Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (15 page)

I had sung a solo at Saturday’s midnight mass. Afterward, Chuck came over to praise me for my singing. I noticed he wore a blue-and-yellow-striped Christian Dior sweater and brand-new pair of Pierre Cardin pants. I complimented him on his appearance. He kindly thanked me and told me how much he was looking forward to seeing me the next day all dolled up for Easter.

With a newfound sense of self-confidence I told him that he was going to like the way I looked. Chuck took my hands, looked deep into my eyes, and told me that his church service would be finished by twelve o’clock, and invited me to eat lunch at his house. I convinced him that we should be with my parents, since I was an only child. He accepted, and left with a big grin on his face, saying, “Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow."

"Me too,” I replied.

The next day was beautiful—the perfect Easter Sunday. I woke up at seven o’clock. Mama and Papa were already in the family room having their coffee and milk for breakfast. I kissed them and wished them a happy holiday. They hugged me. That morning, I think, I was the happiest girl in the world. I drank my milk really fast because I wanted to get dressed and go to the church for an early rehearsal. My parents were going to follow an hour later.

I put on my dress. As I stood in front of the long mirror, fixing my hair, a few rays of sunshine made their way through the curtain and shone straight on my face. The dress showed my figure very well. It fit tight across my breasts, and highlighted my thin waist and beautiful legs. My long black hair fell down my back, stopping at my hips. I felt beautiful, perhaps for the first time in my life. All I could think of was Chuck. I imagined the look on his face when he saw me in this dress. I knew he would ask to kiss me. I just knew it. I could feel it. Chuck would want me to know that he was falling in love with me. I could just tell, especially after all that had been happening between us for the last week. I looked in the mirror for the final approval and left for church after kissing my parents good-bye.

The church filled up very quickly. Everyone wore new clothes. Fresh flowers were in abundance. The altar was beautifully decorated. The mass was perfect. But toward the end of the service, I noticed that a lot of men were talking to each other and then leaving the church in groups. I thought, Oh my God, here it comes. We are going to be put on alert. I thought the shelling was going to start again, but the priest didn’t say anything. He usually interrupted mass to inform people of an alert to give us time to run to shelter.

When the service ended at twelve o’clock, everyone stood around the front of the church talking. I went out hoping that Chuck had finished at his Greek Orthodox service early and would be in the crowd waiting for me. He would know what was going on. I looked for him, but he wasn’t there. While I was going back inside the church to see if he was looking for me there, I overheard a couple of people standing by the door talking about the terrible explosion at the border of town.

"What explosion?” I asked. They told me that Group 8—Chuck’s group—had received a tip that the Palestinians, knowing that this was a holiday, were trying to sneak into the back of town to attack. So the young men had left church, got into their tank, and headed over to the edge of town to see what was going on. The tank had gone over a land mine planted on the side of the road, and the mine had exploded. Three of the group were killed immediately and four others were wounded. My heart stopped.

I tried to control myself as I asked if they knew the names of the men who died. They said, “We heard Eli and Bassam were killed.” Eli and Bassam were Chuck’s best friends, the ones who helped him free my family when we were trapped in our bomb shelter. “And,” they added, “also Chuck . . . but nobody really knows for sure who’s dead and who’s alive."

By the time they finished their sentence, the blood had stopped pumping into my face. Chuck couldn’t be dead. I ran to the street, where Tony, a friend of ours, just happened to be passing by in his car. I stopped him and asked if he had heard anything about Chuck. I told him what I’d heard and suggested we drive to the Good Fence, the border with Israel, because I had heard that the wounded were being transported to Israel for treatment. I saw Mama before we left and told her what had happened, and that I would be home for lunch. I asked her to wait just another half an hour for me.

I hopped into Tony’s car and we drove to the Good Fence, which was about a ten-minute drive south. When we arrived, the ambulance was in the process of unloading bodies. We got out of the car and walked toward the ambulance. It was horrifying. Blood was everywhere. I was able to recognize the two bodies lying in the ambulance as Eli and Bassam. Eli had lost both of his legs and one arm, and the top of his head was gone. Bassam had lost one leg, two arms, and his stomach area. The four who had been wounded were being taken to the hospital. Chuck wasn’t in the ambulance with the other two bodies, so obviously he wasn’t dead. Thank God, I thought; being wounded is better than dead.

We ran to the doctor to see where Chuck had been sent. The doctor said he was still in the ambulance. We said, “No. Only the dead bodies were there, and Chuck wasn’t there."

The doctor replied, “Yes he is,” and turned his face away.

Tony and I looked at each other, puzzled, and ran back to the ambulance, where soldiers were bringing boxes for the bodies. We looked inside the ambulance after they pulled out Bassam and Eli, but there was nothing left but a big plastic bag. The soldiers pulled a third box up to the ambulance. As they slid the plastic bag into the box, I saw Chuck’s name written on its side. And as they pulled the bag over, a human finger fell from it. Without thinking, I bent down, picked it up, and put it in the box with the rest of him.

And then I began to scream so loudly that it hurt my throat. I was hysterical. Tony had tears in his eyes and held my hand until we got to the car. We drove back home without saying a word.

Tony dropped me off at my parents' house and continued on to Chuck’s house. When I told my parents, they began to cry. As we sat at the table to eat, we looked at the empty dish that was intended for Chuck. Mama had prepared the table before she left for church that morning.

The funeral was set for two thirty that same day, about an hour from the time we got the news. They wanted to bury the dead as fast as possible because in response to the attack, shelling was scheduled to begin at four thirty that afternoon.

The coffins were sealed because the bodies were so badly mangled. The boys' mothers screamed in agony, banging on the coffins, pleading to see their sons one last time.

That beautiful Easter had turned into a day of unbearable sorrow. A few hours before, these three young men had been singing in the choir of the same church where their funeral was now being held. When they had left the church on their mission, they were still in their holiday clothes. They left, died, and within hours came straight back to church for their burial ceremony. The church was still decorated with flowers and white satin cloth, inside and out. People were still dressed in their holiday clothes; little girls, looking like little angels, still wore their traditional white satin Easter dresses.

I stood there in my velvet Easter dress next to Chuck’s coffin for our last good-bye. I told him that I hadn’t realized that morning when I put on my lovely new dress—the dress I couldn’t wait for him to see—that I was dressing for his funeral. I cried bitterly as I leaned over his casket, holding on to it so tightly that I could hardly breathe. The funeral was over by three thirty in the afternoon. Then everyone left for their shelters for what turned out to be the beginning of a week of agony, bombing, and despair.

That night, I sat on my bed in the corner of the shelter, numb, listening to the explosions of the artillery shells and thinking about Chuck. My parents kept talking about how Chuck would always check in on us and look out for us. They recalled how Chuck and his friends had saved our lives. Now all three of our rescuers were dead. “How sad,” I remember Papa telling Mama. “The old people who have lived a long life are still here sitting in a bomb shelter, and the young ones are dead. Why didn’t God take us, and let them live?"

I looked at the flickering dying candle trying to burn just a little longer to maintain whatever small glow and thought how similar we were. I had tried to hold on to hope in those few peaceful weeks we had enjoyed, thinking I had a chance to live, to learn, to become something, and to enjoy life. But when I could touch hope, hope vanished in the midst of hate, violence, death, and intolerance. Just when I thought peace was possible I was robbed of my innocence in the most gruesome way. Hope was dying along with my dying candle.

The war had been raging now for seven years as the Western world watched. No one realized what the Christians in Lebanon were going through except the Israeli Jews. They had been facing this force of hatred ever since their inception. Just when I was about to give up on life, when hope died and despair overcame me, fate stepped in to alter my destiny and give me the drive and reason to fight for the life I wanted, desired, and deserved.

Our militia was so angered by the Easter attack that it launched an all-out retaliation attack against the Muslims and Palestinians and their villages. The Muslims fired back with renewed vigor. That’s the Middle East: revenge upon revenge, and it’s usually the civilians who pay the price.

For the next three months things were very uncertain. The fighting had escalated to an unprecedented point. The Palestinians were getting stronger and more aggressive with their attacks. They would start shooting when we least expected it. They would fire a barrage into town at seven thirty in the morning when kids were riding to school and parents were buying food and running errands.

At the same time the Israeli army had set up an artillery base on the hill across the valley from our town. We knew something was up just by looking at the massive construction and listening to the heavy artillery barrages that the Israelis launched. This artillery base was our main defense against the Muslims and the Palestinians. Israel had brought in 155-millimeter cannons that shook our house when they fired. This was the same type of weapon that the combined forces of Syrians, Muslims, and Palestinians had been using against us for four years. We knew things were not going to get better any time soon.

At least after seven years the shelter had become a home of sorts. It was equipped with a radio and the small black-and-white battery-operated TV. Papa used it mostly to watch news programs. There were other things we could do to pass the time and create an atmosphere of normalcy. We had yarn for knitting, thread for crocheting, and old magazines and a few books to read. My father would scavenge wire from telephone poles that were blown up and strip out the smaller colorful wires inside. I would use them to weave baskets and plates using the different colors to create designs. We could play cards and backgammon, which the Lebanese call
tawle.
And, most important, we weren’t starving. We had enough dried meat, beans, rice, and dried fruit to survive. Mama made it a point to prepare one major meal a week, after church on Sunday, and we looked forward to it because there would be some sort of meat served. Sometimes, if the weather was nice and bombs permitting, we could emerge from the shelter and sit on the porch of our ruined house.

Israel was finally fed up with the low-intensity war of attrition that the PLO and Syrian proxy militias were waging from southern Lebanon across the border into northern Israel. In 1970, well before we began living in a bomb shelter, the communities of northern Israel started digging and building their own bomb shelters. Now Israel decided that there needed to be a more thorough effort than 1978's Operation Litani to protect its northern border. A plan to drive the PLO all the way to Beirut and to expel it from Lebanon was put together. The PLO had been terrorizing not only northern Israel, but the entire population of southern Lebanon. In addition to fighting the SLA, made up of both Christians and Shia Muslims, the PLO had been engaged in bitter, open warfare against the Shiite Amal militia for most of the last three years for control of Lebanon. If the puppet Lebanese government, the Syrian puppet master, and the UN’s worthless UNIFIL “peacekeeping force” would do nothing to stop the PLO reign of terror, Israel had to.

For its efforts to protect itself Israel would be bitterly criticized around the world and on the floor of the UN General Assembly. In Lebanon, the majority in both the Christian and Muslim communities rejoiced, but especially among the Christians.

For many in the West, June 6, the anniversary of the beginning of the liberation of Europe from Nazi domination, has a particular significance concerning the overthrow of oppression. For us, June 6, 1982, would come to share a similar meaning. It was the day Israel launched Operation Peace for Galilee, pushing PLO and Muslim forces north toward Beirut. Out of range of their artillery, we were free to come out of our bomb shelters and back to rebuilding our lives.

It began as a typically beautiful Mediterranean spring day, except for the war. We were serenaded by a choir of birds, interrupted occasionally by the sound of shelling somewhere off to the northwest. We’d been trapped in our shelter for three days, and the night before, the shelling had been particularly bad.

Since we’d gotten no sleep because of the shelling, I slept in until almost nine o’clock. By the time I got out of bed, both Mama and Papa were out of the shelter. Mama was making breakfast on the stove in her old kitchen, and Papa was sitting on the porch, having coffee in the sun and listening intently to Radio Monte Carlo, which was reporting large numbers of Israeli troops and equipment massing along the border as if to invade Lebanon. I began to say, “Maybe that’s why the shelling stopped this morning,” but I was interrupted by the blast of a 155-millimeter shell exploding fifty meters away from the house. Before I had a chance to start another thought, a second shell exploded in the backyard, and then it just started raining bombs. I screamed and dragged my father inside the door. Mama was already huddled on the floor. Shrapnel was flying everywhere. The three of us crawled on the floor to the hallway, but we were not safe there, either. We had to make it back to the shelter. We decided that my father should run first, because he could not hear, and he was the weakest of the three of us. I followed next, and then Mama. Two shells exploded ahead of me next to Papa as we ran for the shelter. I tackled him and threw both of us down in the dirt as shrapnel flew in all directions. I dragged Papa to his feet and held him up by his arm as we resumed our desperate dash for the shelter. I had lost track of Mama. As Papa and I reached the shelter door, I pushed him inside and turned to look for Mama. I could not see her in the smoke and dust, so I yelled for her to hurry up. Between the explosions I heard her say that she was coming. I turned to tell my anxious papa that she was on her way, but before I finished my sentence a shell exploded just in front of the shelter. The impact picked me up from where I was standing just inside the door and threw me on the bed. I thought that the explosion must have killed Mama. I picked myself up off the bed, ran to the door of the shelter, and started calling her name, but there was no answer.