Sensing increasing instability and a fearing a breakdown of social institutions, my father had his savings withdrawn in cash from the Bank of Lebanon. He hid the money in our beds at home. His plan was to use it to move us all to America and start a business if the need arose. That would have been in line with what happened to most persecuted Christians in other parts of the Arab world. When things get tough, leave. It is something the spread of Islam has relied on for centuries.
One cold, windy November night in 1975, as winter began taking hold on Marjayoun, there were no customers at the restaurant. Papa closed early, sent his employees home, and walked to our house fifteen yards up the hill behind the restaurant. In anticipation of his arrival my mother had already set the table in the family room and turned up the kerosene heater. The heaters used in Lebanese homes came in a variety of shapes and sizes, with a round metal reservoir for kerosene attached to the heater by a metal feeder tube. A knob on the tube allowed one to adjust the flow of kerosene much as a nurse controls the drip for an IV in a hospital. The kerosene simply dripped inside the stove and burned with a yellow-orange flame on the bottom of the heater. A metal chimney pipe about six inches in diameter went from the stove up through the ceiling. The stove usually sat in the middle of the room. In southern Lebanon, this is what passed for “central heating."
Because we didn’t have central heating as most Americans know it, the family room became the center of our lives in winter. It served as the bedroom, dining room, living room, breakfast nook, and, since it was the room with the TV, the entertainment room.
My parents followed a nightly ritual. Since it was winter, and the heater would go out at night, they tucked me in between two wool blankets covered by a big heavy comforter and another wool blanket over that. They sat one on each side, and we said our prayers, thanking God for that day’s blessings. I thanked God for things that happened to me at school, for my friends, for my parents, for our food, and for my health. Then they sang me a lullaby. I could smell Mama’s perfume on her neck as I snuggled and gave her little kisses that made her hold me tighter. Her hair tickled my face as she moved, and I could hear the smile in her voice. I could feel Papa’s big fingers running through my hair and the stubble on his cheek as he gently kissed me. Our nightly ritual closed with their telling me, “We love you higher than the skies, deeper than the oceans, and bigger than the whole wide world."
I felt no greater love could ever exist.
My parents then went into the family room, where they sat sipping arak, the traditional Lebanese liquor, and quietly discussing the restaurant business and the events of the day. An angry wind whistled through the grapevines outside my window. The TV signal faded in and out as the antenna on the roof swayed back and forth. For their evening snack, my father laid paper-thin pita on top of the kerosene heater, filling the room with the smell of toasted bread. The electricity would blink out for a few seconds now and then because of the high winds. As the room would go from light to pitch black, all you could see were little flickering lights on the ceiling from the design on the kerosene heater. Instead of being frightening, it added a cozy flair to the smell of toasted bread, the fragrance of freshly cut herbs, and the anisette aroma of the arak. All was right in the world, and I was becoming drowsy, about to drop off to sleep to the sound of my parents' voices. Their conversation went from how delicious our new batch of olives was, to the problem with the old patisserie refrigerator, to the new chandeliers my father was thinking about buying for the restaurant this coming spring as a part of the new decor he had in mind.
Suddenly, a very loud boom with a bright light shook our house as if lightning had struck our front yard. My parents jumped up in shock. Papa rushed through the living room and out the front door, with my mother right behind him, to see what had happened. He went to the edge of our long balcony and stood there, peering out in the darkness. He couldn’t see anything, but the smell of explosives and burning was strong. Mama begged him to come back inside, but he refused to listen. Suddenly there was the muffled sound of multiple rockets being launched in the distance. Mama instinctively grabbed Papa by his shoulder, and they both ran toward the door.
They were barely inside the door when a rocket hit the balcony exactly where they had been standing. The force of the explosion picked both of them up off the floor and threw them across the room. Many more rockets exploded in quick succession in and around our house.
One came through my bedroom window. A deafening noise followed by fire, heat, and blinding light erupted in the bedroom. It was as if the gates of hell had opened wide and I was falling into the abyss of fire.
The explosion blew me out of my bed and into the corner. The blast was so loud and the flash so bright that I thought I’d never hear or see again. As my bedroom disintegrated around me, my mind was flooded with television images of explosions and destruction in Beirut and the rest of Lebanon. I remember thinking, “Tonight is Marjayoun’s turn.” This was a horrifying realization for a ten-year-old. I woke up from the dream of a perfect childhood and found myself in a hellish nightmare.
I was pinned in place, trapped under rocks and cinder blocks from a wall that had been knocked down by the explosion. I felt the iron grillwork of the window lying directly over my body, which was under the rocks. From where I lay on the floor, I could see fires burning around the room, including on the bed where I had been sleeping. But the air was filled with smoke and dust, and so it was mostly dark.
I couldn’t feel my right arm or move the fingers of my right hand. I could move my left arm, which I had raised to protect my face from the explosion, but when I moved it, I felt as if I were in a shower, with hot water pouring over me.
My mind dissolved in unfocused panic. I screamed, and kept screaming for my mother, but I couldn’t hear my own screams. The blast had numbed my ears. At first, all I could hear was a constant ringing, so loud it was painful. Like in a dream, slowly I began to hear myself screaming, as if the voice were coming from someone else far away, getting closer and closer. Then it was there—my own voice screaming, “Mama! Mama!” I didn’t know if anyone could hear me. I kept wondering, “Who is pouring hot water over me?"
Finally, after what seemed an eternity, I heard my parents calling my name. They sounded frantic. I could hear Mama screaming: “God! Please. Oh God, please.” They kept yelling my name, asking where I was. I could only vaguely hear them. I tried to yell loudly enough for them to hear me, but I was exhausted. Half of my bedroom wall was sitting on top of my chest. I gathered all the breath I could and screamed, “Come help me. I can’t move."
I don’t know how long it took for my parents to get to me. It was very dark except for the flicker of flames burning in the rubble. We called out to each other until they located me in the corner of my bedroom. When Mama found me, she kept saying, “Stay put. Don’t try to move.” She called to Papa that she had found me. I could hear him saying, “I can’t hear. I can’t hear. I can’t hear anything."
A long time went by as I lay there helpless in the darkness while Papa and Mama struggled to dig me from the rubble. Their voices were fading in and out, and sometimes I felt as if I were floating. It was as if I were there but not there at the same time. I had an unbearable taste in my mouth. I thought that it was probably from the hot, muddy water that I still felt pouring over me. It was in my eyes and in my nose. Sometimes I swallowed a big gulp of it, and it made me want to throw up. I think the nausea helped to keep me awake. My parents kept reassuring me, “You’re okay. Everything is going to be okay.” It was comforting to hear them say that, but I was still terrified.
When they finally succeeded in removing me from the rubble, my mother took my legs and my father lifted me from under my arms. They had to climb over more rubble to carry me out of the room. I screamed when I felt something poke into my back. They strained to lift me up higher. My father was seventy and my mother was sixty-five, and it was very difficult for them to move me, but they had to hurry because we
had to get to a safe place before more rockets came.
They carried me to the dining room because it was the most secure room in the house, located in the center and somewhat protected by the surrounding rooms. While my father laid me on the cold floor, neighbors gathered around.
I was frightened by a sudden brightness shining in my eyes again like the bomb flash, followed immediately by my mother’s screams. I was even more frightened when I blinked and the brightness in my eyes turned from white to red. I thought the explosions were starting again, but the sudden light came from Papa’s flashlight, and Mama’s screams came from what that light revealed. My head and neck were covered in blood. My hair was matted with it. Papa’s eardrums were torn, but his vision was intact. As he raised my arm searching for my injuries, blood gushed out of a gash in my forearm. One piece of shrapnel had entered my arm, and another had cut into my wrist. Blood spurted out of my wrist about six inches into the air. It wouldn’t stop.
We had nothing resembling a first-aid kit at home. Even if we had, I don’t know how they would have found it in the confusion and destruction. It was a miracle Papa found the flashlight. He went to the storage room and brought some kerosene to pour on my wound to make it stop bleeding. It was an old wartime remedy he had learned when the Turks occupied the country. I screamed as the liquid covered my ragged flesh. It felt cold and hot at the same time, and the fumes made the room smell worse. In the midst of their panic my parents did not think to put pressure on my upper arm to slow the bleeding. Even though the kerosene trick worked, my wounds desperately required medical attention.
We heard a soldier yelling nearby, checking to see whether anyone was critically injured and needed immediate transportation to the hospital. My father told him that I had been wounded but that he didn’t think the injury was critical. The soldier then said he would get help later, when the shelling subsided. My father thanked him and waited eagerly for things to settle down so help would come and get me to the hospital. I guess he figured it would be safer, both for us and for the soldiers who would transport me, to stay put for a while instead of driving to the hospital under a rain of bombs. So my father waited patiently.
As I lay on the floor with my head on my mother’s arm, I kept hearing her say that I was going to be all right. Someone had rolled fabric over my wrist to absorb as much blood as possible. I was getting very dizzy as the minutes passed. The rockets and artillery shells continued to fly back and forth between the Lebanese army outpost up the hill from our house and the Muslim position across the valley. Our neighbors had come up to what was left of our house, insisting on being with us. Everyone felt safer together, so we all huddled together on the floor behind the dining-room wall. I remember looking up at the sky and seeing balls of fire flying over us—there was no longer a roof over our heads. The sounds of explosions came so quickly that they reminded me of popping popcorn, except the pops were deafening. In the middle of it all, we lay helpless. I don’t know how we survived the night in the cold and wind in the broken shell of our home.
By seven the next morning, soldiers had begun walking down to our house from the military base up the hill. When they saw my injuries, they sent for someone to take me to the hospital. I was afraid to go to the hospital because my traumatic experiences of being in a hospital after a car accident a year earlier were still fresh in my mind. But around eight thirty in the morning we were rushed into the emergency room, which was full to overflowing. My father carried me in his arms. I was crying, both from pain and from my fear of doctors and hospitals. Mama held my hand as they laid me on a bed. The doctor took one look at my wound and his jaw dropped. He couldn’t believe that they were just now getting me to the hospital. He yelled at the nurses, who rushed to get scissors and the instruments needed to extract the shrapnel from my arm. He told my parents to hold me tight and not let me see what he was doing. I screamed as he cut my skin to the bone where the shrapnel was embedded. Without an adequate anesthetic, the pain was the worst thing I had ever felt in my life. Either the doctor thought there was no time to give me a general anesthetic, or he thought that dabbing some local painkiller on my arm would do the trick. It didn’t. He didn’t seem to hear my screaming as he worked to remove the jagged pieces of metal. Mama cried uncontrollably, as if she shared in the agony I was going through, as she held my head tightly against her neck. The only thing the doctors said to me was, “Another ten minutes and it will be over.” I think I heard this about five times every ten minutes. Finally I was so weak I couldn’t scream anymore, and I fainted.
I woke up later on a bed, with a needle in my hand and a bag of blood hanging over my head. The doctor had cleaned my arm and sewn it up. My parents were next to me. Mama brushed the hair from my forehead as Papa assured me that the worst had passed. He seemed to be talking a lot louder than usual. I was a bit relieved when he told me that the doctor had said I would be all right, but I cried and begged them to take me home immediately. I wanted to get away from that place. I was frightened whenever a nurse walked into the room to check the blood bag hanging over my head and connected to my arm because I had lost so much blood. I was afraid of anyone dressed in white.
The days in the hospital seemed endless. The doctors must have had me on some sort of painkiller, because I was always drowsy and slept a lot. Whenever I woke up, my mother was right there. She really did love me higher than the sky, and deeper than the ocean, and bigger than the whole wide world.
The destruction of our house was big news in town because we were the first victims of the war that had now come to southern Lebanon. Since my father was one of the most respected community leaders and spent much of his time at the hospital with me, my room was crowded with visitors coming to check on me and offer their condolences. From all the talk going on around me at the hospital we learned what had happened on that terrible November night.
The multiple explosions that had rained down on us were Katyusha rockets, launched from Elkhiam, the Muslim town across the valley. The Shia Muslims of Elkhiam were staunch Communists and allies of the PLO. We would come to know their Katyusha rockets well. The Palestinians and their leftist Muslim allies seemed to have an endless supply. Once primitive World War II-era rockets, these have developed over the years to become very effective in laying waste to large areas. Fired in rapid succession from multiple tubes on a single launcher, they carpet an area with high explosives in seconds, creating widespread devastation.
The first rocket the Muslims fired to check their aim that night hit its intended target, the army base up the hill behind our house. But the force of the rocket’s firing tilted the launcher down a fraction of an inch, so the rest of the rockets fell fifty yards short, landing in and around our house. It was luck for our town that the Lebanese army base above my house didn’t take the full brunt of the bombardment and was able to return fire. That was the only thing that prevented the combined forces of the PLO and the Muslims from overrunning Marjayoun that night. The Muslims' poor aim was good for Marjayoun, but bad for us. It changed the course of our family’s life and my future.
I spent the next few days in a fuzzy, semiconscious state. I wanted to get out of the hospital and away from the doctors and nurses. I would carry an intense fear of hospitals and people in white coats for many years to come. After I threatened to run away if they left me there, my parents talked with the doctor, and arrangements were made for me to sleep at home at night and come back to the hospital during the day so the staff could check my progress and change my bandages.
Leaving the hospital was a relief, but I would not have been so happy if I had known what kind of life awaited us. Half of our once beautiful home was gone, and what remained was severely damaged. The living-room and family-room walls had collapsed. Blood from my injury was splattered all over my bedroom—on the walls, on the carpet, on the twisted metal of my bed’s headboard. I had lost so much blood that it had dripped from the mattress onto the floor, covering an area half the size of the bed. The ed
ges of my mattress were burned from the fire that accompanied the blast. The only part of the mattress that wasn’t burned was the area soaked in my blood. It was a miracle that I was still alive. As we surveyed the house, we realized that my father would have been killed if my mother hadn’t forced him to come back inside with her. Yet if they hadn’t gone outside in the first place to check out what had happened, both of them would probably have been killed in the room with the heater. The table where they had been sitting was buried under rubble. For us to have survived at all could mean only one thing: there was some higher power out there that didn’t want us to die yet. That was all my young mind could comprehend. The next seven years would be miserable, the days endless, and the fear of losing my life more real than the air I breathed.
To a ten-year-old, all this—the civil war and the attack against us— was bewildering. Just as people asked “Why do they hate us?” after 9/11, one evening I asked my father, “Why did they do this to us?” He took a long breath and paused, deeply concerned about what he was about to say. “The Muslims bombed us because we are Christians. They want us dead because they hate us.” This hate was not because we had armies in the Middle East or because we supported Israel or for any of the reasons people easily turn to today. It was because we were Christians, infidels.
As a child, I was just too young to understand all the political implications, but I understood one thing: people wanted to kill me simply because I was a Christian. As I grew older I would discover more by watching television, and seeing the massacres, kidnappings, suicide bombings, and destruction inflicted by Muslims against non-Muslims worldwide. I would hear the hatred and bigotry espoused by mullahs in mosques televised throughout the Middle East and eventually throughout the world. Today I live on another continent eight thousand miles away from Lebanon. I sat watching television with my American children on September 11, 2001, crying as I heard the screams of family members looking for their loved ones buried under the rubble of the World Trade Center. It was my children who now looked at me and asked: “Mom! Who is Osama bin Laden and why does he call us infidels?"
Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America Page 7