10
On a rainy night in April 1984 I decided that it was time for me to leave Beirut. Ann had been evacuated by Marine helicopter, along with several hundred other Americans, during the Shiite uprising in February, so I was staying in our cavernous apartment by myself. The Druse had set up an old 50-caliber-machine-gun nest adjacent to our building in order to scare off any Phalangist or Israeli ships that cruised too close to shore. There is nothing that gets the adrenaline flowing faster than being woken in the dead of night by a burst of 50-caliber-machine-gun fire, which always sounded to me like a whole army of crazed militiamen storming my apartment. I had perfected a move whereby the second I heard the gun go off I could roll out of bed and right under it with two turns of my body.
In any event, on that April evening a terrible thunderstorm was beating down on Beirut. I somehow managed to get to sleep between thunderclaps but was jarred awake at about 2:00 a.m. when several explosions shook the apartment and rattled the windows. Half asleep, I couldn’t tell whether it was thunder or shelling. I listened carefully for a moment and then detected the whistle of incoming mortars. Our whole West Beirut neighborhood was being shelled from East Beirut.
My first instinct was to jump out of bed and run into the bathroom in the middle of the apartment, because it was the only room that did not have any windows. There I sat on the toilet, my head in my hands, waiting for the shelling to stop, while listening through the pipes as the women in the apartment below me, who were also hiding in their bathroom, wailed, “God save me, I just can’t take it anymore.” As the shelling intensified, my news instincts came alive and I crawled on my hands and knees from the bathroom into my office and dialed the telephone number of the Times foreign desk in New York. Before anyone answered, though, I put the phone down.
You idiot, I thought to myself, this kind of shelling has been going on every night since the civil war started. Nine years! Tonight it just happens to be your house, but it’s not news. If it were anywhere else in town, you would have put the pillow over your own head and gone back to sleep.
So I crawled back into the bathroom, sat back down on the toilet, and waited for the cease-fire. All I could think was: This is really crazy. I am the New York Times correspondent in Beirut. I am being shelled, and it’s not news. It’s time to leave.
It would be a few more months before I would actually depart, but as the day approached, I began having second thoughts. I was drawn to the Beirut story like a moth to a candle. Some of my colleagues had come to Beirut and could not leave because they had become hooked on their own adrenaline and on the daily bang-bang that gets you on the front page or the evening news. I was not immune to that myself, but there was always something more for me. When I think back on Beirut now, I barely remember the close calls or the adrenaline highs. Instead, I always come back to certain moments—all those remarkable human encounters I got to witness that taught me more about people and what they are made of than the previous twenty-five years of my life. I got to see with my own eyes the boundaries of men’s compassion alongside their unfathomable brutality, their ingenuity alongside astounding folly, their insanity alongside their infinite ability to endure.
Of course, for the Lebanese who starred in the moments of my memory, there was no thrill, only the numbing routine of survival, punctuated by an occasional moment of levity. I never forgot that my moments were usually their nightmares. Gerald Butt, the BBC correspondent in Beirut, told me a story that happened toward the end of the summer of ‘82 that really brought this home to me. A group of Lebanese doctors and nurses had decided to organize a protest march across the Green Line from West Beirut to East Beirut, in order to draw world attention to the Israeli siege, which had caused a shortage of medical supplies in West Beirut. The march took place at the Galerie Sama’an crossing point between East and West, a barren mile-long stretch of road flanked by half-destroyed apartment buildings purged of all life except snipers.
“At the time, I really didn’t think about it being dangerous,” Butt later recalled. “I just thought, Well, here’s a story that I should be covering, so I joined the march. There were about twenty doctors and nurses and someone at the front carried a Red Cross flag. When we got about halfway across the Green Line, I looked around and saw that there was no cover anywhere. We were in the middle of the Green Line! There was shelling nearby, snipers all around, and I was walking with these doctors. I just said to myself, ‘What am I doing here?’ And then I turned to look back and I saw a Lebanese man just a few meters behind us, and he was leading a white horse. A white horse! It looked like a racehorse. He must have heard that there was going to be a march across the Green Line and he wanted to use us for cover to get his horse out of West Beirut. He probably couldn’t feed it because of the shortage of food and water. It was so surreal. These doctors, and the Red Cross flag and the shelling, and this man tagging along with his white racehorse.”
It is for such moments that a reporter is drawn to Beirut, and stays there long after good sense tells him he should leave. The front-page stories, the six-column headlines over my byline, all were a great thrill at the time. But they don’t last; only the moments do.
I learned this lesson, like every other one in Beirut, the hard way. I had had an understanding with my editors that I would stay in Beirut during the summer of ’82 until the day the PLO finally was evacuated. Then I was planning to go on vacation to settle my frayed nerves. My editors understood that it was personally very important for me to be in Beirut until the climax. Having witnessed the invasion from the very beginning, I wanted to see how the story would end and be able to write the last chapter of the PLO in Beirut for The New York Times.
As I noted earlier, the first day of the PLO’s departure, August 21, 1982, I had gone down to the port early to watch the French peacekeeping troops land. A few hours later, trucks of PLO fighters began to arrive. Everyone seemed to be wearing new uniforms; I don’t know where they got them. There were some tearful farewells, but mostly V-for-victory signs, and so much firing of bullets into the air in celebration that the ground at my feet became carpeted in brass shell cases. We watched as truck after truck entered the harbor and the guerrillas piled onto the Cypriot ferries for their trip to Tunis. In a few hours it was all over.
I stayed behind afterward just to savor this scene, which marked the end of an era. I fell into conversation with some young Palestinians who had bade farewell to their brothers and became so absorbed in our discussion that when I finally said goodbye to them I discovered the street was empty, save for two other people, Arthur Blessit and his son Joshua. Arthur Blessit was known as the Sunset Boulevard Preacher; he had walked to West Beirut from Israel to pray for peace, dragging a 13-foot-long wooden cross with a wheel on the bottom. His young son Joshua carried a similar, smaller cross on his shoulder. Arthur, to put it bluntly, was one of the many lunatics that the Beirut war attracted. He and Joshua had also come to see the PLO off that day. As I was leaving the port, Arthur picked up his huge cross, set it gently on his shoulder, and said to his son, “Well, Joshua, I guess we saw the peace we came for. It’s time to go home.”
For me, too. It was about 4:00 p.m. by then, and I immediately went to the Reuters office to write the story for which I had waited three long and difficult months. I wrote and wrote with the energy of a reporter who knows that his article will form a small part of an important historical record. And then my reporter’s nightmare came to life.
Just as I finished typing out my story, all the communications lines between West Beirut and the rest of the world went dead. Dead—even the Commodore’s communications. The telephone. The telex, everything. Kaput. Finished. There I was, with the final chapter of the summer of ’82 all typed and no way to send it to New York. The generator at the Beirut Post, Telegraph, and Telex office had burned out, and there was no one who would venture down to the Green Line on a Saturday afternoon to fix it. It was the first and only time Beirut was completely cut off from the outside world that whole summer. The blackout lasted twenty-four hours. The telex operators at Reuters punched my whole story into telex tape and I sat up all night by the Commodore telex, just in case the lines suddenly came alive and I could feed my story to the Times. They never did. The New York Times used an Associated Press story filed earlier in the day, before the communications had crashed. I was left with a souvenir, my farewell to the PLO and the Sunset Boulevard Preacher, which no one will ever read. I still have that story in a shoe box, but, more important, I have the moment, which I will always cherish more than any yellowed newspaper clipping.
Having said all this, I know there is some attraction Beirut held for me that I can’t explain, not even to myself. It is a sort of irrational pull that I think many newsmen feel once or twice in their careers, and it prompts them to do something normal people would consider utterly crazy, like covering Beirut and enjoying it. Whenever I tried to explain it to friends, I was always reminded of the story Woody Allen tells at the end of the movie Annie Hall.
A man goes to his doctor and says, “Doctor, Doctor, I have a terrible problem. My brother thinks he’s a chicken.”
The doctor says, “That’s crazy. Your brother’s not a chicken. Just tell him that.”
And the man says, “I can’t, I need the eggs.”
That went for a lot of us who covered Beirut. Plenty of times it just didn’t make sense to be there, but we kept coming back because we needed the eggs.