Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (5 page)

The Commodore also has restaurants. These are recommended during fighting. The Commodore always manages to get
food delivered no matter what the situation outdoors.

Nightlife begins late in Beirut. Cocktail hour at the Commodore is eight P.M., when U.S. editors and network executives
are safely at lunch (there's a seven-hour time difference). The
Commodore is strictly neutral territory with only one rule. No guns
at the bar. All sorts of raffish characters hang about, expatriates
from Palestine, Libya and Iran, officers in mufti from both sides of
the Lebanese Army, and combatants of other stripes. I overheard
one black Vietnam veteran loudly describe to two British girls how
he teaches orthodox Moslem women to fight with knives. And there
are diplomats, spooks and dealers in gold, arms and other things.
At least that's what they seem to be. No one exactly announces his
occupation- except the journalists, of course.

I met one young lady from Atlanta who worked on a CNN
camera crew. She was twenty-six, cute, slightly plump and looked
like she should have been head of the Georgia State pep squad. I
sat next to her at the Commodore bar and watched her drink
twenty-five gin and tonics in a row. She never got drunk, never
slurred a word, but along about G&T number twenty-two out came
the stories about dismembered babies and dead bodies flying all
over the place and the Red Cross picking up hands and feet and
heads from bomb blasts and putting them all in a trash dumpster.
"So I asked the Red Cross people," she said, in the same sweet
Dixie accent, "like, what's this? Save 'em, collect 'em, trade 'em
with your friends?"

Everyone in Beirut can hold his or her liquor. If you get
queasy, Muhammad, the Commodore bartender, has a remedy
rivaling Jeevess in P.G. Wodehouse's novels. It will steady your
stomach so you can drink more. You'll want to. No one in this part of the world is without a horror story, and, at the Commodore bar,
you'll hear most of them.

Dinner, if anyone remembers to have it, is at ten or so. People
go out in groups. It's not a good idea to be alone and blonde after
dark. Kidnapping is the one great innovation of the Lebanese civil
war. And Reuters correspondent, Johnathan Wright, had disappeared thus on his way to the Bekaa Valley a few days before I
arrived.

If nabbed, make as much noise as possible. Do not get in
anyone's car. If forced in, attack the driver. At least this is what I'm
told.

Be circumspect when driving at night. Other cars should be
given a wide berth. Flick headlights off and on to indicate friendly
approach. Turn on the dome light when arriving at checkpoints.
Militiamen will fire a couple of bursts in your direction if they want
you to slow down.

Clubs, such as the Backstreet near the Australian Embassy,
keep going as late as you can stand it. There's some dancing, much
drinking and, if you yell at the management, they'll keep the Arab
music off the tape deck. Cocaine is available at about fifty dollars a
gram and is no worse than what you get in New York.

Beirut nightlife is not elaborate, but it is amusing. When
danger waits the tables and death is the busboy, it adds zest to the
simple pleasures of life. There's poignant satisfaction in every puff
of a cigarette or sip of a martini. The jokes are funnier, the drinks
are stronger, the bonds of affection more powerfully felt than they'll
ever be at Club Med.

East Beirut is said to also have good restaurants and nightclubs. But the visitor staying on the West side probably won't see
them. No one likes to cross the Green Line at night. And, frankly,
the East isn't popular with the West-side crowd. All the window
glass is taped, and the storefronts are sandbagged over there. It
gives the place a gloomy look. No one would think of doing this in
the West. It would be an insult to the tradition of Oriental fatalism,
and nobody would be able to see all the cartons of smuggled
Marlboros stacked in the window. Anyway, the East-side Christians
are too smug, too pseudo-French and haven't been shelled enough
to turn them into party reptiles.

To travel to the rest of Lebanon you just hail a taxi. The
country is only one hundred and twenty miles long and forty miles
wide, and no Lebanese cab driver has to call home to ask his wife if
he can take off for a couple days. Settle the price first. This won't
be easy. It's not the way of the Levant to come to the point. I asked
Akbar, one of the Commodore's taximen, how much he'd charge to
take me through the Israeli lines and into South Lebanon.

"I have been in this business twenty-seven years," he said.

"Yes," I said, "but how much is it going to cost me?"

"I will tell you later."

"Give me a rough idea."

"Would you like a coffee?"

"What's your hourly rate?"

"Across the street-fine rugs at the best price. I will get you a discount."

"What do you charge by the mile?"

"I have a cousin in Detroit."

"Akbar," I shouted, "what's it going to cost?!"

"If you do not like my price, I tell you what," Akbar gestured grandly,
"you do not hire me anymore again."

Make sure your driver knows English well enough to translate.
Lebanese English is often a triumph of memorization over understanding. "I come from the village of Baabdat," the driver will say
in quite an acceptable accent, "it is very beautiful there in the
mountains."

"Right," you'll say, "but you'd better pull over, that guy
behind the sandbags is leveling an anti-tank gun at us."

"You do?" the driver will say, "Is that in Texas? I have a
nephew in Houston."

Wherever you go, it's important to leave early in the morning.
Those who think the war is dangerous have not seen the traffic in Beirut. It's a city of a million people with three stoplights and these
aren't working. There are some traffic cops, but they are on no
account to be minded as they tend to wave you into the path of
dump trucks going sixty miles an hour. All driving is at top speed,
much of it on the sidewalks since most parking is done in the
middle of the streets. The only firm rule is: Armored personnel
carriers have the right of way.

Once outside Beirut there are, of course, other difficulties.
The only land route into the Israeli-occupied South goes through
the Chouf mountains to a crossing point in the town of Bater, which
is separated from Beirut by forty miles of armed Druse. You can
also take a boat to Sidon from the Phalange-controlled docks in
East Beirut if you're a Christian. I am, but there seemed to be some
difficulty anyway. First they said they would have to ask Israeli
permission because I was a journalist. Next they told me they
didn't speak English. Then they quit speaking French.

On the way to Bater my driver took me past "Green Beach,"
the former U.S. Marine emplacement and very interesting to students of military history. It's as defensible a position as the bottom
of the air shaft in the Plaza Hotel. There's hardly a spot in Lebanon
from which you can't fire a gun and hit it. Don't get out of the car.
The beach is now an Amal military base under heavy guard
because it's next to the orthodox Shiite women's bathing area. They
wear ankle-length chadors in the water, which may explain the lack
of a world-class Shiite women's swim team.

In the Chouf mountains, the land is green and exquisite, cut
through with precipitous gorges. Even the steepest slopes have
been terraced and planted with fruit trees, vineyards, olive groves
and gun emplacements. The road is narrow with no railings or
shoulders, and traffic is slow because the Druse are usually moving
artillery around preparing to blast the Phalangists on the coast. Be
sure to keep a mental note of such things. It's considered good
manners to convey information about military movements to the
next faction down the road. This takes the place of celebrity gossip
in Lebanese small talk.

The Druse militiamen were good-natured. "Do you speak
Arabic?" asked one. I shook my head, and he said something to
another soldier who poked face and gun into the car and shouted, "He just said he wants to fuck your mother!" At least, I assume this
was good-natured.

The Druse villages are built in the Ottoman style, graceful,
foursquare sandstone buildings with balconies, arched windows
and fifteen-foot ceilings. The low-pitched hip roofs are covered in
red tile. Tidy gardens surround each house. Peasants in white skull
caps and baggy-crotched jodhpurs ride donkeys along the road.
Herds of goats meander in the streets. It's all quite timeless except
for the video-cassette rental stores, unisex hair salons and Mercedes-Benz sedans all over the place.

The Bater crossing was another matter. A couple hundred
Lebanese, mostly old people, women and children, were jammed
into line behind barbed wire, waiting for the crossing to open.
Several hundred more squatted in the dirt or milled about disconsolate. These, apparently, did not have their papers in order. Some
had been there for days. A few tents had been provided but no
toilets. There was no running water and no food other than what
people had brought with them. Soldiers from the Israeli-hired
South Lebanon Army were yelling, pointing guns and threatening
everyone. The sun was hot. A few of the women and all of the
babies were crying. The smell was horrendous.

There seemed to be no way to tell when the crossing would
open. My driver, Akbar, didn't have any ideas. I was not about to
get in line behind the barbed wire. It looked too much like BergenBelsen. No one in sight, as far as I could tell, was in charge of
anything but pistol waving.

On top of an embankment about a hundred yards on the other
side of the crossing was a machine gun nest with the star of David
flying over it. I took my passport out and, holding it shoulder high,
walked through the barbed wire and tank traps. I fixed the South
Lebanon Army guards with a stare I hoped would remind them of
Grenada. `American," I said. They backed away, and I headed as
coolly as I could for the muzzle of the Israeli .50-caliber machine
gun now being pointed at my chest.

Israelis are not well-liked in West Beirut. During 1982 the
Israelis besieged the Moslem part of town. There was no electricity
and little food or water. The shelling and air strikes sometimes went
on for twelve hours at a stretch. Beirut's journalists call the Israelis "Schlomos" and consider them war criminals and also real squares.

Personally, I was glad to confront the only armed maniacs in
the Middle East who aren't allowed to shoot U.S. citizens. I hoped
they remembered.

"That's my helmet you're wearing," I was thinking. "Those are
my boots, and I paid for that gun so you can just go point it at
someone else." Not that I said this aloud. The hole a .50-caliber
bullet comes out of is not small. It looks as if you could put your
whole foot in there.

The Israelis motioned for me to come up, and I climbed the
embankment. They held the machine gun on me until it became
clear I was not a peroxided Iranian. "You must speak to the
captain," they said.

He proved to be a boy of twenty-five. "Do you speak English?"
I said.

"Gee, sure," said the captain. The Lebanese kept a respectful
distance until they saw him talking to me. Then they descended in
a horde waving unlikely-looking slips of paper and shouting the
interminable explanations of the east. The captain's escort chased
them away with shoves and curses. The women, children and old
folks pressed back with no apparent fear. Finally, they pushed the
officer and me under a guard tower. "Welcome to Lebanon" is the
phrase everyone uses whenever anything untoward or chaotic
breaks loose.

"Welcome to Lebanon," said the Israeli captain. He read my
credentials and smiled. "Tourism?"

"Yes," I said, "I'm the only tourist in Lebanon."

The captain laughed. "Oh no, you're not. I'm a reservist, you
know, and this is my vacation, too."

The Israelis wouldn't, however, allow my car through. I told
Akbar to meet me there in two days and then hiked across noman's-land to a line of taxis on the other side.

There were three stages in crossing the Israeli lines. Once
through the checkpoint at Bater, I had to go by taxi to an interrogation center a few miles up the road. From the interrogation center I
took a bus eight or ten miles to another checkpoint in Jezzine.

At the interrogation stop I was searched and questioned by
Shin Bet, the Israeli F.B.I. An enlisted man apologized for the inconvenience. Less auspicious-looking travelers were being led
off to be grilled in windowless huts.

In Jezzine I was questioned again by the South Lebanon Army,
an interesting process since we had no language in common.

I hired another taxi to take me the fifteen miles from Jezzine to
Sidon. It took five hours to get through the Bater-Jezzine crossing
and a total of eight hours to make it from Beirut to Sidon. Before
the war it was an hour drive on the coast road.