Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  ‘The problem is that the enemy knows roughly from where we operate, just as we’re aware of their deployment. So, if one of my men is preparing to use his weapon, he can’t loiter long in front of that little hole from where he pokes out his barrel… some of their snipers could hit a cigar box at 500 or 600 yards’ he told me. Christian marksmen sometimes spent hours after dark on rooftops looking for vantage points from which to hit the enemy at first light.

  ‘Sheikh’ Karam (he preferred the appellation le Chef) had a reputation for employing unusual methods, like bomb detectors, at his control points and pulling a vehicle off the road into an open basement and making the driver open everything – including removing the tyres – while his own men watched from a distance.

  An agreeable adjunct to his command was a squad of sloe-eyed beauties, quite a few of whom were still in their teens or early twenties, who made themselves useful in all sorts of ways, such as in logistics and supplies. Others monitored Syrian radio traffic. Their presence was a tonic to the men. Those of us who have spent any time in the Eastern Mediterranean know how stunningly attractive many of these young women are. Trouble is, they know it too…

  A year or two later, the Lebanese Force Command began training women for combat. At that stage, females were regarded as strictly rearechelon personnel. Some of the girls in uniform enjoyed sporting an AK in town, particularly after dark, and they looked appealing in an androgynous sort of way in their American olive-drab fatigues and boots. We’d long ago been warned not to take liberties with any of them.

  ‘Look, but don’t touch’ was the rule, and even then you didn’t make a meal of anybody with your eyes. A well-known foreign correspondent, an Irishman, was found dead with a knife in his back in a Beirut apartment after a bit of hanky-panky with a married Lebanese woman.

  Female soldiers, while rarely used in combatant roles in Lebanon, provided valuable service on both sides of the Green Line. While playing key roles in communications, administration, intelligence and in caring for the wounded, they were not averse to handling weapons when critical circumstances demanded it of them. (Author’s collection)

  The fighting in Hadace was not nearly as intense as in sectors closer to the downtown high-rise areas. Unlike the enemy – billeted in places to which they had been drafted and often bought in from the mountains of the north or from Sidon or Tyre to the south – Karam’s men had intimate knowledge of their own backyard. Most had played there as kids.

  Every narrow passage between buildings, each little path that allowed access to the front as well as the buildings that surrounded them, all had their uses. Though the Chef wouldn’t comment, we were made aware that his people were able to infiltrate Syrian and Palestinian lines, if not at will, then often enough to make things difficult for the other side. Their local knowledge made them accurate scouts, always on the lookout for something new to put their minds to.

  One of these opportunities was exploited while I was with Karam’s people. A bulldozer was heard each evening working on Syrian defences a few hundred yards beyond Christian lines. Then, one night, three men with two RPG-7 rocket-launchers slipped out a little after midnight. They were back an hour later, the driver of the bulldozer dead. The Syrians retaliated with heavy stuff, but the intruders were already underground.

  As with most unconventional struggles, urban guerrilla warfare in Beirut was an extremely difficult option, but it was vital if the Christians were to hold their own in the ever-vacillating climate of war. It was almost impossible to reconnoitre enemy positions in streets where look-outs could see any kind of movement at a glance and usually for some distance. Also, as we were already aware, their night-vision goggles were Soviet, third or fourth generation and the best.

  What was taking place behind those rows of buildings? No one knew until it happened. The Muslims would collect their forces along a street on the Line. The Christians would be aware of these concentrations because the rate of fire would pick up and there would be movement. Meanwhile, they would move up more of their own men to bolster defences.

  The other side, in turn, would pre-empt, this time en masse, sometimes catching the Christian forces unprepared. Such attacks would take place in great force, perhaps across half a mile of battlefront, and would sometimes concentrate on what might have been perceived as lightly defended positions. Many penetrations were made in this manner. Gemayel’s people used the tactic to good advantage too, but their options were constrained because his people didn’t have any kind of depth in numbers.

  When buildings had to be cleared in close fighting, the combat became a horror of confusion and high casualties. Most of the time the light was bad, and fighting sometimes took place in the dark. Both sides would accidentally shoot their own people, and since this kind of thing could not be planned beforehand, the Christians tended to leave their fighters to their own devices. The Islamic Jihad was less flexible because they just targeted everything that moved.

  As Rocky – the Sodico commander – had originally suggested: ‘If you’re somewhere where the lighting is low or there’s none at all – and you know that the fellow in your sights might be one of your own – you shoot him in the legs. Just in case!’

  Karam was one of the Christian fighters recruited into the ranks of what began as an irregular guerrilla force at the beginning of hostilities. Those were early tit-for-tat days, one strike answered by another, invariably in retaliation for events that had taken place perhaps hours, or days before. As the war progressed, the conflict became more conventional, but throughout the conflict, his job was to hold the line, even against the tanks.

  He once rolled barrels of fuel down a hill into an attacking force and exploded them with tracers. They were never attacked from that position again.

  Ranks within Lebanese Force Command seemed to be vague. They existed, of course, and there was clearly an established order, but it wasn’t anything definitive, in part because the enemy would target anybody who looked like being in authority. More significantly, there was no formal flummery, no standing on dignity or ceremony. The bottom line was to stay alive. Obviously, that applied to us scribes as well.

  Similarly, there were no concessions. Prisoners of war were often kept alive no longer than was needed to extract information, though in later years both sides classically used prisoners as bargaining chips, in clear contravention of the Geneva Conventions. It was a war in which both sides made their own rules.

  One of Karam’s men captured by the Syrians had his arms and legs cut off by a surgeon in the enemy camp. After his eyes had been gouged out, he was left in the open under the muzzles of snipers. They waited for the Christians to try to bring him in. Le Chef himself had to fire the fatal bullet. It would have been impossible to get him out without taking losses, he explained, but he refused to be drawn further on the subject, except that it would have been inhuman to keep the man alive.

  Karam had spent four years at university with the fellow and the catastrophe had a lasting effect. He made it his business to kill the customary three or four Syrians every week, using – in preference to standard-issue army rifles that came from the Israelis – a Brno .30-06 hunting rifle with a ten-power Leupold sight. His ammunition was Winchester 180-grain soft-point.

  Essentially, the Lebanese Force Command was a group of civilians drawn into the fight by force of circumstance. When the fighting was over, or when there was a lull, they went back to their jobs or their studies.

  Anybody who could use a gun was a soldier. Even non-combatants helped the cause by packing food, preparing dressings or priming ammunition, old men and women alike.

  One young zealot who’d turned 22 while I was there fought on with one eye; he had lost the other in an RPG-rocket attack. An unusually talented individual, he had studied classical guitar under the Armenian master Joseph Ichkhanian. During the war he was to become an expert with the weapon that had cost him so dearly.

  Another young Phalangist officer with whom I spent a little tim
e was a third-year engineering student. He fought on despite the loss of a leg below the knee, his perseverance generating much respect among his pals. His closest friend was a student of mathematics. There was also a dental student, a cabinet-maker who specialized in Louis XIV reproductions, as well as two lawyers. All were tough, aggressive fighters, who with time became experienced and battle-wise. Few were hotheads who were likely to get themselves killed or maimed.

  Had these people been serving in any regular army, they would have been characterized as model combatants who took few chances, though obviously, there were times – sometimes every other day – when they’d have to put their lives on the line. If they needed to enter a particularly dangerous area, they’d go in only after a careful reconnaissance, and then crouched low and at the double. When there was shelling, nobody exposed himself if it wasn’t essential.

  As the war went on, accommodation for the media covering the east side of the Line became difficult. G-5 couldn’t support us indefinitely.

  I usually stayed in the Christian Quarter or up the coast in Jounieh. Quite often, because it was safer, I’d head for Byblos, a delightful little harbour that dated from Phoenician times and lay roughly 15 miles as the bird flies from Beirut’s always-delightful Cornice. I liked it because it was well away from the carnage, but then Byblos was also far away from it all and that sometimes meant being out of touch. Then I would seek other options and occasionally I was led across the Line.

  The Commodore Hotel was not one of my favourites because I had to pass through Muslim lines to get there. However, it was a necessary stage in any journalist’s itinerary in that part of the world. We all billeted there at some time or another.

  I got to know Fuad Saleh, the manager during the Israeli invasion of 1982. When I wasn’t staying at one of the Israeli Army headquarters in a big villa in Baabda, George De’Ath and I would go down to the Commodore, usually by taxi. It was there that we missed a Christian car-bomb by minutes. We’d been seeing a friend at another hotel in West Beirut and hadn’t been out of the building for about an hour before it went up in a huge column of smoke and debris. The entire facade came down and a lot of people were killed.

  At the time we were being hosted by the Israeli command and were sleeping on the balcony of the Baabda HQ. We’d hardly bedded down for the night when we heard the blast and got up to view the fire. It didn’t particularly bother our Jewish hosts overmuch because it had all taken place in the Islamic half of the city. George and I counted ourselves lucky.

  The Commodore was also bombed, but in spite of omnipresent danger, the place was invariably a hive of activity. In February 1987 it became the target of rival squads of Druze and Shi’ite militants who fought for control of the building with tanks and rockets. The Druze took the honours; as they usually did when they made up their minds to strike at a specific target, customarily displaying a level of aggression seldom seen outside the Middle East.

  I was to see a lot of Druze combatants during the course of the war but never tangled, officially or otherwise, with them: they made no secret of their loathing for us ‘journalist scum’.

  To my mind, the Druze were the toughest, the most dedicated of the combatants in Lebanon. They had to be because their numbers were limited and it said much that they never took prisoners, Christian, Israeli or Muslim.

  In many respects the old Commodore was different from any other hotel I’d frequented over the years. It was shabby and run-down, yet as comfortable as a pair of old slippers. The ebb and flow of events in the Middle East could be gauged by the number of foreign correspondents packed into the round bar any evening.

  There we would find a rare diplomat priming journalists and vice versa, UN ‘peacekeeping’ soldiers on leave – usually talking amazingly tough – and, of course, the usual spooks, professional murderers and friendly ladies. It was a congenial watering-hole and I often wonder what happened to Younnis and Mohammed who served behind the bar.

  Signing in at the Commodore was a ritual. ‘Sniper side or car-bomb side?’ the clerks would ask new arrivals, usually nervous at the prospect of possibly coming under fire. Yet, once through those doors, you felt strangely comfortable, even safe. From the top of the Commodore we could sometimes watch the nightly display of Christian tracers.

  John Kifner of The New York Times describes a night after the American Embassy had been blown up for the second time by a suicide truck bomber.

  ‘Suddenly the windows around the bar shook and then dissolved as Shi’ite fundamentalists bombed nearby bars and bingo parlors. Thirty journalists dived onto the floor in a heap. Their glasses were placed neatly around the circular bar and not a drop spilled.’

  ‘Oh,’ someone said, ‘it’s not going to be one of those nights!’

  One of the bitter-sweet gratifications of any experience in wartime is that one can look back dispassionately on events that at the time seemed to be extraordinary or, as Wordsworth succinctly phrased it, ‘emotions recollected in tranquility’.

  Obviously, a great deal has changed in Lebanon over the years and it continues to do so. For a while peace seemed to have arrived in this troubled land, but it has been deceptive because Hizbollah, now legalized and with seats in Parliament, was waging its own little war along the length of the Israeli border. Then, in the summer of 2006, the IDF invaded again and its warplanes destroyed much of South Beirut, including almost all the suburbs occupied by Shi’ites.

  Israel was forced back behind its own lines once more and things went back to normal: more rockets into Galilee, more IDF commando probes, but nothing on the scale of before.

  There is still the occasional explosive charge laid and some very prominent people – mainly Christians – continue to be murdered. Syria, as always, stays menacing. The old President Hafez al-Assad is long gone, his place taken by Bashar, who we’d all hoped would be a moderating alternative. How wrong we were.

  Bashar Assad had been working as a dentist in London when he was called to take over in Syria. Because of the number of assassinations since orchestrated by his security people – including another old friend, Prime Minister Rafic Hariri (who’d actually bought my son’s 100,000acre hunting concession along the Kafue River in Zambia) – that brutal tyrant is now vilified by almost all the people of Lebanon, Muslims as well as Christians. Though curiously, hardly ever by anyone linked to Hizbollah…

  During the course of the civil war, Beirut took a monumental plastering from both sides over many years. Nothing was left intact. However, once the fighting had ended, reconstruction started almost immediately and these scenes in downtown Beirut are no more. (Author’s collection)

  Looking back, only now can one appreciate how Lebanon’s children must have suffered in that war. Children in the Levant tend to be spoilt and pampered anyway; and all the more because of the war. They were seldom visible except when things were safe, usually only fleetingly.

  During hostilities, an entire generation of Lebanese children seemed to live in bunkers, parking garages and basements: catacombs, as it were. There were subterranean playgrounds with swings, sandpits, jungle-gyms and games. Naturally the kids almost all looked pale, except those in the mountains or at school. Of course they pined for sun and air, and came out whenever they could, but as soon as a social pattern of sorts became evident, the other side would hurl mortars.

  We see it often enough on TV these days: dying or mangled children being taken to hospitals in Chechnya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Darfur and Iraq especially, all corners of the world where Islamic zealots remain active. For those who have experienced it from up close, this is not something you can get used to. Certainly, normal people can’t.

  Those of us who recorded these events, in script or on TV, were outsiders. Very few of us had emotional ties with the Lebanon. Most of us tried to preserve a degree of objectivity, but it was impossible to be dispassionate amid the horrors of such sights and sounds, especially once you got to know the people hosting you and could see and underst
and their problems first hand.

  The children who suffered the worst were those in the dreadful camps to which Palestinian refugees had been consigned. One camp I visited in Tyre defies description. There was no running water and nothing that even resembled a bathroom like you and I regularly visit. Children were playing in their own excrement. These were lost souls, abandoned by the world, even today. We seldom see that side of things in Western television reports.

  It was a child who left me with one of my most memorable moments of this war. I’d been staying with a family in the foothills above Beirut and we were woken up by the wails of half a dozen Katyusha rockets that screamed over our heads as we lay in our beds. If you were awake, you heard them coming and for a second or two your heart would stop. As they shot past, you knew you could breathe again. Moments later explosions higher up the Shouff told all.

  Then your thoughts would turn to those who had taken incoming who were possibly wounded or burnt alive… or had been killed outright. And when you heard ambulances in the distance, you just knew there had been casualties. It happened almost every night and clearly, it could have been us at the receiving end.

  At breakfast one morning, one of the children mentioned the rockets that had gone over the house the previous night. The father translated what the little girl said:

  ‘The most beautiful sound in the world’, were her words.

  ‘What sound is that?’ I asked.

  ‘Screaming rockets… when they go right over our house and we know we’re safe.’

  In Lebanon, who could argue?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Lagos and an Army Mutiny

  Like the earliest of loves, coming under fire that first time, if not sacrosanct, leaves its mark. Rubbing shoulders with the Reaper is unforgettable, a milestone of sorts. The fact is, I’ve yet to meet anyone who simply sails through combat: I’ve always found the experience unsettling. My so-called baptism of fire came in Nigeria in the mid 1960s and the events that took place remain etched in my mind as if it were a week ago. But first, I need to set the scene…