Barrel of a Gun

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Barrel of a Gun Page 31

by Al Venter


  Should members of the unit cross into South Lebanon, they would have with them infra-red sensors that would be able to indicate whether there was somebody hiding camouflaged in a wadi, or what equipment was being unloaded from the trunk of a car many miles away. All transmissions are in code, which the Syrians have been trying to jam for years.

  This air force station in the hills east of Ayta Ash Sha’b was not named. It was called the ‘Volcano Contingent’ and appropriately so. The principal weapon, mounted on APCs, was the American six-barrelled 20mm ‘Vulcan’ Gatling and there were two of them.

  The camp, right up against the Lebanese fence, was reached by a narrow road, again lined on both sides with signs that warned about mines. The entire perimeter, about a third of a mile long, consisted of bulldozed earth ramparts. In the distance there were several towns, all Muslim, their minarets reflecting the sun in the early morning light. The only human movement was that of locals weeding the tobacco crop in adjacent fields.

  Like most other Israeli camps in the region, there were 35 soldiers at the post; five were women who were responsible for communications and intelligence. Also of note was the fact that almost none of them were over the age of 21. The commander and my host was a 21-year-old electronics expert with the rank of a lieutenant; his second-in-command was about a year older and also male.

  Breakfast was being served when we arrived, good old-fashioned yoghurt, herrings, pita and green salad with cucumber predominating. There was coffee, lots of it, black and strong. I could just as easily have been back at the King David in Jerusalem. Meanwhile, in the arrivals area outside, more vehicles had just come in: a new contingent had taken over from the night shift.

  Things started with a brief overview. The men spent a maximum of three weeks at the camp, after which they went home on leave, which was compulsory and couldn’t be accumulated. The only exemptions from call-up were on medical or religious grounds; almost 20 per cent of the population was so exempted, I learnt afterwards from an article in the Jerusalem Post.

  ‘We work to fixed routines’, said the commander (who asked whether I spoke any Spanish). He was from Argentina and though he said his English was ‘not too good’, it was fine.

  ‘At first light we all stand-to. In the past, if it happened at all, the terrorists would attack at dawn or at sunset. Then everyone must be ready… no other way.’

  ‘Have you ever been attacked?’ I asked. I didn’t expect an answer but he gave me one anyway.

  ‘Not directly; but we have been mortared. And in April there were many Katyushas’, he told me

  ‘On the camp?’

  ‘One or two, but we were in the bunkers. Most of them hit outside.’ He pointed to a nearby kibbutz.

  ‘Not on the people. In the fields. But near.’

  ‘And mines?’

  ‘Over there, plenty.’ He pointed north. ‘None in Israel.’

  The work was not boring, he suggested. At first he had some difficulty with the diverse group of people under his command. There were Falasha Ethiopians, Jews from India and Canada, some British and quite a few from Arab states such as Morocco, the Yemen and Iraq. Some were Sabras, second-, third- and fourth-generation Israelis. The lieutenant’s family had originally come from Rosario.

  Also at the camp were handfuls of Americans and Russians and occasionally there were problems. ‘Nothing serious: but you know how us young people are.’ He was enjoying the session, in part because I was genuinely interested. Most journalists, he’d found, went to the operational area for the ride and the pictures.

  An interesting aspect dealt with men or women who’d simply had enough of the routine and who wanted to go home. As I was to discover, the IDF had its own way of dealing with such people.

  ‘I had one of these people two weeks ago, young guy, about 19 or 20 and he said he was going crazy. He had to go home.’

  Those dissatisfied with life in the army are never prevented from leaving, he disclosed. ‘They’re taken before the camp commander and warned that when they came back, whether it is after a week or a month, they’d be charged and jailed… all done under military law and two weeks in detention usually follows.’ The time of absence and in detention is added to the period of compulsory military service and it had to be served, one of the officers explained.

  ‘When he gets back to his unit afterwards, life goes on as usual, both for him and for us. No hard feelings. We all just get on with our jobs.’ he said.

  The obvious role of the camp was to pinpoint enemy fire. For that it was equipped with an American ‘guidance’ system called ‘Unit 37’ the operators of which had been trained in the United States. The majority of specialists served three months at a stretch Stateside. It has since been superseded by other weapons systems.

  While details were classified, I was told that Unit 37 used a method of ‘saturating forward areas with radio frequencies and analyzing their disruption by an explosion’.

  In winter it gets bitterly cold in parts of Lebanon, particularly along the ice-clad slopes of Mount Hermon, where I spent a week with DanBatt, the Danish UN detachment. (Author’s collection)

  The response was automatic, effectively within three minutes. This was one of the reasons why Hizbollah units bombarding Israel like to disappear as soon as they’ve launched their rockets, missiles or mortar bombs. A conspicuous feature of the camp was the stacks of liquid nitrogen tanks placed around the periphery at irregular intervals. They were used for cooling infra-red instruments, essential in the heat.

  Life at all Israeli military establishments along the Lebanese border, of necessity, is focused on the eight or ten mmiles of security fence, with each camp responsible for its own stretch. Some of the control panels in the operations rooms were electronically linked to the fence and were geared to give warning of a breakthrough. There were also regular patrols along a well-maintained security road; two vehicles in the day and three at night, when the patrol is customarily led by an officer.

  Targets are all graded according to threat level. Some warnings are electronic; a pressure on the wire of about 10 kilos, for instance, will set off one signal; anything over 30 kilos triggers something else. There are sensitive sensors for ground movement as well as infra-red, radio and TV monitors and quite a few that the IDF does not talk about. At any point along the border there are at least a dozen different impediments.

  Apparently, it was easier for Hizbollah to cross farther towards the east, because the terrain was less uniform and more difficult to guard because of high points, valleys and steep gradients. In this area, a machine sprayed fine dust adjacent to the fence so that patrols could spot any kind of disturbance. All was constantly checked.

  A chart on the wall of the camp operations centre categorized some of the tactics that Hizbollah had used to cross the frontier into Israel. Besides the usual array of small boats that included high-speed racing craft, there were several acoustic and contact mines depicted (all Israeli patrol boats now carry depth charges) and among about 30 others, photos of the pair of sleek, powerful jet-skis, used by the insurgents who had tried to run the naval blockade from Tyre the previous year but were killed by gunfire from a patrol boat; their craft was found to be packed with explosives. IDF intelligence sources later reported that the objective had been to ram a pleasure craft off Haifa; another suicide operation.

  Various types of scuba equipment were also on view, including some well-known brands made in America. One was a Farallon diver propulsion vehicle, state-of-the-art for this kind of unconventional warfare which, said the lieutenant, was what this affair was all about.

  I was made aware of the sinking of a small submarine in Israeli waters in the late 1970s by depth charges, even though Jerusalem never released details. It took place in deeper water off Tel Aviv, all of which adds a new dimension to this ongoing low-key conflict.

  However, an anti-submarine tracking systems have improved a hundredfold-fold since I spent my three years in the navy. Even Hizbollah
would be aware that if America has the most advanced undersea tracking systems, then in all probability so has Israel. And while using suicide bombers is encouraged by Party of God commanders if tangible benefits are derived from actions, sending people to almost certain death in risky, unproved maritime exploits is another matter.

  This could be one of the reasons why so little use has been made of the dozen underwater craft it is known to possess. But then again, since Iran is involved in all of this, who knows what long-term plans are afoot for their deployment.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Marj’Ayoun and the South Lebanese Army

  ‘At Israeli behest, the South Lebanese Army was set up as a Christian militia under the command of Major Sa’ad Haddad in 1978, its prime role being to assist the Jewish State counter Palestinian terror. After the Lebanese War, and once Jerusalem had established its so-called security or “exclusion” zone, it was the job of the Israeli Army to help the SLA maintain its dominant position in the region.’

  GlobalSecurity.org

  HE WAS A BOY, NOT more than 18 years old, and he kept firing at the UN position until his magazine was empty. Nobody shot back from any of the strongpoints that surrounded the base.

  One moment the youngster was walking down the road towards Ebel es Saqi, the next he’d levelled his M16 and was firing on full auto. He obviously wasn’t Hizbollah because they’ve always preferred the AK-47 to anything Western.

  At the time I’d been in one of the battalion halls, a few hundred feet from where all this was taking place, with my UN escort, Captain Fredrik Amland, Norwegian Battalion (Norbatt) in South Lebanon. The also youthful Amland was one of about 1,000 Scandinavian soldiers deployed in South Lebanon with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). Half were Norwegian, the rest from Finland.

  The firing surprised us all. Though we didn’t take cover, the fusillade halted everything in the mess where we were eating at the time, automatic fire in the Levant tending to have that effect. Some of the soldiers stopped what they were doing, which was when the captain went out to check.

  ‘It’s one of those fuckers, shooting at us’, Amland reported when he’d returned to his meal. He spoke in an accent that reflected time spent in Newcastle in England and, clearly, wasn’t much bothered.

  ‘Who’s shooting?’ I asked. He didn’t answer immediately. When I asked again he said brusquely: ‘fucking DFF. Just walked up to one of our OPs [observation posts] and started shooting… no reason at all …’

  DFF or De Facto Forces was argot for the South Lebanese Army, which their Israeli patrons referred to as the SLA. In fact the abbreviation signified a good deal more: DFF meant anyone ‘on the other side’ with weapons.

  ‘Someone hurt?’ Another officer queried

  ‘Nobody. Not even a scratch.’

  Didn’t his people return fire? No retaliation at all? I asked.

  He hesitated a moment, clearly annoyed at the inference and then replied in the negative.

  ‘So what’s the upshot? What you going to do about it?’

  Silence. Now it was the captain’s reticence that had become bothersome.

  ‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing’, he finally declared. He then added, almost as an afterthought, that since the shooter was DFF, there was nothing to be done. Were they to take any kind of action against the man such as arrest him or keep him in a cell a day or a week, the local community would be in an uproar. The UN might be accused of siding with the ‘hated fucking Jews across the border’, my escort suggested and he was quite serious.

  ‘What about next time? It might be you or me that’s in his sights?’ I declared warily. It could easily happen and he knew that. In fact, it already had, just weeks before. Then a sniper – not a very good one, mark you – had targeted several UN soldiers and wounded one of them. The man only stopped taking pot shots when the UN commander demanded a meeting with the elders of the man’s village and from what I gathered afterwards, the man shared the views of the majority of South Lebanon’s Christian population at the time: UN troops were regarded as interlopers and were not properly doing their job.

  Still, it wasn’t my problem and Lebanon, we were all aware, could be a dangerous place. Each of us had accepted that much within hours of getting there. Look askance at somebody on the open road and he might draw a gun, was the usual bar-room comment. At a hint of a pretext he’d probably kill you, happily, and then go home to his wife and kids and possibly first stop off at his mosque along the way.

  I’d seen something similar take place once to a car ahead of me while driving through the Shouff during a visit to Druze positions a few years before. A car had pulled abreast of another and the two drivers were having a chat, oblivious of passing traffic trying to get through. Eventually another driver got out of his car, pulled a pistol from his belt, put it against the head of one of the culprits, a juvenile, barely old enough to qualify for a licence.

  All I got was the gist of what was perhaps a 20-second discussion: if the youngster didn’t move, he’d blow him away. Moments later, in a screech of burning rubber, the car pulled away.

  ‘Where’s the guy now?’ I asked Amland.

  ‘His own people have taken him away.’ It was an absurd situation, like the war in the adjoining countryside.

  Later the captain said something about it being typical of these irregular hostilities. He confided that he’d rather the whole fucking Lebanese business had never happened. As it was, he was embarrassed at having to talk about something that officially didn’t happen, probably wasn’t even entered into the log, and with an almost total stranger to boot.

  Later, the captain admitted that there would be no official protest. No questions had been asked, nor would any be. Nor were any apologies asked for or given, because at that stage the 3,000 members of the SLA were held in contempt by the UN, even though they constituted half the military forces in this low-key guerrilla insurgency in an area a good deal smaller than Greater London. The other half was Hizbollah.

  For decades Marj’Ayoun was at the heart of the Christian Lebanese struggle in South Lebanon. A short distance from Metulla in Northern Israel, it was the headquarters of the South Lebanese Army. Then, without warning early in the New Millennium, the Israeli Army pulled its forces back behind its own borders, leaving this community to be dealt with as Hizbollah saw fit. It was a bitter betrayal. (Author’s collection)

  I wasn’t the only one who thought that the situation was bizarre. To disregard the presence of an Israeli-supported military unit, much as the UN was trying to do, was almost like the British government ignoring every Roman Catholic in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

  That was Lebanon then. It is also Lebanon today, where anything but the most serious kind of bloodletting rarely gets the attention it might deserve.

  I discovered afterwards that the man who’d let fly at the guard post came from Marj’Ayoun, a stark hilltop town of cinder blocks and rutted streets. This was the most Christian village in the eastern part of the security zone. It was also Israel’s forward command and control centre in the region and the headquarters of the SLA while that element was still active.

  Modest, even by Arab standards, Marj’Ayoun was a rather nondescript Middle Eastern village which boasted barely 12,000 inhabitants. With Hizbollah today dominating the entire region, only a fraction of the original Christian families remain. The majority have suffered the same fate as other Christian communities in the Arab West Bank further to the south, like Nazareth, Taibe, Ramallah and Beit Jala.

  Marj’Ayoun was an important focus to many Lebanese Christians then, just as staunchly Shi’ite Nabatiya is to Hizbollah today. Before Israel pulled its troops out of South Lebanon, Marj’Ayoun was the nerve centre of all SLA operations in the region. Most of the senior officers of this Christian militia lived there. Almost all its houses were gathered in untidy clusters round several large hills, some half-finished, others two or three storeys high and still unfinished, in large measure be
cause of ongoing hostilities. Marj’Ayoun saw a lot of action in its day and many of the men with whom I came into contact, a few of whom became friends, ended up dead because of it.

  The main road wound through the town. Near the centre, even today, it is sometimes only wide enough for a single vehicle as it twists and turns on its north–south axis. In the old days, roads branching out from Marj’Ayoun would shoot off in all directions and stop where the minefields began.

  There were scores of shops on either side of the main road, but not as we know them in the West. These are adjuncts to the family dwelling, so there were always old people and children about, the latter playing almost under the wheels of passing cars. Elsewhere, there were cluttered little workshops, usually with two or three men sitting out in front drinking coffee or pulling from a hookah.

  The smell of cooking was everywhere; falafel, or mutton ribs or a shank over an open fire by the roadside, much of it dominated by the powerful scent of cardamom.

  In those days, if you sat on the flat roof of one of the houses near where Samy Talj ran his little garage, you could see much of the surrounding countryside, usually with a couple of GPMGs covering local ground from behind clusters of sandbags. Anybody who has used a ‘Gimpey’ in combat knows what a comfort these guns are in a scrap.

  These were Western weapons though, and the SLA used captured Soviet stuff. I concluded from the deafening silence from my escort on this subject that they’d probably been filched from one of the UN squads.

  Unlike Beirut, where everything leads up to the mountains, the country around Marj’Ayoun is largely rock-strewn. Many of the high points were defended, though you saw little of those fortifications from the town. In the valleys and wadis between them, there had been some hard fighting.

 

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