Suddenly he was flying, or more accurately hurtling through the air, over the very heads that he had just been smiling down on. Though he was enveloped by clouds that billowed grey and soft, he felt no sense of peace, as his breath had been sucked from his lungs and he was choking and on fire; an angel cast down from heaven. Other objects whistled by him in this celestial pollution — body parts and glass; concrete and steel reinforcing rods; boots and vehicle parts; all seeking new converts to their miraculous liberation. The maelstrom around Sean shrieked with the flight of unseen banshees.
Then, with an unceremonious thump, he was thrown to the earth like litter from a speeding car, and left to stare upwards at a heaven obscured by tons of ferroconcrete dust, while all around him objects, some horribly recognizable and others mercifully indescribable, fell from the sky like a hellish plague. He was alive.
This was where Sean would awaken, just as he had awakened in the makeshift Battalion Aid Station a day later, bewildered at the sudden shift in reality, but largely unhurt. He would not believe the corpsmen who insisted the entire battalion command post was simply no more, and grew combative when they told him that two hundred and forty-one of his fellow marines had died in the carnage of the truck bombing. He had known that this could not be true, as he was still living — could not be true. He could not have survived such a catastrophe.
Then a lieutenant with an engineering degree had tried to explain it to him, saying that it was likely the very explosion that had doomed so many within the building had lofted him along on a cushion of hot gases, and set him down with surprising gentleness as those same gases dissipated into the unconfined atmosphere. “A miracle, nonetheless,” the well-meaning officer had assured him. “Bullshit, sir,” Sean had replied courteously.
The following day he had been released for duty. Still angry over the inexplicable pessimism of his normally gung-ho fellow marines, he strode directly to the site of the command post. It wasn’t there.
Sean had stared in incomprehension, turning this way and that in an attempt to get his bearings. Somehow he had become disoriented and had arrived at the wrong location. It’s concussion, he had assured himself. That was the only possible explanation for his sudden loss of direction within the limited confines of his unit’s area of operations. Had he not spent the last five months of his life dodging Shiite sniper bullets, Druze artillery rounds, and the occasional Syrian-made rocket right here in the Corps’ stinking little piece of Beirut?
A corporal had walked towards him dragging a poncho liner full of something and dropped it heavily at his feet. “Pull your head out of your butt, Marine, and get this over to the morgue.” Sean had stared back at the NCO blankly. “And when you’re done, double-time back here... there’s still a lot to clean up.” He had hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the tons of rubble behind him. Only then did Sean allow himself to see and recognize.
The administration building that the Beirut Airport had given over to the marines for their command post lay in the grave that the basement had provided, floor upon floor having collapsed in on itself after the Iranian Revolutionary Guardsman had driven his twelve thousand pounds of explosives into the lobby and detonated them. Sean had seen then... and believed. Then the poncho liner had fallen open.
When Sean climbed out of bed, he felt sore and tired, as if he had relived the experience his dream commemorated. Even so, the excitement the police sergeant’s warning had engendered remained, and he felt unaccustomedly cheerful and optimistic. The possibility of a threat to his life had somehow reconnected him to the living world, awakened him as if from a deep, deep slumber. As he poured milk over his cereal and gazed out his kitchen window, he could see children returning from school, chattering like jays and darting this way and that over the sidewalk, the energy of youth rendering them unable to walk the sad straight line of adults, and for the first time in many, many years, he thought of Ibrahim.
In the days following the bombing, Sean had found himself more and more frequently manning Combat Post 69. This was directly due to the loss of personnel, and had the bombing not happened, he would have complained bitterly at such long pulls of hazardous duty. CP 69 was not sentry duty. CP 69 was where you provided target practice for the Shiite militia in “Hooterville,” a slum otherwise known to its inhabitants as Hay-Es-Salaam. It was rumored that in the early days of the Marines’ peacekeeping mission, when all had been well betwixt the peacekeepers and the Muslims, two lovely Lebanese girls had made a habit of undressing in front of their window, which faced the Americans’ outpost. Hence the name Hooterville. Sean suspected this had been wishful thinking on the part of some lonely marines, as the Muslim girls were known to be notoriously, and disappointingly, strait-laced. Nonetheless, the name stuck.
But in the months of August and September, relations between the Marines and all the factions involved in the Lebanese Civil War deteriorated rapidly and violently, and CP 69 had become an extremely hot spot. They were routinely shot at and rocketed from every quarter. Infuriatingly, the rules of engagement laid down from on high made it nearly impossible for the beleaguered troops to properly defend themselves. After the bombing, the marines, and Sean, found ways.
One of the rules that Sean and the other surviving members of his company quickly dispensed with was the prohibition on returning fire at a combatant who could not be clearly seen actively firing at them. As the enemy usually chose to shoot from the upper windows of the bombed-out buildings that looked down on CP 69, and then ducked back inside, this had always been extremely impractical. Now, they always “saw” the militiaman, and after chasing him away from the window with a hail of bullets, they would follow up with a few carefully placed grenades. This had the effect of silencing that particular room, and the marines could rest assured that at least one, if not more, of the militiamen would fail to answer roll call the following morning.
After several days of this, there was a dramatic lessening of incoming fire. From several thousand rounds of small-arms fire a day, and hundreds of rocket-propelled grenades and frequent mortar barrages, they were faced with what, as seen in comparison, was a desultory few hundred rounds and only the occasional grenade. The Shiite militiamen seemed to be thinking things over.
It was during this lull that Sean and his newly constituted squad discovered Ibrahim. Sean first saw him at the Lebanese army checkpoint located across the street from CP 69. He appeared to be entertaining the soldiers with some kind of story that involved episodes of break dancing, and the government troops were enjoying the show immensely. These soldiers were ostensibly the Americans’ allies in their failing mission to keep the peace between all the warring factions in their country. However, experience had taught the marines that their commitment to that mission varied wildly, and appeared to be based on the quality of the opposition they faced. When they fought, they fought ferociously, but often they would stay their hand for reasons known only to them, much to the marines’ consternation.