Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  Somewhere in Washington, Paris and London – and probably Moscow as well – there are pictures of me standing on a polished deck in T-shirt and shorts, trying very much to look the part of a tourist out on a casual jaunt. It didn’t work. We all knew that our passports were carefully scrutinized on the Larnaca dockside by intelligence people who specialized in such things before they were handed back to us with perfunctory smiles.

  On two occasions I was accompanied by several South African Special Forces operatives. By then, Pretoria was pretty sure that the country would soon have to deal with the same kind of urban guerrilla issues then faced by Lebanon and they were eager to acquire the knowhow. In exchange, the South Africans offered training facilities for Christian military recruits and medical assistance for their more seriously wounded. F. W. de Klerk, the newly elected President of South Africa, circumvented that eventuality by releasing Nelson Mandela.

  Those were curious times. On these VIP visits we were grandly accommodated and feasted, though I never did get accustomed to eating raw sheep brains and pig liver or taking five spoonfuls of sugar in my coffee.

  Lebanese hospitality could be hard on the constitution. Apart from the food – which, at best, was dodgy because the war meant there were no kind of health controls – once a bottle of whisky had been cracked it had to be quaffed and that led to some prodigious hangovers.

  I took my still adolescent son, Albert, to this country once for a summary lesson of what happens when religious or tribal factions go berserk. His reaction was interesting because none of it made sense. Also, it was dangerous; we were sniped at on the Green Line one morning and he had at least one near miss. On these tours my minders seldom let me out of their sight, and on that trip they had an additional responsibility: my son.

  Their close protection caused some difficulty on my last trip to Jounieh in the ferry, which left Larnaca at last light and arrived in Lebanon at dawn. I was given a cabin and a key. However, having travelled for two days from Islamabad via London to get to Cyprus – I’d seen off a film crew that I’d tasked with circumventing Kabul during the early stages of the Soviet invasion – I left the belly-dancers in the saloon about midnight. For once, I told my minder, I could find my own way to my cabin. Anyway, he was interested in the dancers.

  It could be that I had had too many gin and tonics, but I soon found myself way down at one of the lower levels of the ship and in a cabin with the same number as on my key. It wasn’t my original cabin because my luggage wasn’t there, but it was late and I was bushed. Anyway, the key worked, a bunk beckoned and I was out the moment my head touched the pillow. I didn’t know until later that, somehow, I’d found my way into the crew’s quarters.

  Of course, when they checked my original cabin some time after midnight, I wasn’t there. In fact, I wasn’t anywhere. All eight of our bodyguards spent the next three hours searching. They went through every corner of the ship, except, of course, where the crew were billeted. At some stage very early in the morning, they concluded that I’d either been murdered or had fallen overboard, which was when they woke the captain and ordered him to put about to look for me.

  The exchange apparently went something like this:

  Minder: ‘He’s gone. We must go back and look for him.’

  Captain: ‘That is difficult. We have to keep to our schedule. Anyway, how do you know he isn’t with some woman in her cabin?’

  Minder: ‘We’ve checked. There are only so many women travelling alone… he’s not with any of them.’

  Captain: ‘Well then, how do you know he isn’t with some man? Do you know his preferences?’

  They left it at that.

  I surfaced several hours later when I had to get to the heads in a hurry. When I emerged onto the passenger deck, there was one-armed Claude, the man responsible for keeping me alive, sitting with his head in his hand. He was convinced I’d been murdered. When I walked up the stairs to where he was sitting, he looked up, blinked, looked hard again and finally smiled. With that he got up and kissed me on both cheeks, which was when I realized that the Lebanese can be pretty effusive in a crisis.

  To get to East Beirut at the time of the fighting in Sodico in 1981, I had to use whatever contacts I could get. I had been in touch with some Christian contacts in Cyprus on my way back to London from Israel after having been with Sa’ad Haddad’s people in South Lebanon. One of them gave me the name of someone with ‘contacts’ in Limassol. And what a peculiar set of connections they were.

  The man’s one claim to fame was that he owned a Ford Thunderbird and spent hours each night cruising around looking for girls. Also, I was regarded as little more than a meal ticket. His name was Habib and I only found out later that he was a con artist of repute.

  In great detail, I explained to this devious bastard what I needed. I had to get ‘to your own people’ in Beirut, the Christians. Many boats from Limassol went to Jounieh, I said, stating the obvious. Could he get me onto one?

  My sole criterion, I stressed, was that the boat should have a Christian skipper and, if possible, a Christian crew. I had no particular wish to make any kind of close acquaintance with the hot end of the Jihad.

  The matter of hostages had not yet arisen; it would be a while yet before people like the journalists Terry Anderson and John McCarthy or Bill Buckley and Peter Kilburn, the librarian at the American University in Beirut (both of whom died in detention), were taken by the militias. Others, like the American priest Father Lawrence Jenco, would soon be kidnapped and held under appalling conditions.

  ‘My dear friend’, suggested Habib, putting his arm around my shoulders, ‘there is no problem. I find you very good boat.’ That, in itself, sounded ominous. He was confident that the entire exercise would probably be only fractionally more difficult than buying a beer. It would cost me $300 down, he said, half up-front. I didn’t argue, though I never found out how much Habib kept back for himself.

  I waited three days. Then one evening, I was taken through the harbour gate at Limassol to board the archetypal rust bucket, the motor vessel Ali, a couple of hundred tons of badly eroded steel held precariously together by huge dollops of red lead paint on the superstructure. I discovered later that the Ali was 29 years old and was capable of seven knots with a following wind. I was also distressed to find that she was Syrian; her port of registration, painted in faded white letters on the stern, was Latakia.

  Habib reassured me. ‘They’re good people. Just remember, not all Syrians are crazy… only some of them. I wouldn’t send you into danger, now would I?’ I wasn’t convinced, but I also knew that I couldn’t hang about the Cyprus waterfront indefinitely. Perhaps it would be alright, I persuaded myself.

  It wasn’t. About an hour after we left I asked Captain Mahmoud how long it would take us to get to Jounieh.

  ‘Jounieh?’ he said. ‘Jounieh!’ he shouted. ‘Who tell you we go to Jounieh? We go Beirut!’ I was being delivered into the hands of zealots, and with all the Israeli stamps in my passport, I was sure they would be very pleased to see me.

  Captain Mahmoud, a tubby, curly haired little Syrian, watched me carefully as he spoke and was suspicious from the start. Who the hell was I, anyway? And why was I going to Lebanon? I cursed Habib. The situation wasn’t only invidious, it was bare-back dangerous.

  My friends tell me that when things get uncomfortable I have a talent for ingratiation. It’s a blessed quality that has its advantages. More to the point, it is also probably why I’m still alive.

  On the Ali that night, I knew that if I put one foot wrong, the Syrian crew would most certainly deliver me to Damascus. They would do so even if they just thought I was up to no good. All Westerners were assumed to be foreign agents in the Levant in those days and in some parts, they still are.

  I took the initiative and made it quite plain that I was a sahafi, a reporter. I said I had heard about the atrocities committed by the Kataib, the Christian Phalangists and I wanted to see these monsters for myself. I showed
Captain Mahmoud my Daily Express press card and he appeared satisfied. For the moment, anyway.

  The voyage should have taken a day. Because of bad weather, it took more than two. In that time the crafty little Arab captain questioned me often, and he could be subtle. What did I think of President Assad? Had I ever been to Israel? Was I a Jew? Did I believe all that rubbish about the Nazis killing Jews? I lied with accomplished fluency.

  As vessels go, the motor vessel Ali had little to recommend it. This small ship – more like a boat, really – had originally been built by the Germans for the Baltic trade. Its most elegant quality was its porcelain ashtray with the word ‘Dunhill’ that appeared in prominent letters on all four sides. Obviously stolen, it was proudly displayed in a salon that had been stained by generations of mariners sloshing their soup about.

  For the two days at sea I kept to the saloon, the only place where I could get my head down. I ignored the dirty plastic wallpaper, the buckled ceiling and unswept floor. A page of the Koran was prominently displayed above the fridge, stuck onto the bulkhead with cello-tape. The captain’s hookah stood in a corner. As a good Muslim he refused the whisky I proffered, though he made up for it by coughing his way almost ritually through wads of tobacco at all hours.

  The ‘usual offices’ on board were austere. There were two heads; the Western one didn’t work and the other was the ubiquitous Oriental hole in the deck over which you squatted, in the company of swarms of green flies that delight in Middle Eastern latrines. We ate in common out of an unwashed aluminum pot, with our hands and a spoon. I hoped that the others were scrupulous in their observation of the usual Muslim ablutionary injunctions.

  The boat was carrying earth-moving equipment for the ‘rehabilitation’ of Beirut; the war would end in a month or two, Captain Mahmoud told me confidently, adding that the dreaded Christians were being pummelled so badly by the Muslims that they were about to surrender en bloc. I didn’t argue.

  The day-to-day duties on board were the responsibility of the captain and an engineer, a little Syrian who spent most of his time down below in the engine-room. There were five other crew members.

  We broke down twice. The crew – two Syrians, an evil-looking Egyptian and two Lebanese boys who lounged about the saloon and with whom I communicated in sign language – were a disparate lot. Looking back, I am pretty sure that if Captain Mahmoud had not had a firm hand on his men like the Turk he was, they would have considered my Nikons as well as my money belt as their rightful perks. I felt utterly alone.

  We eventually arrived at Beirut and even with the war going on, I was pleased because the place had a seductive charm about it. Kim Philby regarded Beirut as the most beautiful city in the world. Now the blackened shell of the tall Holiday Inn in the western part dominated the skyline and could be clearly seen from where we lay. We’d anchored in the roadstead for the night because Captain Mahmoud didn’t want to go in until daylight; he feared we might be mortared. ‘The Kata’ib’, he said. ‘Murderers!’

  Getting ashore the next morning was not easy. Captain Mahmoud prepared to go to the port offices as soon as we docked. He said that I should go with him to show my passport. I had a bellyache, I replied. Would he mind if I rested a while?

  The options open to me were limited as I observed the harbour surrounds very carefully from the gangplank. How to get to the Christian quarter past the harbour authorities and others who would want to know what I was doing there without a visa? There was also the stamp showing that I had been in Tel Aviv the week before.

  The Soviet RPG-7 was the weapon of choice among many combatants on both sides of Beirut’s Green Line. (Author’s collection)

  I spoke to a couple of dock workers and they asked me if I was an American. I answered no, definitely not! They were sceptical and for the moment left it at that. Then an official came on board, but he had worry beads in his hand and I didn’t risk telling him anything. I only found out later that the beads are as common among Christians as among Muslims.

  At about eleven that morning a taxi deposited a passenger at a ship farther along the quay. When the driver had turned his car around I stopped him. Was he going into town?

  ‘Sure,’ he said in American English. Where did I want to go? I looked for any indication that he might be a Christian. There was: a St Christopher badge among the artificial fur on the dashboard.

  ‘You Christian?’

  ‘Yes, I am’ he answered, his eyes narrowing. He looked at me, now also suspicious. ‘Why you want to know?’

  ‘Just curious. Can you wait while I get my bags?’

  When I got back in his cab I took my life in my hands and asked him whether he could get me through port control without having to show my passport. ‘I want to get to the offices of the Lebanese Force Command’, I told him quietly, and for once I was deadly earnest.

  It was a gamble, of course, but I had no alternative. I explained what I was trying to do. I was a journalist and a Christian. I wanted to report on the war from his side.

  ‘You sit in front here with me,’ he said quietly. With that he got out, put my bags in the trunk and came back with a dirty old cap which he told me to wear. ‘You are my brother. I talk when we go through checkpoint.’

  Three minutes later Michael Chamoun (who became a good friend until he was killed in a mortar attack on a crossroads in Bourj Hammoud three years later) dropped me off at the offices of the Lebanese Force Command. It was a fine old two-storey building about 500 yards from the entrance to the port and it had taken a battering.

  I tipped Mike $20 US which, for a freelancer in those days, was a lot of money.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Death of a Young Man

  Like Nicholas Della Casa and the Angolan soldier killed after we decided to take his bayonet, I also felt indirectly responsible for the death of a yong soldier in Beirut. I never did get anything but his first name and that was Christian. He died under very different circumstances from the other two, after we’d spent almost a week together along that city’s embattled Green Line. In the brief period that we operated together, we’d got to know each other quite well, which happens often enough in wartime.

  CHRISTIAN WAS BARELY 21 YEARS old and had returned to Beirut after several years of studying science at the Sorbonne in Paris. He’d come back to ‘fight for something in which I truly believe’, he told me, implacable in his determination to make some kind of impact against an enemy whom he would refer to as ‘fucking barbarians’.

  His job, while I remained on assignment in Lebanon, was to act not only as a military escort, but also as my general factotum. Duties included protecting and feeding me, as well as finding us a place to put our heads down after dark. It was a thankless, unforgiving task in a society where any contact with a foreigner is regarded with distrust. Together, to his credit, we overcame a labyrinth of obstacles.

  His name, in itself, was a declaration of sorts in a country where religious divisions have given rise to 14 centuries of conflict, and to my eternal regret, his death was pointless, utterly so. I would have liked to have said as much when I met his mother afterwards, but it would have been inappropriate: he was her only child and his death was not only unnecessary, it should never have happened.

  Christian did a sterling job as guide, facilitator, interpreter and friend. We operated under deplorable conditions and nothing was easy. He had been detailed to accompany me as my ‘minder’ by Max Geahel, the undisputed head of the Lebanese Force Command’s G-5 office. Simply put, you couldn’t get into this war with the Christians unless G-5 – Max’s press-cum-security office – gave the nod.

  Interestingly, Max was another of those characters who emerged prominently as the war progressed. American author Jim Morris, who followed me into Lebanon afterwards, described him in one of his reports as ‘the mad monk with the thousand yard stare’. It was Max who told Christian that whatever happened, he wanted me back at headquarters when I’d completed my tour of duty.

  ‘And I w
ant him alive!’

  The war that raged around us in the early 1980s eventually caused Lebanon to transmogrify. It went from the most ordered society in the region to the most violent and chaotic the world has experienced in the past few centuries

  For many years, once hostilities had started, the country remained an anarchist’s fantasy. Murder was the norm and the word compassion wasn’t part of its lexicon. By the time all this madness had ended, there were about 100 different militias, each with its quota of zealots – some Christian, the majority staunchly fundamentalist Islamic.

  Apart from Amal, Hizbollah, the Christians and the Druze communities – together with perhaps a handful of other political or factional groupings – very few of the rest maintained even a semblance of order. Within their ranks, only the most powerful individuals ruled, and they did so absolutely and without compromise. Foot soldiers were expected to do their bidding and if they didn’t, they were killed.

  It is one of the oldest axioms, dating back to before the time of Caesar, that in a prolonged struggle, you eventually become like your enemy. So it was in Lebanon. With both Christian and Muslim, the crust of ideology made an honest reckoning in this singularly violent society uncommonly difficult.

  At first glance, this was a nation that had lost all reason. The journey from progression all the way through to mindless mayhem had been swift, with huge numbers of people killed. Now and again, entire towns, settlements and ghettos – some Christian, others Muslim – were wiped off the map. Sabra and Shatilla (both Islamic) were among them. There was a Christian town south of Beirut where it was estimated that between 10,000 and 12,000 people – men, women and children – were systematically slaughtered one morning in the early days of the struggle. Things went on to deteriorate to the point where there were people in the streets of Beirut, Sidon, Tripoli and elsewhere slaughtering each another with the kind of ferocity that has recently surfaced even more mindlessly – be that even possible – in Iraq and Afghanistan.