Our rescuers used a break in the shelling over the next few hours to remove the sandbags and move the cement block. Finally free, we ran outside and hugged our rescuers. Tears of happiness poured from our eyes. Even the young men who had dug us out began crying. There were three of them: Chuck, Bassam, and Eli. It was a beautiful day in May, about ten o’clock in the morning. The sky was clear and blue, the bluest that I had ever seen.
I ran to the base of the apricot tree in front of the shelter, put my hand around it, and started running in circles, screaming, “We’re alivel We are going to live!” The whole world looked different to me. The garden was blossoming and there were buds on the trees and bushes. My God, I thought, I can’t believe I hadn’t noticed this before. I am sure they came out at least two weeks ago. I also noticed butterflies—it seemed like tens of thousands of them, of many colors, bright yellow, dark orange, pink, and brown with black stripes— flying all over the garden and fluttering above the flowers. I noticed the sun. I hadn’t felt sunshine on my skin in at least a week. I just wanted to sit in the sun and let it warm me. Life took on a whole new meaning.
We sat down in the front of the shelter talking excitedly with our rescuers. Chuck, the young man who had found us, was an eighteen-year-old Christian militia fighter from our town. He was on his way up to the military base to meet friends. He told us that when he first passed our shelter he thought he’d heard something but ignored it, assuming he was imagining noises because he had been at the front lines all night. But about fifty meters past our place, he felt guilty. He thought, What if there is somebody there?—I better go back and check. And that’s how he heard us the second time.
After our rescue, every week or so Chuck would stop by to make sure we were all right. He was five years older than me, about six feet tall, very well built and very masculine. His hair was curly and black. He had big black eyes and eyelashes any girl would die for, let alone a thirteen-year-old hungry for contact with the outside world. He would sit and have coffee and give us an update on what was going on. Since he was in the militia and toured the town, he knew what was happening. He would tell us who had died, who was injured, which houses had been destroyed. Chuck would stay for an hour or two and then excuse himself. My parents would always send their regards to his parents.
After three years of isolation we were no longer alone.
4.
HOPELESS EXISTENCE
It’s hard to imagine we have been living like this for three years. It’s now 1978. But time doesn’t really matter or mean much anymore. There is no reason to keep up with time or days or holidays. There is no change; there are no events to look forward to: no time I have to be in school, no time to be at a doctor’s appointment, no time to be at a social event. About the only thing time can tell us is when the shelling will begin, and it might be our time to die.
In theory, the Lebanese civil war ended in October 1976, with the Six Parties Summit. Delegates from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, the PLO, and, oh yes, Lebanon, represented by Syrian puppets, met in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and then Cairo, Egypt. They conveniently forgot to tell the people shelling us.
The Six Parties agreement “ended” the Lebanese civil war by validating Syria’s virtual control over Lebanon. The agreement created the “Arab Deterrent Force,” a thirty-thousand-man army, to maintain order and establish peace in Lebanon. The Arab Deterrent Force was made up of twenty-seven thousand Syrian troops already in Lebanon, and small contingents from Sudan, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states, and Libya.1 The Six Parties also reaffirmed the Cairo agreement of 1969, which gave the PLO virtual sovereignty and freedom of action in southern Lebanon.2
The Six Parties ended the Lebanese civil war only in their own minds. They didn’t end the violence we were suffering. They just gave Syria the authority to control the violence. In southern Lebanon, Hafiz al-Assad, president-for-life of Syria, controlled the violence by facilitating it. Despite the buffer zone protected by our SLA militia and Major Haddad, PLO artillery and rockets were still within range of communities in northern Israel, and certainly within range of us in Marjayoun. The PLO would fire artillery and rockets into southern Lebanon and Israel from positions within the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) zone. Neither the UN troops on the scene nor the UN itself did anything to stop them. We who could benefit from the UN’s taking action felt that they were all show and no go. The UN troops appeared to be some form of international effort to solve a problem, but they were actually making the situation worse. While not stopping the PLO from shelling us and Israel, they would become remarkably protective and indignant when either Israel or the SLA fired back at the PLO. The Six Parties may have fooled the world into believing that the Lebanese civil war had ended with their “agreement,” but for us, the war went on.
The war forced us into a daily routine. Everything we did was influenced by the constant thought of keeping alive. Don’t get shot by snipers, blown up by shells, maimed by mines, suffocated by carbon monoxide from our coal heater, frozen to death by the cold, or weakened by lack of food or water. If there was anything else to fear, I guess it was being bored to death. Other than the war, there was nothing else going on. There were no people to visit, no school, no movies— nothing that would attract a large gathering of people. The fear was too great that a shell would hit and kill a lot of people located in one place. The Muslims and PLO had a random shelling philosophy: traumatize the general Christian population by randomly shelling the civilian areas. It was a constant form of terrorism. You never knew when you would die from a shell from the sky.
We were being shelled every day. Our nights in the shelter under heavy shelling were like sleeping through a huge thunderstorm. The explosions, like the lightning that hits your house or a tree in your backyard ten times over, would jolt us upright out of our sleep in terror or never let us sleep at all.
Chuck came over one day with good news of a new and exciting development. Our elders had decided to reopen the schools so we could continue our education, something central to our culture and values. We would go during the morning when the fighting usually stopped or slowed down dramatically. What a relief from our boredom. It had been two years of sitting in our bomb shelters without studying or learning anything other than how to stay alive. Now living in no-man’s-land would not be so bad. Not only would I get back to my studies, but I could see and socialize with my friends in town.
It was fun getting ready to go to school again. We would try to keep from being killed or wounded at night; then I would get up in the morning to go to school. Being able to take a shower would have helped a lot, since I had only two decent school uniforms in the shelter and alternated them every day; but we looked clean and well put together despite our lifestyle. Besides, come shells or high water in the shelter, we were going to continue our education. More important than anything else to our parents and leaders was that we be educated.
Our classes were held on the first floor of a three-story building so the floors above would give us added protection. Many days, just an hour after we got to school, the principal stormed into our class and informed us that shelling would start in fifteen minutes. He would order everybody to evacuate the classroom into the hallway. Some of the teachers who had cars would fill them up and drive us home to our bomb shelters. Many days I had to run home, sometimes crawling in ditches to avoid the bombs falling all around me. I used my books to protect my head from falling shrapnel. We missed many days because of heavy shelling, but we were determined to get an education.
I have to say that our quest for knowledge was tempered a bit by our circumstances. I would save studying for a test until the night before the test because I didn’t know if I was even going to be alive to take it anyway, so why bother? This was the attitude of all my friends.
In March 1978, six months after school started, the fighting began to worsen. We stayed in our shelter for six days straight. Finally there was a cease-fire, and we went up to
the house to shower and change our clothes. Our morale was very low because of rumors that the Palestinians, with the help of the Syrians and Iranians, had been fortifying their bases and planning an attack on the town. We were terrified that our exhausted troops were too weak to protect us and that our town would fall into the Palestinians' hands if they attacked that night.
I was washing my face when I heard Chuck’s voice in our house. He was in a hurry. It was about three o’clock in the afternoon. He had stopped by to inform us that we were going to be attacked viciously that night in an attempt to take us over. He said, “Make sure you wear comfortable clothes and running shoes in case you have to flee. And if you flee make sure you run straight toward the Israeli border.” He comforted me, saying he would be back the next day as soon as he could to check on us, if he stayed alive. Then he added: “But if we are all to die tonight, I wish us all a merciful death.” And he left.
We were alone again. The silence that followed Chuck’s disappearing footsteps made us feel that death was in our midst. Fearing we were going to be slaughtered that night, I didn’t want strangers to see some poor dead girl in wrinkled old clothes who would be dumped in a hole. I wanted to look pretty when I was dead. Knowing that there would be nobody to prepare me for burial, I asked my mother if I could put on my pretty Easter dress. They might rob me of my life, but they would not rob me of how I wanted to look before I was gone forever. My dress was light blue with white roses all over it and beautiful lace around the neck and arms. I stood in front of the mirror crying as my mother combed my long hair and tied a white ribbon in it that matched the roses. I pleaded with her: “Please. I don’t want to die. I’m only thirteen.” My poor mother. Here was her only child, whom she had waited twenty years for, and all she could do was help grant her last wish to have some dignity in death. The sense of hopelessness and fear in my pleading must have been breaking her heart. She asked me to stop crying and assured me that Jesus would take care of us.
Here I was in the pretty dress that I had worn to happy occasions and Easter services, and now I was shaking in fear sitting in the dingy bomb shelter with the crashing and exploding noises outside. We huddled in the corner on our bed. Mama and Papa prayed to God to protect us. All I could do was cry.
This was the explosive opening of what was going to be a long night. How long would be determined by whether the Palestinians reached us and how long our troops could hold out. Papa said, “Brigitte, you are young. We have lived a long life. We are old and are going to die soon anyway. We can’t run if they come to kill us. But we will create a distraction while you run toward Israel and never look back.” I started crying harder and said, “How could you say that? How can I run and leave you? I have nobody but you. Why do I want to live if you are gone?” My father begged me to listen to him. I just prayed that it would never get to that point. We spent the night dreading that we would take a direct hit or that death would come bursting through the door to slit our throats.
Daylight finally arrived, and the bombardment quieted down. The quiet after a battle is always the most agonizing time for those who do not know what is going on. It can be good or bad depending on who won the battle. Soon we could hear the rumbling of a long column of tanks and trucks heading north. Heading north was good. South meant bad. After years in the bomb shelter, we could tell the difference between a tank, a truck, and an armored car just by the sound of their engines. We’d never heard so many sounds before, and they were different. My mother and I decided to poke our heads through the door to see if we could tell who was riding in these vehicles. There was a lot of activity. We saw tanks that we had never seen before and soldiers in uniforms we didn’t recognize. The soldiers didn’t look hostile, not like they were out looking for people. Another tank passed and I spotted Chuck sitting on the back. We knew we were going to be fine. The worst had passed, at least for a while.
The only reason we stayed alive that night was because Israel came into Lebanon and drove the Palestinians away. Like the Christians of southern Lebanon, the inhabitants of northern Israel had been forced for many years to spend long periods of time in bomb shelters because of artillery and rocket bombardments by the PLO and its Muslim allies in Lebanon. In addition, Palestinian death squads repeatedly attempted to infiltrate across the border into Israel to conduct terrorist attacks. Sometimes they succeeded, with deadly results. The incident that broke Israel’s patience happened on March 11, 1978, when a squad of Palestinian terrorists from Lebanon hijacked a bus on a highway south of Haifa, on Israel’s northern coast. They drove south toward Tel Aviv, brutalizing the bus passengers and firing indiscriminately out the windows at passing cars. Dozens of Israelis were murdered and scores were wounded before this Palestinian tour of terror was halted. Fed up with the incursions, on March 15,1978, Israel launched Operation Litani.
This operation had two purposes: first, to bring the incessant bombardments of northern Israel to an end by driving the Palestinians out of artillery and rocket range, and second, to relieve the beleaguered Christians of southern Lebanon and assist the Lebanese army leader Major Sa’ad Haddad, who commanded the Christian soldiers when the Lebanese army disintegrated. With his help Israel could establish a security zone where his South Lebanese Army could protect the local inhabitants and keep the PLO from reoccupying the area and hitting Israel.
Although the Palestinians were full of swagger and arrogance when they bullied unarmed Lebanese Christians, they fled in panic before the Israelis. Most of their Muslim leftist allies threw their militia uniforms away, hid their AK-47s, and blended back into the population of Elkhiam and other Muslim towns and villages in southern Lebanon. In a few days the Israelis achieved their first goal, driving the Palestinians north of the Litani River. The Israelis withdrew from Lebanon three months later after achieving their second goal of strengthening the South Lebanese Army. By the time Israel withdrew, the area protected by Major Haddad had expanded from three small enclaves to a continuous strip of land along the Israel-Lebanon border.
The Lebanese Shia sect of Islam had not yet been infected by the radical pan-Islamist fundamentalism that would sweep the Muslim world in the wake of the Iranian Revolution one year later. Although the main Shia militia, Amal, supported the National Front/revisionist coalition politically, it did not participate in the opening stage of the war.
Israel negotiated an agreement with the United Nations under which the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon was to take a position between the PLO and the SLA security zone. (In practice, UNIFIL was to prove less than helpful.) The UN troops ended up with a halfhearted policy in dealing with PLO or Muslim terrorists trying to get into the security zone and Israel. If they caught a terrorist trying to pass through their area they would take his gun away and return it to his militia leader. All he had to do was get it and try again. I don’t think he was told to go stand in the corner unless it was for failing his mission in the first place. If he had a bomb, the UN would keep that but let him go without any form of detention or punishment. The UN troops seldom ventured outside of their bases unless they were in a supply convoy or relocating. None of them wanted to be killed in someone else’s war.
As a result of Operation Litani, life became a little easier. Although there were still occasional rocket and artillery attacks (most of which originated from the area “controlled” by the United Nations), the shelling was not as bad as it used to be. You could still be killed by the occasional shell falling out of the sky, but at least the snipers were gone. Life could return to something that resembled normal. School was much safer to attend now. But I would no longer be attending the private one I had gone to all my life. My parents could not afford to send me there anymore. Now I would be going to public school.
Money was scarce, as I was finding out. I had some idea that we had money in a bank but were unable to get to it because of the fighting. What was obvious was that Papa was not working. The restaurant was closed and no one was renting apartments. I did not
know that we had no income from the government because Papa had collected his retirement all at once. I thought that it was not coming because of the war and problems in our government.
I came home one day to see a strange man in the room with my parents. My mother was handing him a handful of gold teeth and bracelets. The man handed her cash in return. I realized my mother was selling the gold fillings in her teeth and whatever jewelry she had left to help pay for food and the books and other things I needed for school. I now understood why she and my father had gone to the dentist the month before and got all their teeth pulled out and decided to wear dentures. After the man left I asked her, “Why are you doing that?” She told me that we were getting low on money. I couldn’t understand what had happened to all the money we had in the bank. I knew we were wealthy. After all, we had servants before the war and lived a good life. The little money that had survived was gone. That’s when they told me about what had happened to my father’s life savings: that it had burned when the house was bombed. I was shocked and frightened when I heard their words. I realized we had no hope. I couldn’t get a job even if I wanted to, at least for six more years. My father was seventy-four years old now and deaf, and he had difficulty walking after four years of sitting endless hours in the humid, wet shelter. I realized I was going to have to take on more responsibility in the family.
We continued our bare existence with Israel’s help and support. The opening of the border created needed commerce for many in the security zone. The crossing became known as “the Good Fence.” The Israelis set up an office to process daily visas for the Lebanese who started going in for business and work. Many people from the security zone went to work inside Israel in many fields, including agriculture, hospitality, and the service industry. They were able to make a living, earn shekels, and revitalize our own little economy by spending their earnings in town. A few people became businessmen importing Israeli meat and chicken and selling it in the stores. Some entrepreneurs became money changers, or chauffeurs driving people to the border and back. My parents and I, however, couldn’t take advantage of this work opportunity. They were very old and I was still too young. My only comfort was knowing that in case of any medical need we could turn to Israel, which was our only lifeline. Israel had opened its hospitals free of charge to any Lebanese in the security zone that needed medical help. Some people had open-heart surgery, brain surgery, and many other procedures that they otherwise would not have been able to get. As my parents were older and had no financial resources for medical care, Israel was the rock we could lean on. Most of us couldn’t even go to any other hospital in Lebanon no matter the severity of the illness, because if we got out of the security zone, the Muslim militias would kill us as traitors.
Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America Page 10