Soul of a Seal

Soul of a SEAL
Bellaire author Chuck Pfarrer offers special ops war stories

SEAL team commander Chuck Pfarrer had just settled into sleep the morning of October 23, 1983 after an all-night reconnaissance patrol in West Beirut when the shock wave of a massive explosion shook him and his men from their bunks. Within hours, he was helping dig the bodies of 243 American Marines out of the rubble of a massive truck bomb attack on their headquarters.
At the time, Pfarrer was a 26-year-old lieutenant and an assault element commander with the ultra-secret SEAL Team 6 -- Navy commandos who infiltrate enemy territory by sea or air on special operations. In Lebanon, he and his weary squad had passed up breakfast at the Marine Headquarters at Beirut International Airport that morning and were sleeping in an underground bunker 500 yards away at the time of the blast. A bomb carrying six tons of explosives had smashed through a gate, igniting the biggest terrorist attack in U.S. history prior to 9/11. “I was told by the FBI that it was the largest non-nuclear explosion in the history of warfare,“ he recalls.
Flash-forward 20 years and Pfarrer is promoting a new book on his experiences in the SEALs during the ‘80s, entitled “Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL.“ A resident of Bellaire, Pfarrer will read from his book and sign copies this Thursday, Jan. 22 at 7:30 p.m. at Horizon Books in Traverse City.

A WARRIOR‘S LIFE
“The thing about the SEALS is you sort of have to surrender your self to get through BUD/S,“ Pfarrer says, referring to the brutal Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training which every commando must endure. Drop-out rates during the 24-week course average 60-to-90% as the result of exercises which include running 15 miles a day or more, locking arms for hours in icy surf and pounding out hundreds of push-ups -- sometimes without sleeping for days at a time. Out of 500 volunteers, only 100 may be selected for BUD/S training, and only 0-20 might make it through. “There have been classes, in fact, from which no one graduated,“ he writes. “No one graduated because everybody quit.“
Pfarrer, who stands over six-foot-tall and looks like he could still bench-press a telephone pole, exudes a sense of easy cameraderie, punctuated with devil-may-care insights into the paramilitary side of global politics.
“It‘s a warrior‘s life,“ he says of his SEAL years. “There‘s not a single person I know who went through SEAL training who didn‘t become a wiser, calmer person.“ He says his former teammates ironically tend to be “peaceniks“ today, with a fierce interest in protecting the environment of the sea.

EYE FOR DETAILS
In taut prose with an eye for edgey details, Pfarrer‘s book leads the reader through the hell of SEAL training. The story is aided by the fact that Pfarrer‘s post-SEAL career is that of a screenwriter whose credits include the films “Red Planet,“ “Hard Target,“ “Virus,“ “Darkman,“ “The Jackal“ and “Navy SEALS,“ among others. His writing background distinguishes “Warrior Soul“ from the macho bombast found in other SEAL genre books. It‘s a page-turner which captures a SEAL commando‘s mindset with a cinematic sense of drama and carefully-honed details.
The book opens, for instance, with Pfarrer jumping out of the tail section of an American Airlines 727 commercial flight in heavy rain and wind. One learns the hazards of having your spine snap or having your hips pop out of your pelvis from such a feat in the wash of the jet‘s engine. You learn that SEALs may jump out of commercial jets flying over hostile territory -- Cuba, Libya, Syria -- because the enemy isn‘t expecting that sort of “D. B. Cooper“ infiltration. SEALs pack up to 150 lbs. of equipment and jump from heights of 35,000 feet on oxygen, drifting 20 miles to their targets, or from as low as 2,000 feet.
Pfarrer notes that his last jump with the SEALs -- one of 300 -- ended with his parachute failing to open at 500 feet, falling at 176 mph on his last night in the service. If you want to learn how he survived the jump, check out the book.

WAR STORIES
The SEALs (an acronym representing the “sea, air and land“ elements of Navy special warfare) grew out of the frogman teams of World War II, planting explosives on the hulls of enemy ships, conducting reconnaissance or clearing invasion sites of obstacles. “Naval speical warfare is the smallest and most elite special operations force in the United States military,“ Pfarrer says. Fewer than 10,000 SEALs have served since WWII -- an outfit smaller than the Hells Angels.
Pfarrer says he was a long-haired, pot-smoking surfer during his youth when his Navy officer father sent him to a military academy to shape up. After a stint dabbling at screenwriting and considering a career in psychology, he decided to follow in his naval family‘s footsteps and enlisted with the aim of seeing the world.
Pfarrer‘s book captures the geopolitical *zeitgeist* of the ‘80s, a time when communism still had currency as a threat to the United States. His details on military hardware and Cold War maneuvering rival those of a Tom Clancy novel. On his first mission as a SEAL ensign, for instance, his team was deployed to retrieve the booster section of a Trident ballistic missile that had been fired from a nuclear submarine. With a Russian spy trawler closing in, Pfarrer‘s team was forced to destroy the booster with C-4 explosive to avoid its capture.
Another early assignment was aiding the Contra counter-rebels from a base in Honduras in the aftermath of the revolution in Nicaragua. Cut off in a rubber raft on a recon mission with a Nicaraguan gunboat chasing his team, Pfarrer and his men narrowly escaped over a shoal the boat couldn‘t navigate.

NO SURRENDER
Pfarrer says that special ops commandos know that death is often the price of failure in such a situation.
“If you‘re a downed pilot, you may be captured and held because you have valuable information the enemy can use,“ he notes. “But if you‘re in special ops, you‘re going to get killed. That‘s why we pick the time and place of our combat. We have to consider what part of the mission might involve ‘Alamo‘ time. What if we get cut off and surrounded? If they capture you, they kill you -- there may even be a bounty on your heads.“
Thus, SEAL operations are planned with exquisite care to avoid disasters such as the all-service attempt to free 53 American hostages from Iran in 1980 in which several U.S. helicopters and a C-130 plane collided in the desert, killing eight would-be rescuers. In the wake of that disaster, SEALs learned how to “assemble a mission backwards“ from successful completion to the consideration of everything that could go wrong, every step of the way.
“Special operations forces are kept on a very tight leash, but when we‘re sent out the door on a mission, we‘re allowed the greatest amount of improvisation,“ Pfarrer notes.

KNOW THE ENEMY
Lest one think that the SEALs are simply physical brutes with serrated knives, Pfarrer notes that there‘s a strong intellectual aspect to the service which involves getting to know hostile philosophies. SEALs study political warfare through the writings of Osama bin Laden, “Das Kapital“ by Karl Marx, the guerrilla manuals of Che Guevera and Mao Tse-Tung, the military strategy of North Vietnam‘s brilliant General Vo Nguyen Giap, Catholic revolution theology, and the Koran, among other texts. They study terrorist organizations, ranging from Germany‘s Bader Meinhof gang to Peru‘s Shining Path. They also review classic commando operations, such as the WWII attack on Germany‘s heavy-water plant by Norweigian partisans -- an event which denied the Nazi‘s an atomic bomb. There are courses in navigation, orienteering, psychological warfare and military law in addition to learning how to lay an ambush or booby trap a ship.
“What you end up with is a Ph.D. in special operations,“ he says, noting that many SEALs have already completed college, including master‘s degrees. “It‘s not like you can go from guys working at McDonald‘s to the SEALs -- it‘s a calling.“

IN THE ‘ROOT
Pfarrer‘s toughest assignment was in Beirut in the early ‘80s, when the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit was sent into a strange “half-war,“ dodging sniper fire on a 24/7 basis in the heart of a religious civil war.
“To be honest, to this day I have no goddamn idea what the United States of America was doing in Lebanon,“ he writes. “It was absolute folly to think for even an instant that we would somehow do any good.“
When the dust had settled in the suicide bomb attack in Beirut, the Marines had lost more men than in the Vietnamese battle of Khe Sahn. “When we came home from Lebanon, we were stunned that no one here seemed to know what had been going on over there and how much fighting we did.“
It was the beginning of America‘s nightmarish dance with Mideastern terrorism and Pfarrer was one of the first in line. His next big mission was intercepting the Palestinian hijackers of the Achille Lauro cruise ship in the Mediterranean, an event which involved an armed showdown with Italian troops at an airport in Sicily.

MOVING ON
After leaving the SEALs, Pfarrer decided to attend medical school, but his life took an unexpected turn towards Hollywood after a forgotten screenplay he‘d co-written was optioned for a film. Hoping to raise funds for college, he wrote the script for “Navy SEALs,“ which became a hit. A string of screenplays followed as a new career door opened.
“The weirdest thing is it doesn‘t get any easier, and I‘ve written scripts for seven movies so far,“ he says of screenwriting.
He moved from California to Bellaire after meeting his wife, Stacey, who spent 40 summers with her family on Torch Lake. A few seasonal visits turned into a year-‘round residency.
Today, Pfarrer is at work on a number of promising screenplays, including the story of a SEAL team sent to retrieve a downed Aurora spy plane in Afghanistan as well as a version of “High Noon“ set in the emerald mines of Colombia.
What prompted his “Warrior Soul“ book, written over a seven-month period? As the conversation evolves, Pfarrer notes that it was the discovery that he had colon cancer three years ago that led him to resurrect the sort of memories which many of his former teammates had “dropped concrete on for 20 years.“
Although he‘s currently in remission, the threat of cancer -- and the 30% chance he was given for survival -- left Pfarrer in a tender, thoughtful mood.
“I was going to write a book called ‘How to Fight Cancer Like a Navy SEAL‘, but Lance Armstrong had already done that,“ he says. “So my publisher, Random House, said to just write the memoir of a SEAL. It really made me write this as well as I could.“

SIDEBAR
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Some SEAL thoughts on current events from Chuck Pfarrer:

On Iraq:
“The situtation in Lebanon 20 years ago is analogous to Iraq today with our troops facing roadside bombs and snipers.
“Lebanon was a catastrophe and the nation is still a basket case occupied by the Syrians. I think that in this case we‘ll eventually pull out of Iraq as well... it‘s not going to be an unalloyed success for us.
... We have 140,000 combat troops on the ground and one or two soldiers are dying each day. (Military philosopher) Clausewitz calls that sort of harassment the ‘friction of war,‘ but we know what it does to morale. We know the effect that has on a soldier -- after a year, you‘re as tight as a banjo string.“

On special ops vs. traditional military:
“SEALs can take anything, but they can‘t hold it for long. You‘re always going to need troops on the ground.
“It takes a couple of million dollars to train one Navy SEAL...The damage we inflict on an enemy is 100 or 1,000 times what‘s inflicted on us. We‘re a weapons system.
“It‘s not PC to day, but it‘s the truth -- we‘re fighting an enemy that wants to put us back 1,000 years -- they have no qualms about killing women and children. The battle is like McWorld versus Jihad.“

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