Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (12 page)

Our days were filled with a mixture of fear and boredom, accompanied by extreme discomfort. The Muslims had cut off the public water mains to our town. Thank God we lived in Marjayoun, “the valley of springs.” In between the shelling, but still under the snipers' sights, my mother and I would take plastic containers and crawl carefully down to one of the many nearby springs. It was normally a five-minute walk from the house, but since we had to crawl in the ditch along the road to elude snipers, sometimes it would take us hours to reach the spring, fill our containers, and get back to the shelter. The pool at the spring hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. My mother had to put nylon stockings over the tops of our water containers to filter out the dirt, worms, and rocks that came out with the water. Each of us carried two containers. Papa couldn’t go with us because of his arthritis. Also, if the shelling started he wouldn’t hear it and wouldn’t be able to get back to the shelter fast enough. Because getting water was such a major undertaking, we strictly rationed it. We would drink only when we got very thirsty, and limited ourselves to one quick sponge bath per week.

Sometimes on those long trips crawling to and from the spring I would wonder about the snipers. Knowing that someone is actually looking at you ready to pull the trigger, trying to kill you personally, not just at random, is a surreal experience. I would wonder if the sniper was a young boy or an old man. Was he a teenager? I sometimes thought that maybe, if it weren’t for the war, we would be in the same school (the Muslims went to the Catholic schools also, as the education was better than public schools) and visit in the courtyard together, maybe even dance at school parties. Instead, he was trying to murder me. I wondered if he would feel satisfaction watching me as I fell down after his bullets hit me. What would he say? Would he brag about it? Would he call his friends and boast, “Hey, I killed the girl with the long brown hair and the yellow water container. Come look, she’s dead.” I wondered if he ever thought I was pretty or ugly. I wondered if he had sisters or daughters my age. I wondered if he hoped to kill me first, or my mother. Which would have given him more joy? Watching my mother cry desperately while she struggled to drag me back to the shelter after I got hit, or watching me cry desperately trying to save her?

When you live in silence and isolation you have a lot of time to think—and imagine the many possible ways you will meet your own death.

Food was, of course, just as much a concern as water—but even harder to come by. Mama and I would sneak out of the shelter, avoiding the snipers, to gather some green grass and weeds that grew in our garden and around the shelter. Sometimes the only vegetables we had to eat were grass and a variety of weeds. Mama would rinse the weeds and put them in a pan with some minced garlic, olive oil, and a drop of lemon juice. It’s amazing how delicious they could be, especially dandelion mixed with garlic. We actually developed a taste for certain weeds, and would look forward to dinner with real excitement when we found them. We thought of these favorites as our “gourmet grass.” Certain weeds tasted lemony; others had wide leaves that could be used as lettuce. Some grass we ate green with olives, and some with lentils.

Our lives fell into a pattern around our chores. During the day we would clean the kerosene lantern we used at night. Because the light burned all night, by morning the glass would be black from the soot and smoke. We had to clean it and trim the cotton wick so it would burn again the following night. The other chore was to take the potty outside, dump it, and clean it. Once these two things were done there was not much else to do.

About four o’clock one morning, Mama needed to go to the bathroom. When she put her feet down from the bed, she discovered she was standing in water up to her knees. She picked up our kerosene light and saw that an underground spring had broken through to the surface and flooded our bomb shelter. Papa ran outside under an artillery barrage to get a bucket so we could bail out the water. The shelling slowed and the rain stopped about an hour later. We brought more blankets from the house and put them on the floor of the shelter to absorb the water from the spring, and then we evacuated to a little room under our balcony that we had used as a chicken coop before the war. Until our bomb shelter dried out, it was the safest place to be.

We felt vulnerable in the room under the balcony because it was completely exposed. A shell could easily come through the ceiling. If one exploded nearby it would blow the front wall in. But we had no choice. We had nowhere else to go. We spread out our blankets and sat with each other by candlelight. I looked at my parents; they looked very old to me. I was thirteen. My mother was sixty-eight and had developed high blood pressure, and Papa at seventy-three was suffering from arthritis worsened by the humidity in the shelter. It took three days for our shelter to dry out enough to be livable again. In the meantime, we huddled together each night, fearing that the next shell was going to land on our roof.

When we returned to the shelter on the fourth day, it was all white inside. Because the sun couldn’t enter the shelter, the walls had developed a fuzzy white snowlike mold in the humidity. It was as if we lived in a cotton room. The damp moldy smell combined with the smell of the toilet to create an unbearable stench.

To make matters worse, I had come of age and was having terrible cramps and crying from pain. My mother gave me a piece of black tire rubber to bite on when the pain became overwhelming. We still had a few bottles of fancy liqueur and wine in the shelter left over from my father’s restaurant. These bottles now became our only pain medication— there was no going to a pharmacy. So my father would open up a bottle of Johnnie Walker, fill a cup, and hand it to me. He would say, “Now, honey, in one sip, just drink down the whole cup.” I hated the taste of that stuff, but I would force myself to drink it, and within a few minutes I would go into a daze that would last for hours. For three days every month, this became my other nightmare.

Radio Monte Carlo, the only radio station we could get in the bomb shelter, became our only connection to the outside world. Its hourly news briefs helped us predict what our next hour was going to be like. For instance, if we heard that Christians in Beirut had bombed the PLO refugee camps in retaliation for a PLO terrorist act against them, we knew that life was going to be hell that night. If we heard that some Muslim headquarters in another part of Lebanon had been hit, we knew that in about two hours the shelling was going to rain down on us in response.

Sometimes the radio had good news, such as an announcement of a cease-fire agreement and how long it would last. These periodic ceasefires were important because at these times it became a bit safer for us to fetch water from the spring nearby. Not entirely safe, however. Cease-fires would stop the shelling, but not the snipers. Even during cease-fires, they felt free to shoot at anything in our town that moved.

Periodically, Caritas, a Catholic relief organization, would send supply boxes filled with rice, beans, dried milk, tuna, oil, flour for bread, and sometimes blankets. When Caritas held a distribution at a church or some other location, a cease-fire would be called, in some elaborate arrangement involving the UN. The distribution would be scheduled a week in advance so all parties would know.

On distribution days, my father and I would go to the distribution center, take a number, and stand in line. Unfortunately, many of the young men would shove and push until they got to the distribution door, grab a box, and leave. When people have to fight for survival, the stronger will always walk over the weaker. Papa was old and weak, and his feet hurt. He would stand to the side, leaning against a wall, waiting for his number to be called. Most of the time we were left until the end.

It tore my heart to see my father being treated this way. As a girl in an Arab culture I could not command respect, and I didn’t have big brothers to fight for me. I painfully remember one day when Papa and I went to one of the Caritas relief giveaways held at the community center in town. We had taken a number and were standing in a long line on the street in front of the building. There were no walls for my father to lean on that day. So many people forced their way into the line ahead of us that when our time came we were told, “You are going to have to come again tomorrow.” My father said, “Please, I can barely walk. I stood here in line for three hours.” But the man shut the gate in his face and said again, “Sorry, you are going to have to come back tomorrow."

Seeing my father, with tears in his old wrinkly eyes, being turned away, I exploded. I started banging on the gate and calling the gatekeeper “a bastard without a heart” and all sorts of names. “Screw you and your donations!” I shouted. “That man,” I said, pointing to my father, “donated the money to buy the ground you are standing on, before you were even born. We don’t need you. You can shove it!” I yelled as I tore our number into little pieces. I threw it at the gate, and the scraps flew all over. My father grabbed me by the arm, telling me to stop crying. “Why did you do that?” he said. “Now we won’t get any food."

Both angry and ashamed, I hung on to him as we walked slowly back to the shelter.

My mother spent the rest of that afternoon massaging my father’s legs, which ached from having been standing up all morning. After dinner that evening, my mother and I sat on our beds talking. Papa was very quiet. He tried to get up to walk to the bathroom, but got only a few steps toward the door. His legs were shaking so badly that he lost his balance and fell down. As Mama and I helped him get up, he looked toward the oppressive ceiling of our shelter and, like Job of ancient times, screamed, “God, how could you let something like this happen to me? I am the one who served you all my life."

At one point we heard that we would be having two days of ceasefire. We decided to take the time to make our bomb shelter more protected. Papa went downtown and had men bring back sand for sandbags to fortify our shelter. For the next two days we worked feverishly, filling sandbags and using them to create a wall in front of the shelter that would stop the shrapnel. We also spread sandbags on top of the shelter for more protection. It was a good thing we did. When the fighting resumed, it was fiercer than ever. Big artillery now entered the picture—155-millimeter cannons, which fired an explosive shell about six inches in diameter.

One spring evening, after dinner, it was warm enough that we didn’t have to make a fire. For a moment, the familiar sound of crickets in the garden made the world seem peaceful and normal. We knew that the shelling would probably pick up again around ten o’clock. But we had been listening to the news earlier, and there had been some talk about a peace proposal, so we went to sleep hoping that the warring factions would agree on something soon and that our nightmare would come to an end.

The enemy forces started shelling with the big 155s at around eleven that night. Each shell that landed felt like a volcano erupting, and would dig a crater into the ground six feet deep and eight to ten feet wide, lifting up rocky dirt and throwing it as far as a hundred meters. I was terrified. A direct hit would kill us instantly.

My father got out of his bed, which faced the door, and sat next to us on our bed. We prayed to God to have mercy on us. Five minutes later, a bomb landed just outside in front of the bomb-shelter door. At first we thought the bomb had exploded inside, because the room was lit up as if the sun itself had landed on us. I was shrieking and crying hysterically. Smoke filled the room. As we regained our senses we gradually realized that we were still alive and uninjured. We just sat there holding each other tightly.

The morning came and with it the realization that somehow the door had become blocked, and we were trapped. It was so dark we could barely see. In a lull in the shelling that morning, my parents tried to determine what had happened. All they could see was that the cement block, which took three men to carry, had fallen sideways on top of the door under all of the sandbags. There was no way that the three of us—an old man, his old wife, and a small thirteen-year-old girl—were going to move it. We tried anyway for about two hours until we became exhausted. We were kidding ourselves. We couldn’t loosen it or move even a single sandbag. The only way we would be freed was if someone dug from the outside. Papa attempted to comfort us by saying, “Don’t worry. A soldier will pass by and see this without a doubt. We will be just fine.” But I knew it would take some real luck for that to happen, because our shelter was hidden behind my father’s restaurant building, about twelve yards off the road. No one driving or walking by could see it.

Since the shelling had been so heavy during the past few days, we hadn’t had a chance to go to the spring in a week. Only one and half bottles of water remained. We figured that the water would last us two days if we conserved it. Our stock of dry food was also low. We ate breakfast and decided to sit silently all day to conserve energy. If we heard someone walking by, then we would scream for help. Nine hours of silence went by with no sound of anyone passing. By the afternoon of the second day, we decided we had to try again to free ourselves. We worked for about an hour trying to move the block, but finally gave up, overcome by exhaustion. We hadn’t been getting enough sleep because of the shelling, and were hungry and thirsty because we were rationing food and water. By the third morning the fear of death was there in the dark tomblike room. We prayed for help.

We were out of water, but we did have some rice and lentils left. Our plan for water if no one found us by the following day was to drink the urine collected in the can.

We tearfully embraced and began to say our good-byes to each other. As we sat together on the edge of the bed, my parents told me how much they loved me, how much joy I had brought them, how deeply they regretted that I had to go through this. They told me stories about when I was a little girl, the things I used to do and songs I used to sing. Once again, they told me they loved me higher than the sky, deeper than the ocean, and bigger than the whole wide world.