Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  Listening to a French-speaking announcer in some lonely post at Kfarchima or in the mountains overlooking the city, you might have forgotten that you were on the fringe of what was then one of the most dangerous conflicts east of Algeria. For all this, it was astonishingly easy in those days to become a cipher on a clipboard. Each day, between 18 to 25 people died violently in the Christian sector alone, most from random artillery and mortar fire from Syrian and Muslim militia and PLO positions across the way.

  The usual tactic was to hit East Beirut during the morning or evening rush-hour. Since the town had been carefully mapped years before, even the Syrians possessed reliable charts and they were able to drop a bomb within a yard or two of any street corner. Some intersections would be teaming with traffic when the mortars arrived and the carnage could be terrible.

  You could never know when a single bomb or a cluster would drop silently out of the sky, four, five, even six at a time. Once the first one struck, we’d all watch carefully to see in which direction the rest of the pattern went. Each mortar bomb would land a few yards from the one before it and sometimes a pattern of explosions would ‘walk’ in a straight line for as much as 150 yards or more. It all depended on whether the base-plate had been set on hard ground: the softer the surface, the more expansive the spread.

  On my third morning in Beirut I was invited to lunch by some G-5 friends of Fadi Hayek and Jacques Tabet. There was a cafe three blocks away, well sandbagged and accessible only through a narrow, reinforced entrance. Steel plates hung over the door and offered good protection.

  We’d finished lunch and were ambling back to the office. There was no need for caution because there were buildings on all sides and we were at least a mile from the front. Suddenly the first mortar bomb exploded in the road about 200 yards ahead. Moments later there was another, 20 yards closer than the last. By now we were in full gallop for a large entrance to a building nearby; any opening would do. A stone doorway which gaped immediately ahead was just fine.

  We reached it with about a second to spare before the last bomb exploded in a shower of fragments outside. None of us was hurt, but our ears rang for days and a shard of jagged steel about five inches long ricocheted off one of the eaves to land with a loud clink at my feet. That chunk of metal remained on my desk for years, even though it was always an unfriendly reminder.

  What was sobering was the realization that in full flight a piece of shrapnel that size can sever a man’s arm, or his neck. More worrying, there had been five journalists killed and a dozen wounded in that phase of the Lebanese conflict.

  As with all wars, there were escapes aplenty, some that we still marvel about when some of the old hands get together for a couple of a drinks. A French television crew was filming in downtown Beirut close to the Green Line when a Russian 82mm mortar bomb hit the curb immediately alongside the cameraman. Fortunately, it landed in the gutter and the raised curb absorbed most of the shrapnel, if not a large portion of the blast. When I examined the place afterwards, I was astonished that the man was still alive. As it was, he was spattered by bomb fragments down the length of his body.

  He was flown out the next evening; the airport was then still open.

  Afterwards, I saw an Arriflex 16mm camera at the offices of Gamma in Paris. It had a hole in it, with a sniper’s bullet neatly lodged where the magazine had been clipped onto the body. The trajectory had been straight in line with the side of the cameraman’s head when it struck and clearly the marksmanship was outstanding. But it didn’t kill the man: apart from a big bruise above his ear, he was unhurt.

  Graffiti commemorating the deaths of about 100 innocent civilians killed in an Israeli artillery strike in the South Lebanese town of Qana. This kind of mindless brutality on the part of the Jewish State – it was not an accident since several salvos were fired – polarized passions in the region even further, were that possible. (Author’s collection)

  While in Beirut, I spent a lot of time in an apartment near the headquarters of Fadi Hayek’s G-5.

  Always a gracious host, his hospitality in this strange and dangerous land was not only welcome but essential, because most of us were broke. Short on ceremony, Fadi was a convivial entertainer who could drag a bottle of Château Lafite-Rothschild out of somebody’s cellar in an instant and like a prestidigitator of old, produce the best pate de foie gras from what passed as the local gourmet store.

  Living in Fadi’s shadow, as it were, served two purposes. He could keep an eye on us, ostensibly friends of the Christian Forces but who could just as easily have been enemy. Also, by then all Christian hotels in East Beirut had become targets for a proliferating number of carbombers. With so much activity, their job was easy.2

  Not long before I arrived, Jihad bombers had destroyed the US Marine barracks at Beirut Airport. Only years afterwards we were to discover that this was one of the first acts of a new brand of Islamism that called itself Hizbollah, the same Pasdaran who, by then, had entrenched themselves in South Lebanon and whom I encountered while moving about from the UN Headquarters base at Naqoura.

  The Hizbollah, or Pasdaran, strike on the airport base was uncompromisingly brutal. More than 300 American servicemen were killed in that attack, and it was followed soon after by two suicide bombs, one at the entrance of the American Embassy that killed many of the top CIA officers in the Middle East, who were at a conference at the time. The other hit the French diplomatic mission, a few streets down. After the Israeli invasion, similar tactics were used in the destruction of an IDF military headquarters in Tyre, in the south of the country.

  At about that time, another, less conventional type of fighter started to arrive in Lebanon. Mostly of European extraction, with quite a few Germans in their ranks, these radicals were sharpshooters, the majority extremely well trained. From what I gathered, quite a few had psychopathic tendencies, which might have been expected since their role was to target purposely those less fortunate than the rest. The poor souls who came into their sights included the old, the very young and, in particular, people who had been incapacitated. Those in wheelchairs and the decrepit appeared to attract inordinate attention.

  The UN base at Naqoura in South Lebanon is the largest UN military establishment in the world, yet its role throughout decades of fighting in the Levant has been divisive: the Israelis have repeatedly invaded their northern neighbour, usually brushing aside UN forces as if they didn’t exist. For its part, Hizbollah, while offering customary lip service, is today equally dismissive of the so-called UN peacekeeping role in the Middle East. (Author’s collection)

  Snipers of all nationalities were active until the end, but the average journalist seemed to take little interest in these actions, though this was clearly an issue tailor-made for the front page. Why? Because this was an extremely delicate subject, they were told in the kind of language that allowed no room for debate. More than one hack in the Commodore Hotel got a friendly nudge whenever the topic was raised: sniping wasn’t a good story, he or she’d be told. And of course they’d agree…

  Nonetheless, the subject was in everybody’s face. A French-woman was killed by an Amal sniper in a boulevard not long after she had disembarked in Beirut harbour, intending to walk into town. It was a senseless murder, because she was clearly a foreigner and there was nothing to be lost in letting them retrieve her body afterwards. Instead, she lay there for days. Anybody who tried to get near her remains became fair game. The French Embassy protested, but Amal wasn’t listening.

  The almost blanket silence in the Western press about sniping was peculiar, since these marksmen accounted for substantial numbers of casualties. The gunmen were all around us on both sides of the Line and, as a result, we’d never hang around in exposed places.

  Sniping went on through every ceasefire except the very last one, which ended the war. The Muslim rate for a kill during the early and middle 1980s, whether man, woman or child, old or young was about $250. The Christians, in contrast, regarded it as part of t
heir war effort and their soldiers charged nothing because they were getting at the hated enemy.

  Many of the Jihad fighters used Soviet Simonov rifles with telescopic sights. There were also Russian Dragunovs; a more refined variant of the AK, though nowhere nearly so accurate for sniping as the rifles made by McMillan or the Springfield Armory MIA National Match.

  Then the Syrians got hold of large numbers of Austrian SteyrMannlichers, prized hunting weapons and the finest and most accurate in their day. The end-user certificates stated that they were for the Syrian Army Sniping Team, all 300. We all decided that it was curious that nobody in Vienna seemed to notice the quantity, and there is little doubt that despite subsequent protestations, the authorities were aware that many German and Austrian weapons were finding their way into Arab countries at the time.

  Bob Brown, owner and publisher of Soldier of Fortune magazine, sent in his own teams of sniping specialists, always embedded with Christian forces. One of his reporters had indicated this gap to special forces and Bob filled it, as he had done in El Salvador, Rhodesia and elsewhere. Soon we had people like Peter Kolkalis and Phil Foley teaching Christian lads the sniper’s intricacies of minute-of-angle and windage. Bob MacKenzie, with whom I afterwards covered the war in El Salvador (see chapters 7 to 9), was also there for a while.

  More Americans entered Lebanon to help the Christian side after Jim Morris, good friend, author, university lecturer and journalist spent time with the Lebanese Force Command. He was freelancing and his reports were widely published in the United States.

  The acquisition of more sophisticated types of weaponry was always a problem for the Christian forces. Some came by sea to Jounieh harbour from Haifa. Still more were acquired in France at hefty premiums and would arrive in packing cases marked as machine parts. The Phalanghists captured a lot of materiél early in the war, but they constantly needed to build up reserves in readiness for any big push by the Muslims. In that they succeeded, but Bashir Gemayel also took the precaution of establishing a number of central depots in caves in the mountains of the interior.

  The Christians also manufactured their own ammunition, grenades and mortar bombs and made a very efficient 7.62mm rimmed explosive bullet of their own. Then, astutely, they built a bazooka based on the French Sneb 68mm air-to-ground rocket, which worked well in a ground-support role. The tube was made of unpainted aluminium and it astonished a lot of us that they never bothered to camouflage the device, because it must have glinted in the moonlight.

  Fadi’s people always had their own way of doing things. It was the kind of enterprise that had enabled his people to survive centuries of invasion, subjugation and persecution and, on the face it, the Christians seemed to manage pretty well considering that they were both outnumbered and outgunned. ‘But never outmanoeuvred’, one of their officers stressed at one of the few press conferences conducted at Hadace while I was there.

  By 1981, the Syrians had moved large numbers of men and equipment into the Lebanon. They also had irregular ‘volunteers’ who, over the years, had been infiltrated into the ranks of the various Muslim factions. This was done more to keep some kind of control over a situation that was volatile and which tended to resist any kind of overall authority, than to provide additional manpower. There were then in Lebanon 35,000 regular Syrian soldiers, eight batteries of ‘Special Forces’ each consisting of 5,000 men and another 5,000 Moukhamarat or secret police, who were working clandestinely in civilian clothing. This force was already many times what the Christians could field even in a concerted effort.

  The Syrian forces were supported by several hundred tanks, mostly not-so-old Soviet T-55s (excellent for close-quarter work) which were deployed round Zahle, an isolated mountain enclave in the east that was completely surrounded. This hardware was backed by armoured personnel carriers (APCs) – including several hundred BTR-152s and 40 or so BM-21s, mounted with batteries of 40-salvo Katyusha rockets. It was a formidable arsenal and to many of us, it all seemed unstoppable. But again, with good tactical Israeli counter-measures, the Christians seemed to manage.

  Additionally, the Syrians spent millions of dollars a week on ammunition, much of it arriving from Russia as part of the Kremlin’s Middle East programme of destabilization.

  Syrian anti-aircraft guns, to which they added the full range of surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) fielded by the Soviets, were no less impressive. Most deployed around Beirut were specifically reserved for Israeli Air Force reconnaissance flights and we’d spot their white plumes rising in the sky from time to time, even though hits were scarce.

  In the end, for all this hardware, Lebanon’s conflict was very much a People’s War. Every civilian in East Beirut or across the way in Jounieh, in or out of uniform, was a soldier, and that included the majority of young women of military age. I rarely met one who wasn’t carrying at least one concealed weapon: a revolver or a pistol. Among the men, one in five or six would have a grenade in his pocket.

  American revolvers were the most popular: mostly Smith & Wesson, Ruger or Colt, usually in .357 Magnum calibre. Dirty Harry’s .44 Mag was regarded as excessive. ‘Overkill’, Fadi called it. My own preference for the .45 Colt auto was dismissed with contempt, probably because it was American (weren’t they almost all?). Consequently, the 9mm Parabellum quickly became the in-thing among the younger set. They discussed ballistics like today’s crowd talk Lady Gaga or Beyoncé.

  Certainly, the greatest advantage that the Christians had over their adversaries was a single command structure. In this respect the Lebanese Force Command was run like a regular army. At the same time, it seemed that apart from the wherewithal that was being used to fight this war, all things American and Jewish were despised with a passion that us transients found disquieting.

  It was almost like biting the hand…

  There was another, softer side to the conflict that seemed almost incongruous under the circumstances. While the war raged, people seemed to get on with their lives.

  Take Jacques Aboul, who owned the excellent patisserie that was popular with all who lived in the Beirut suburb of Hadace. Hadace was both an expansive and expensive place before the war and was home to many wealthy Lebanese expatriates who had second and third homes on other continents. It lay to the east of the airport, a little above the American university, and was highlighted by a big sign that read: ‘Ville de Hadace’. Its quarter-of-a-million inhabitants were a fair sample of Lebanese Christians: tradesmen, doctors, artisans, electricians, architects, bankers and politicians.

  The common language of the more-educated classes, apart from Arabic, was French. Those who left the country usually found a niche for themselves in France or in the French-speaking African colonies, where the Lebanese tend to monopolize business even today. Quite a number emigrated to the United States, where the more industrious prospered and continue to do so.

  Aboul’s shop stayed open almost throughout the war. Just before I arrived, he’d stocked his shelves with good things: the best imported whisky and gin, Swiss chocolate, some excellent French cheeses, South American coffee and other delicacies from abroad. Then it was hit by a mortar bomb and the boards and sandbags went up again. It was like a game, Aboul would comment sourly when we talked about it in good English. ‘A very expensive game…’

  Aboul was introduced as a Christian Lebanese who had accumulated a fortune in Paris and was now losing it. So why did he return?

  ‘Why do any of us come back? Ask any of these people here; they’re all good people, informed people. They could go abroad tomorrow. But we stay. It’s our country. It’s the land, the heritage of our children…’

  As with many Israelis, the Lebanese – like my friend Aboul – really believed that there was only one country on earth worth a dime. In Aboul’s view, the war would soon end, though he never counted on the tenacity of the Syrians, who needed to dominate that part of the Middle East for the sake of their own partially landlocked security. The Syrians remained the dominant force in Leb
anon for a long time after the civil war ended, but in the end because Damascus overplayed its hand in murdering prominent Lebanese who opposed their presence, even their forces had to go home.

  My destination in Hadace was the command post of ‘Sheikh’ Tony Karam, a fifth-year medical student who’d spent as many years fighting for the ideals in which he passionately believed. I was taken there by Claude, also from G-5, the one-armed leader of a commando platoon who was one of my bodyguards on board the ferry from Larnaca.

  Karam’s headquarters was protected by two solid reinforced concrete structures and, as he explained in an early briefing, it dominated much of the fighting.

  Like most other commands along the Line, Karam’s front was divided into sections of about 400 yards each, with small groups of soldiers given responsibility for particular areas, which were usually close to where they lived.

  How many men in his command? ‘That’s a secret’, he replied with his customary demeanour. ‘You ask a stupid question and you get a stupid answer’, he would joke moments later.

  Weapons? Also secret, he averred, though I could make my own assessment simply by moving along the lines, which was easier said than done because of PLO or Jihadi snipers. They’re pretty good, Karam warned.

  When the Christians acquired some French infra-red image-intensifiers, Karam’s sharpshooters took the initiative. It was hard going nevertheless, he admitted, as most of these specialists seemed to work from isolated observation-posts among tall buildings and always from high ground.