that damn gully while manning the right side .30, taking a round in the heart, and breathing my last sprawled on the floor of the APC. I kept having this nightmare over and over to the point that I was absolutely certain that I was having a premonition about how I would meet my end. Until I was transferred to another unit I made sure I was never on the right side of the APC. Maybe it was just a nightmare. Or maybe it was a warning that I heeded, a warning that gave me the chance to dodge that bullet.

I use the term monotonous due to the static, reactive nature of the engagements. The same outposts were getting hit the same way and we’d react in the same way. Both sides were in a tactical and strategic rut as deep as the valley. In a weird sort of way it was like working the night shift at an assembly line job.

From 1978 to 1982 the front line was static, sort of like low-grade trench warfare. The poor training and general tactical ineptness endemic in both the SLA and PLO further compounded this stagnation. I shudder when I think back on how easy it would’ve been for a halfway competent enemy to chew us up and spit us out.

Fortunately, between PLO ineptness and Syrian learned helplessness, we never had to face an enemy with any semblance of competency during my time there. That would come later when the Hezbollah evolved from a pack of pathetic suicide jocks formed in the vacuum of the PLO’s rout from the South in 1982 to a well-trained, well-lead guerrilla army that held its own against the Israel army in both the 1996 Grapes of Wraith Operation and the 2006 Invasion of Lebanon.

The Hezbollah certainly had their shit together. In 2006 the Israelis barely reached the Litani River after weeks of fighting and never really gained control of the key towns and villages. And that’s with the Hezbollah only having a couple of thousand fighters.

I’d heard that they are the best trained and best led militia and they sure proved it, blowing away Israel’s aura of invincibility in the process. Even an Israeli general had to admit that they were not just a pack of terrorists, but a trained, effective army. A sharp contrast to the PLO.

Meanwhile Back at the Ranch...

When the town was shelled, the Captain would take a couple of us on a shrapnel run. We’d drive into the shelled area to look for casualties. During sustained shelling, that meant driving buttoned up into the shelling. I could feel the shock of the explosions and hear the shrapnel rattling off the sides of the APC. Praying that a round didn’t land on top of us. The civilians had good shelters and fortunately casualties were light relative to how intense the shelling was. Still there were casualties.

still hear the screams. Still feel their blood on my hands as I treat their wounds. Still feel my sense of guilt and helplessness when they died on me. More bullshit guilt added to my store. Sometimes I would feel overwhelmed by it all and by my lack of training and supplies. In retrospect I don’t think I was really cut out to be a medic, certainly I felt more confident with a rifle than a Kelly clamp.

Chapter 5: You Meet the Most Interesting People in a War

Beyond the guys in the APC crew, who were normal, well as normal as any one can be in that insanity, there were some interesting characters living in Marjayoun. There was this really old guy who rode with Lawrence of Arabia and had an old faded photo with him and Lawrence of Arabia himself. Wish to God I were fluent in Arabic because I’m sure he had one hell of a story to tell.

Then there was Crazy George the tank commander. Definitely had serious issues. He could be a really nice guy, but his idea of a fucking joke was to pull the pin on a dummy grenade and toss it through the window. The first time he did that I wanted to kill him.

We became good friends, his English was good and he was an excellent raconteur. Myself and several of the original mercs would hang out at his place for good conversation. He lived on the edge of town with his wife. Their yard was mined. Kind of felt sorry for his wife as it couldn’t be easy being married to this guy. She had a resigned look about her and rolled her eyes a lot. He often went shopping in the tank he commanded and finally had it taken away for using it for personal reasons. As a soldier he was a man of great personal bravery, though on one occasion I witnessed it seemed more like great personal ego.

Outskirts of Khirbe: August 1981

I was a passenger in my Captain’s three-quarter ton truck. We were driving back from a trip to Metulla when we bumped into Crazy George in his tank just outside of Khirbe just across the valley from Beufort Castle. The two men nattered away in Arabic. While I was sitting there kicking myself for never learning the language, I hear the whistle of incoming. The two men seemed oblivious.

It went over close to half a kilometer and exploded. Big flinch from me.

The two just kept nattering.

Another round whistled in and exploded a couple hundred meters over. Bigger flinch from me.

The two just kept nattering. I was caught up in a game of chicken between these two. I gave my Captain a get the hell moving look.

Totally ignored.

A third round landed short barely a hundred meters.

The nattering stopped. brief pause to see who would start first. We did.

Both vehicles were well clear when the fifth round hit less than twenty meters from where we were, well within shrapnel range of a 130mm HE shell.

The Mercenaries

When I came, I thought I was the only one, though I’d heard that there were a few before. At the time there was still one, an Iranian Christian, who was a former Combat Engineer Lieutenant in the deposed Shah’s Imperial Guard. He disappeared a few months after I arrived and rumor had it that he was recruited by the Mossad to go back into Iran.

There was also an ex-Dutch UN Peacekeeper fighting for the Amal militia that was part of the SLA. He had deserted the UN and signed up with Amal a week before I came on the scene. He was Mad Max, though it would be over a month before I would meet him.

A couple weeks after I arrived we received three volunteers; a Brit, and a second Dutchmen, and another Canadian. None with any military experience. I moved out of the bunker and the four of us were housed in an abandoned school. The Brit and Canadian lasted as long as I did and the two headed off to Africa together. The second Dutchman cracked under fire his first time out and was let go.

Mad Max heard about us, left Amal, and came to Marjayoun to sign up with the Christian militia. He also lasted as long as I and stayed behind when I left for home. I never did find out the real reason why he had decided to desert the Dutch Army to join some raggedy-ass militia.

Over the next sixteen months, volunteers came and went. Some forgettable and some memorable, like the German ex-Foreign Legionnaire turned bank robber. He had fled to Israel and lived the high life in a five star hotel. Joined us when the money ran out. Didn’t speak a word of English, but we taught him. What sticks to my mind were his first few phrases. “Where’s the coffee pot.” and “I have no ammunition.” You had to be there...

We had a three other ex-Foreign Legionnaires one of whom, a Swiss with 15 years in the legion, became a good friend. he spent most of his service in Djbouti and spoke excellent Arabic. What is most interesting about him is that he used his savings to open a restaurant in Majayoun. It was the only fine dining restaurant in South Lebanon and became quite popular with the more well-off locals. To this day I wonder what happened to him when the Hezbollah took over.

One of the other ex-legionnaires was the most disliked mercenary of the bunch, an obnoxious Dutchman who’s narcissism and squealing alienated most of us. In fact we would purposefully mispronounce his name, calling him Nico, which means fuck in Arabic. Anyways Nico decided to make his fortune smuggling dope into Israel.

At first he smuggled hash, which you could buy for a hundred bucks a kilo in Lebanon. As time wore on, his ambitions grew. When the Peace in Galilee operation cleared the road to Beirut, he decided to move up to smuggling heavier stuff. So he went to Beirut to buy some heroin and was never seen again. We figured he got done in for the money he was carrying. No tears were shed.

Walid the Bedouin, who ended up with me in Sergeant Simon’s unit, arrived just after the November mutiny. Like most Bedouins he was a crack shot. I’m not to sure how or why he ended up in Lebanon, but I’m glad he did as he saved my ass more than once. He knew very little English but picked up fast.

Of the Americans, several come to mind. One was a preacher’s son who felt he was doing God’s work by killing the enemies of Israel. We’d play chess and argue theology for hours on end. We never did agree, nor did we ever agree to disagree.
Then there was this guy with CIA written all over him. I am sure that he was not the only spy among us. There was, of course, that Norwegian submariner who was caught spying for the PLO. I often wondered who else was, and who was spying for the Mossad. I know among the Lebanese there were quite a few feeding information back to the Lebanese army, and to the PLO and later the Hezbollah. This got worse after I left and contributed to the growing demoralization suffered by the SLA during the nineties.

Speaking of demoralization, among the mercenaries there was a fair bit of demoralization and frustration due to the poor living conditions, poor training, lack of discipline, general tactical ineptness of our officers, the static warfare which gave no sense of there being an end in sight, and the interplay of our own personal issues with the aforementioned. This all came to a head in the November mutiny in 1981.

All of us mercenaries were under the command of Captain Abu A at that time. He would pay us 350 Lebanese Pounds and deliver our mail. We were feeling cheated as the normal pay was supposed to be 500 Lebanese Pounds, about thirty dollars more. Some of the mercenaries also felt that we were not getting all our mail. We also felt like we were getting more than our fair share of the crappy jobs; stringing barbed wire, unloading supplies, and so forth.

The final straw is when he took all of us and some of the Lebanese to this village. It was high in the mountains, damned cold and pouring rain. We drove up to this outpost. We were deployed in the outpost while all the Lebanese went to this house to party all night. On the ride back you could cut the tension with a knife. Most of the guys decided things had gone far enough and drew up a list of our grievances. The Captain heard what we were up to from Nico and decided to handle it by sending over some of the Lebanese under his command.

Schoolhouse: November, 1981

Seven of us sat on the bunks that lined the walls of the old classroom. The ex-Brit paratrooper held a note pad and pen. I felt uneasy, caught between my sense of duty, and the reality that I had to live with these guys. My relationship with these guys had become decidedly cool over the past few months. I could see it in the Brit’s eyes.
Things had gotten so bad that duty and loyalty were now seen as “sucking up to the Lebanese”. The only person more on the outs than I was Nico.

“Where’s Nico?” Mush asked.

“Probably squealing to the Lebs.” The other Canadian remarked. He looked at me. “I’m surprised you’re still here.”

Before I could answer we hear footsteps coming from the large foyer. Mad Max looked out the door. “Its the Lebs.”

We all filed out into the foyer. There was Bassam, Butros, Saleem, Sameer, and the two APC Georges. Guys I’d lived with and fought along side for over six months. God I wanted to be anywhere else but there. Didn’t want to choose between the mercenaries and my APC crew. The look in everyone’s eyes said it had come to that.
“So you not happy with the Captain?” One of the Georges barked.

“Damn rights.” The Brit Paratrooper replied.

“After what he do for you?”

“Like fucking us --” The Brit paratrooper was interrupted by George’s punch, which he managed to dodge.
Everybody went at it.

I hesitated. Paralyzed by the choice of which side to have pissed off at me. Doing nothing would have both sides pissed off at me.

Butros was on top of Mush pounding away at him. I grabbed Butros around the neck and hauled him of Mush.

Butros threw me and dove on top of me. Mush returned the favor and pulled him off of me.

Mad Max, built like a linebacker, sturned the tide and the Lebanese finally retreated.

Congratulations and victory whoops.

A slap on my back. “About bloody time.” The Brit Paratrooper said in a friendly voice. The others nodded and the ice age receded.

“We’re fucked.” Mad Max stated.

“They’re going to fucking court martial us.” I stated the obvious.

“Or worse.” Mush stated.

We all sunk into a sea of dread.

However the Major had other plans and sent over Sergeant Simon, an ex-Lebanese Army sergeant who was one of the more capable leaders in the SLA and fluent in English. We talked for hours and felt listened to. He took our list of demands and said he would see what he could do.  Nico came by at this time to pick up his gear. He was going to move in with the APC crew. Lots of threats were made towards him but none materialized.

Surprisingly our demands were mostly met. We received new quarters, our full pay, and we would pick up our own mail. We were all transferred to other units, I ended up serving under Sergeant Simon, which worked out well. Mike, an English speaking Lebanese who had been educated in the States was assigned as our liaison with the Lebanese. We ended up all liking him as he did the best he could for us. The SLA also became careful about seeming fair when assigning the crap jobs. However the training didn’t improve, and the Brit Paratroopers and Foreign Legionnaires took it upon themselves to set up a training schedule for the rest of us.

So we had won, I guess the propaganda value of having foreign volunteers and the propaganda cost of having the mutiny publicly acknowledged by court martialing us was such that giving in to our demands was his best course of action. Of course kiss goodbye to any relationship with the Captain or the APC crew. Fortunately, the hostility between us evolved into a cool neutrality. Eventually Nico was moved in with us and we decided to put up with him.

MERCENARY TIP: Don’t do this at anywhere else folks. We were lucky to get away with it. Probably if the SLA wasn’t as closely supervised by the Israelis, or was commanded by someone other than the Major, we could have all been shot. Again luck reigns supreme.

In retrospect several of our grievances were unfounded. We didn’t get any more mail than we had, so none of it had really gone missing. it was simply the fact people were not writing back. As for the 150 Lebanese pounds that the Captain was holding back, that really was justifiable given that we ate at his place every day. Once the monotony of a diet of Israel army rations set in we realized that we had paid a small price for the home cooked meals we’d been getting.

The staple Israeli ration was the two varieties of loof. Loof can best be described as dog food for humans, er, I mean kosher 'spam'. The two varieties were light colored and dark colored ground and compressed mystery meat. Which if I were to hazard a guess, the light stuff was chicken and the darker stuff lamb or goat.  Nobody knew what this crap really was and I could never get an Israeli soldier to give me a straight answer. They gave us tons of this stuff, enough that we fed stray dogs and used some for target practice. The taste was gagging when eaten cold and you needed hot sauce to make it palatable.

The one good thing is that we never went hungry, as there was a never-ending supply of the stuff. In quantity, Israeli ration sardines came a close second, followed by potatoes, a tasteless cheese-like substance,  and stale rye bread. On that rye bread we spread this 'chocolate' spread that I believe was actually carob. We did get a lot of eggs, so I remember many a morning eating 'spam 'and eggs with the Brits leading us in singing the 'Spam Song'.

The ration ‘used crank case oil’, I mean coffee was a terrible tasting stuff that left an inch of silt on the bottom of your cup. Occasionally we'd get something like a gallon can of marmalade or olives, or a big bag of dates, oranges and tomatoes. Rarely we got an unopened Israeli ration pack, but mostly we ate what they had left over after their troops and picked the ration packs clean of the good stuff. Loof, sardines, potatoes and eggs, all washed down by that vile excuse for coffee.

Yup, you gotta luv the gourmet meals you get as a mercenary...

As for me I wonder if there was anything I could have done to prevent things from getting so out of hand that we ended up in a brawl. Certainly as the merc with the most seniority I could have showed more leadership during this time. I have often replayed that confrontation in my mind and the appeal to our common cause and duty that I should have made. Going along with the herd is easy. Being a leader is hard.

In any case, with winter setting in it was nice to get new quarters that actually had intact windows and a stove.
As a side note, I found out in 2000 that Sergeant Simon had rose to the rank of Colonel in the SLA. I was not surprised given what I saw of him during the time I served under him. While certainly no military genius he was the best of a rather poor lot.

Chapter Six: The Collapse of the SLA

There's a valley in Lebanon called the Litani
It's a place that we all know so well;
It was there that we gave of our manhood
Where so many of our brave comrades fell.

There's a valley in Lebanon called the Litani
Its a place that we all know right well
For it's there that we fought the terrorists
And saw that pleasant valley turn to Hell.

We are proud of the South Lebanon Army
And the fight for Free Lebanon that it made,
There we fought against the terrorists
As part of the Marjayoun Brigade.

The army of which we were so proud.
For twenty-four years it fought a bloody war;
But abandoned and betrayed by Israel
It stands on the Litani no more.

Israel you will never find peace with the terrorists
You will never know friends such as we
So remember the battle for Litani
And the men who fought to keep that valley free

Now we're far from that valley of sorrow,
But its memory we'll never forget,
Though defeated we stand tall with honor
And remember our dead.

* * * *
In May of 2000 the SLA collapsed in a matter of days ending its 24-year history. Founded as the Free Lebanese Army by Major Haddad in 1976, It initially controlled the Christian towns of Marjayoun and Qlayaa. It expanded its control in 1978 as a result of the Israeli Operation Litani and its formal support. It first it was a purely Christian militia, though it never became part of the coalition of Christian militias know as the Lebanese Forces. An Amal splinter-group eventually allied with it based on the old ‘any enemy of my enemy’ principle. While technically renamed the South Lebanon Army in 1980, it was still popularly known as the Free Lebanese Army.

In the early 80’s its strength was about 2500 and its composition became progressively more Shiia among the rank and file, though most of the officers were Christian. In 1984, Major Haddad died of cancer and General Lahad took over. While never good, the quality of the SLA then went from bad to worse as a result of an ever-deepening state of demoralization. This demoralization was due to increasingly effective attacks by the Hezbollah, as well as the sense of isolation engendered by the collapse of the Lebanese Forces and the victory of the Syrian-backed forces that resulted in the so-called end of the Lebanese Civil War in 1990 (it certainly didn't end in the South).

This demoralization contributed greatly to its final collapse of the SLA in May 2000. By that time it was down 1500 men, mostly Shiia conscripts, who found themselves fighting their own religionists in the Hezbullah.

While Israel’s withdrawal, especially in how they handled it, in May of 2006 triggered the rapid chain of events the resulted in the collapse of the SLA, it was ultimately the poor moral, the literal lack of leadership, as General Lahad was in France at the time, and lack of civilian support outside of the Christian minority in the South that made the SLA incapable of surviving on its own.

Even in 1981-82 one sensed that, even with the PLO’s military mediocrity it only survived because of Israel’s support. It had very few heavy weapons and small arms that wasn’t Israeli supplied. More critical though was the poor training and tactical ineptness. Certainly it was incapable of any real offensive operations without the IDF taking the lead. Squad level actions were all they could really manage, though on a good day they could pull off a platoon level operation, but only just. We only looked good because the PLO looked worse. Hell when they sent me and the rest of Sergeant Simon’s squad for ‘special operations training’ it was just a few days of learning to use C-4, a bit of field craft, and how to attack a house. Then they sent us out. It scares the crap out of me when I think back on it…

Interestingly enough I either didn’t know better back then, or simply didn’t want to see. The latter makes more sense, as it would be really scary to know I was putting my life on the line with inadequate training, poor equipment, and inept commanders.

MERCENARY TIP: Odds are you are going to end up fighting in an incompetently-led, poorly-equipped, poorly-trained force. So suck it up and deal with it. By the way the Free Syrian Army is looking for cannon fodder, just head to any village on the Turkish-Syrian border and they’ll sign you up.

Still the SLA had their uses. Israel used the SLA as a buffer and a tripwire force. First against the PLO and later against Hezbollah.  In that role the SLA was very useful and allowed Israel to control ten percent of Lebanon with only a thousand men.  A BBC commentator once referred to the SLA as Israel’s sandbags. A very apt description for the 621 SLA fighters that died and the over 1300 that were wounded in place of the Israelis who would have otherwise manned the outposts and patrols.

I strongly believe Israel’s 2006 attack against the Hezbollah resulted in far greater casualties; both Lebanese and Israeli, than would’ve resulted if they had continued to support and prop up the SLA. The attack itself would have been unnecessary as the buffer provided by the SLA would have precluded effective Hezbollah operations against Israel itself. Most of Hezbullah’s inventory of rockets, for example, had insufficient range to reach Israel across the old SLA Buffer Zone. Certainly it left Israel with no allies in Lebanon and a nice little refugee problem of their own as they had to take in thousands of SLA fighters and their families.

A nice sterile summary, but it does no justice to the emotional impact on myself that the collapse of the SLA had.   As long as the SLA existed it gave meaning to the sacrifice of time, the chronic emotional wounds that I suffered, and the risks that I took. Then they were gone and it all became a colossal waste.

I felt so betrayed by Israel. For some reason I played Bocelli’s ‘Time to Say Good By” over and over while crying my guts out. I would cry until I couldn't cry any more. I finally was able to start grieving all the happened in Lebanon. What I experienced. What I did. What I didn’t do. Going there in the first place. Guilt and plenty of it.
And the dead....

I think what makes war such as waste is one side loses. The losers die for nothing. And the survivors keep bleeding inside.

And the winners too. Hey if the losing side just admitted up front that they were going to lose then nobody would die. One problem though.

How do you know beforehand? Sure there comes a point when it becomes obvious, but at the start? And even when it becomes obvious, the losing side still keeps fighting, and people still sign up. Look how many foreigners volunteered with the Waffen SS in late 1944 when it was damn obvious that the Third Reich was toast and would soon be burnt toast.

Back in Lebanon, it looked like there was finally some light at the end of the tunnel, that I actually might get to feel what victory is like. Pity it wouldn’t last...

Chapter 7: Peace in Galilee But Certainly Not in Lebanon
Marjayoun: June 1982

     Something was seriously up. Yesterday the Valley of the Springs was empty, and now there was what looked like at least a full Israeli armored brigade parked down there. The Israeli air force was seriously bombing the PLO’s positions. Then I could hear Israeli tank guns firing from the other side of Marjayoun. Curious, we headed over.

We found a battalion of Merkiva’s parked along the ridge overlooking the Litani Valley, direct firing at the PLO’s positions on the other side of the valley. We felt the concussion backwash over us as they fired their 105’s. Then a flight or Israeli Skyhawks joined in. Fascinated I watched SAM’s streak up, only to be foxed by the flairs dropped by the Skyhawk. Palestinian AAA couldn’t track fast enough and was totally ineffective. Guess it made them feel like they were actually doing something. Personally, if I was them I’d be finding a very deep hole.

The Skyhawks dropped their load of shake-n-bake; napalm and cluster bomb. It was like a scene right out of Apocalypse Now as the napalm flamed across the PLO positions.

We cheered like a bunch of kids watching fireworks.

I didn’t think much about the poor bastards dying a horrible death in that hell of shrapnel-laced fire. The next week I would see...

Late in the afternoon our various squads were ordered to congregate at the fort. By early evening a couple of companies were milling around. Everybody was given M-16’s and new flak jackets. Our squad leaders were being briefed. It didn’t take rocket science to figure that the shit was about to hit the fan real hard, and the Palestinians were the blades.

Well we now all had our orders. Some squads would acts as guides for the Israelis, more would be covering the Israeli Engineers as they bridged the Litani River. Sergeant Simon told us we would scout out the ford at the Litani river and see how heavily defended it was. If it wasn’t we were to cross and scout out the state of the Palestinian defenses. Must admit I wasn’t terribly thrilled by the thought of being on the side of the river where all the hell was breaking loose. Can you spell death by friendly fire.

Dusk. We sat in the back of a deuce-and-a-half burning corks with our cigarette lighters, smearing the charred cork allover our faces and hands. Black ghosts are we. The truck dumped us off at Outpost 301. A quick pee and a last cigarette. Then the eight of us moved out.

We worked our way down the gullies and washes, trying to stay out of sight. The discharge of the Israeli tank guns and the quick following explosions reverberated through the valley. Wasn’t too worried about running into the Palestinians, figured they’d be too busy prepping for the attack, to send anybody into the valley. It was dark by the time we approached the ford. We went to ground.

Sergeant Simon peered towards the ford for what seemed forever. The Palestinian position on the other side looked churned up even by the moonlight.

No sign of movement.

No sounds.

He motioned us forward. We slowly crept up to the ford. The smell of gasoline was strong on the breeze. Burnt napalm.

We paused again at the ford. Still no movement. No sound.

Sergeant Simon threw a rock into the river.

Nothing.

He motioned us into the river. I prayed that the outpost was really abandoned. That we were not about to walk into an ambush set by some Palestinians with  uncharacteristically good fire discipline. We waded across the river, only a couple of feet deep at this point.

Reaching the other side our main concern was mines. We looked for the path the Palestinians used to get to the ford. Wallid found it. With Wallid on the point, we slowly moved along the trail, scanning the hillside for any sign of the enemy and the trail for any trip wires or signs of newly laid mines.

Wallid froze and pointed down to a metallic glint. He stepped over it and continued down the trail. It was an unexploded cluster bomblet. I stepped over it, careful not to disturb its metallic wings.

We made it to the dirt road leading to the outpost. Sergeant Simon pointed at Wallid and I, then to the outpost.
With Wallid in the lead, the two of us cautiously advanced towards the outpost, keeping an eye out for mines. There were unexploded cluster bomblets everywhere, interspaced by the small craters from the exploded ones. The total reek of gasoline was making me queasy. The outpost itself had taken a serious pounding.

The two of us cautiously entered what was left of the outpost and looked around. Definitely deserted and very likely booby-trapped. Wallid motioned towards the entrance. We made our way back up to the road to join the others.

I figured that the Palestinians pulled back to make their stand at Beufort. Certainly a good place for one, sheer cliffs on one side and a heavily mined and fortified approach on the other side. The sheer cliffs would seem impossible to scale by any significant force. Or so they thought...

We checked out a few other positions near the fort and found that they were also abandoned. The first peak of dawn signaled that it was time to head back and report what we saw.

While most of the Palestinians cut and ran when the Israelis attached, 300 hundred retreated into the castle where it took the Israelis 7 hours of close combat to root them out. Beufort was the only real fight that the Palestinians put up as the Israeli army tore through the their defenses, reaching the outskirts of Beirut in nine days. The Syrians did even worse considering they had a real army and air force, with their armored forces in the Beka'a Valley being obliterated and their air force losing 86 planes.

 
Chapter 8: Men with Boots

Men with boots is an old Latin American term. The peasants were either barefoot or wore sandals. Boots were for the rich and for the dictator’s army. Boots became the symbol of oppression to these people as the men with boots exploited, arrested, and murdered all in the name of El Presidente. In the Muslim villages we occupied we were the men with boots. At the checkpoints we manned we were the men with boots. We intimidated, arrested, and tortured. Then again every militia in Lebanon did the same, and some far worse than we.

Still I am haunted by the fact that I was one of the men with boots. Even if one doesn’t actively torture, taking part in the arrests makes one part of the system. Of course it didn’t bother me at the time, or more likely I didn’t let myself feel. Other than returning their hate with my hate and contempt...

Hasbaiya: August 1982

     Was a Palestinian stronghold just on the other side of the UN Zone, now it was jointly occupied by the SLA and the Israelis. We drove up to the Chehab Palace, where we would be based for the next week. The palace dated back to the Middle Ages and was rather run down and certainly it felt rather optimistic to call the place a palace. The Palace also served as the prison and the office of the military governor.

Between us and the Israelis, there were two dozen men to occupy what was a fair sized town. If the whole population turned on us, we’d be dead in a minute. I guess the only thing that kept them from doing it was that the Israelis would level the place and the SLA slaughter anybody surviving the leveling. Certainly it wasn’t our enlightened administration.

An Israeli Captain acted as the military governor and held court every day. A rather post-modern rendition of some Medieval Lord dispensing favors and rendering judgment on his serfs. Every morning the local leaders, as well as the families of the men we arrested the day before, lined up to see the governor. Myself and an Israeli soldier would keep a wary eye on them. A few couldn’t hide their anger. Most would force a most profoundly insincere smile on their face. The families looked concerned and scared.

The doors would open and the local leaders wee escorted in. The governor would hear their petitions and hand them his decrees to pass on to the towns population.  They would leave, trying to pass off to the population that they had any real say in how the town was run. I can only imagine the BS they would spew. Something on the line of “If you think this is bad, you should see what we talked him out of.”

The local leaders would shuffle off and then the families would be let in to plead for the release of their family member or at least to be allowed to see them. Seeing them was occasionally allowed. As for release, only if the Israelis were totally convinced that the person had no involvement with the PLO or any other organization on the Israeli shit list.

remember not feeling any real sympathy, figuring they were fucking terrorists so what did they expect? As for the families, I pegged them as terrorist sympathizers. Sympathy came much later. As the memories started to haunt me.

In the afternoon I would be either assigned to patrolling the town or kicking in doors. Four of us would patrol the souk and if looks could kill we would’ve been vaporized on the spot. The silent hostility was indescribable. My muscles were taunt as I waited for that knife to be driven into my back or run across my throat. It never happened but it always felt like it could at any moment while we moved through that crowded souk. Certainly I had no illusions about what would happen to any one venturing alone into this town.

Occasionally we would get wind of some suspected terrorist or arms cache and we would go out to kick in somebody’s door, rip their place apart, then haul them in for questioning. A couple of guys would watch the windows and back door, if there was one. Then the rest of the squad would kick in the door, haul out the occupants, flex cuff any males over the age of puberty, then rip the place apart looking for weapons or explosives. Most of the time we’d find nothing, but we’d still drag somebody off for questioning. Any young male was sure to be hauled in.

When I think about it, I’m sure our informants were either out to settle an old score with the suspect, or were a terrorist themselves and merely trying to draw attention away from them. Certainly didn’t think about it back then. In any case we’d drag the suspects back to the Palace and toss them into a cell. The interrogators like to leave the new prisoner alone the first night to let the anticipatory dread set it, imaginations running wild as they remembered all the horror stories they’d ever heard. Everybody knew you didn’t want to be a prisoner of the other side. And now they were.  Not a pleasant prospect, you don’t have to take my word on that, just ask Amnesty International.

The interrogators like to pick random prisoners at random times, so the prisoner never knew when their time would come and never could relax. The interrogators used all the tools of the trade; good cop/bad cop, threats, sensory deprivation, mock executions, and of course torture. For that, the instrument of choice was the cattle prod, though boots and fists were popular too.

Every militia did it, even though it has got to be the most useless way of getting any real information known to man. All anyone gets is whatever the prisoner thinks the interrogator wants. They’ll turn in their grandmother if they think it will make the pain stop. I’m convinced that most interrogators know that, but still do it out of hatred or plain power-tripping sadism.

Frankly I think taking the prisoner to a bar and getting him good and drunk would be a far more effective means of extracting information. You’d probably make a friend in the process.

On one level I feel guilty about my involvement in the arrests, but on the other hand there was squat I could do about it. I know the excuse of just following orders was ruled invalid at Nuremberg, but really there isn’t anything an enlisted man can do in these circumstances.

And as I said, I actually felt that it was all justifiable at that time. Come to think of it, I’m sure the interrogators thought so too. I don’t think any of these guys would admit, even to themselves, that they were sadistic assholes. But as they say, payback is a motherfucker.

Chapter Nine: Will the Real Traitors and Collaborators Please Stand Up

Just gotta love the hypocrisy that is endemic in Lebanon. During its entire history SLA members were referred to as traitors and Zionist collaborators by both its enemies and the Lebanese government itself. I find this amusing, especially from that pack of Syrian puppets that passes for a government in Lebanon. Syria itself occupied the country with a peak strength of 40,000 men until 2005, as well as funded most of the anti-West militias. Since Syria always felt that Lebanon as one of its national provinces, it certainly was not acting in Lebanon’s best interest. And it wasn’t the only country stirring the pot.

The Hezbollah, for example certainly is funded and in many ways controlled by Iran. Hell, about a third of their standing military force are Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen.  So I would certainly tar them as Iranian collaborators. I’d add traitor as establishing an Fundamentalist Islamic Iranian puppet government is certainly not in the best interest of Lebanon and its non-Shiia populace.

But as they say, history is written by the winners, take World War II for example, where Goring is a war criminal but Bomber Harris and Curtis LeMay are heroes even though Allied bombing killed vastly more civilians than German bombing, just ask the people of Dresden and Hiroshima. And so it was for the SLA, with those who failed to escape to Israel being tried as collaborators. Twenty-one death sentences were handed out for war crimes by Lebanese Military Tribunals, with everyone else getting varying degrees of jail time.

Meanwhile those on the winning side who’s guilt is equal or greater are rewarded. For example. Wallid Jumblat is one of the worse war criminals in the country. His PSP Militia overran sixty Maronite villages and killed thousands of civilians. He was rewarded with a Cabinet Post.

I am certainly not trying to excuse or justify the SLA’s behaviour for it certainly was egregious in the extreme, especially in regards to the notorious Khiam Detention Center, a pit of suffering if there was ever one. All I’m saying is that everybody’s shit stank in that country and there were no good guys, only bad guys. Nobody was right. Everybody was wrong. So belly up to the bar and pick your poison.

Chapter Ten: Will the Real Damned Mercenaries Please Stand Up

As for mercenaries, it is interesting how one side’s foreign volunteers where viewed as mercenaries by the other. The term has become a pejorative, for example the SLA’s enemies liked the classify the entire SLA as mercenaries in the pay of the Zionists.

Kind of reminds me of the propaganda from the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, where the Fascist used mercenaries, but the Republicans only used foreign volunteers.  And the difference is...

No one wants to admit they used mercenaries, but they were sure proud of their foreign volunteers. There was a time when mercenary was an honorable term, now there is a criminal connotation to the term. Mercenaries are not offered protection under the Geneva Convention, but we didn’t lose much sleep over that as nobody paid any attention to the Geneva Convention in Lebanon in the first place, though Israel liked to pretend it did.

Well, I have no problem viewing myself as a mercenary because that’s what I was. Though very few people know of that chapter of my life and, given the rather low regard that mercenaries are held in, I’d be better accepted as a drug dealer. Given that, it further reinforces the fact that those of us who run off to in fight somebody else’s war have serious issues. At least a drug dealer has the motivation of easy money. What is ours?

Unless you’re one of the few that have the elite forces background required to get a gig as one of the US-funded Military Contractors in Iraq, the money totally sucks. As for the living and fighting conditions, well to call them piss-poor is being charitable. Poor housing, poor food, and poor weapons with no real training to use them.

Your average mercenary gig leave you pretty well on your own military skills-wise. The training initially provided the SLA’s foreign volunteers consisted of learning to clean your FN and firing off a magazine. After that you picked up what you could, though later we received some cursory street fighting training. My ‘advanced’ medical training consisted of looking over the shoulder of an Israel medic while he worked on the sick and wounded in the ER.

Pretty scary. As a said before the only reason we survived was that the Palestinians were no better trained than we. Luck of course played a big roll. This lack of everything was a cause of major frustration and I envied the Israeli soldiers as they were in a real army, with proper equipment, training, and leadership. It made not getting into the Legion all the more disappointing.

You also won’t find the state of the art medical support found in a real army. No properly trained and equipped medics, no helicopter medivac, and no decent hospitals. Sometimes I would wonder what would be worse, being killed or being maimed. Anybody being maimed was truly fucked as there was no disability pension or VA long-term care hospitals. Life as an unpitied cripple, for after all you brought on yourself, now what a joy that would be. And if you manage to live long enough to be too old for this shit? Then what? Gypsy trigger pullers have no pension plan.

So as a lifestyle, it was hardly conducive to long life, security, prosperity, and certainly not to a positive self-esteem.

Am I pathetic or what?

The damned bravado I used to delude myself that being a mercenary was cool, as well as to hide from myself that I was unfit for service in any real army. Hell, unfit for life in general due to a horrific upbringing. A quarter of a century later I still struggle with it all.

Though I shouldn’t so damn hard on myself. I am sane, not in prison, not an alcoholic or junkie  not living under some bridge. I have a good woman in my life, a real job, and even a few friends. So I guess I’m doing ok. Certainly better than those mercenaries who went off to find another damn war. I mean how pathetic is that. Like life in some African rebel group is going to be any better than the SLA?

So I guess I am doing ok as whatever I was trying to find or prove by going to Lebanon I either found, proved, or figured out that either I didn’t need it, or it was just plain pointless to look there for it. So anyone signing up for yet another war is still looking in all the wrong places for whatever they think they need. That is if they think about it at all.

The first time can certainly be excused. But they second time? One is hardly the naive youth looking for an ‘action adventure career’. Action yes. Adventure yes, though certainly not ‘gee we’re having fun’ adventure. You’re one sick puppy if you find this shit fun. Joining a real army as a private and retiring a warrant officer with a good pension is a career. Being a gypsy trigger puller for third world wages and all the spam and rice you can eat is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a career.

Of course ideology can be a strong motivator, it was one of mine, though not as strong as it was for others. In some it can be so strong that they would take up arms for their country’s enemy in order to fight what they consider a far greater enemy. Look at the tens of thousands of French, Dutch, Belgians, Scandinavians, etc. who joined the Waffen SS to fight Communism. And fight they did, as well as or better than the Germans themselves.

I often wonder how blinded by ideology one needed to be to be so disconnected by the fact one was fighting for the country that invaded and occupied your own. Even more for those who signed up when Germany was obviously losing, knowing that they would be likely shot or hung if they survived Germany’s defeat. I’m sure a psychologist would have a field day with these ones.

Certainly many mercenaries seem to be drawn to lost causes: Republican Spain, the Waffen SS, Biafra, Rhodesia, the SLA, the Contras, etc.  It would be interesting to be able to figure out why. Is it that the ideology of the losers are more attractive to the losers signing up. Is it that the losing side is more likely to be recruiting mercenaries. Or is it simply hindsight that identifies then as losing causes?

Regardless of the reason, lost causes seemed to be our lot in life. We’re damned mercenaries and damned to be mercenaries.

So lets toast St. Anthony of Padua patron saint of lost causes and the losers who fight for them. “Viva le morte, viva la guerre, viva le sacre mercenaire....”

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