Long live the land of ceders.
I’ve been to Lebanon more than a dozen times, in good and bad. It’s gorgeous, diverse and fantastic, my second favorite joint in the world after Yemen. People amazing, food delicious, surf, oddly, fun. Israel perpetually hates on its northern neighbor due, I think now, pure jealously. Here’s a postcard, anyhow, from when Israel tried to smoke the place two decades ago, back in 2006, as found in Reports from Hell.
“What’s this bro’s problem?” I’m mumbling through my sweaty Ellen DeGeneres haircut at Josh who’s sitting shotgun in the microvan we’d been transferred to an hour ago from the yellow Chevrolet Caprice we’d been in since Amman, Jordan.
“Why aren’t we moving?”
Josh shakes his head, annoyed. “He’s saying that he won’t take us if we keep the surf boards on the roof. He says they look like missiles and if Israeli jets spot us they’ll take us out.”
“Well, ain’t that a mishmish.” I whistle while looking at Nate.
“Ain’t that just a real mishmish.”
Nate loosens his black pencil tie slightly, looking back at me quizzically and asks, “An apricot?”
I had meant “peach” but same difference.
“We need the surfboards,” I say. “It’s nonnegotiable, so what’s our play here?”
In truth, we didn’t need the surfboards at all. We had surfed in Lebanon a handful of times already over the past few years, up near Tripoli in the north, just outside Tyre in the south, and all around Beirut but always in the winter. Lebanon, like Italy, the south of France, and Barcelona, hugs the Mediterranean, which requires violent storms in order to create any semblance of surf— and violent storms only occur in the winter. Summer is gorgeous, warm, sensual, and flat as a pancake, but it didn’t matter. There is always the odd chance that waves might break, and if they do, and if I don’t have a surf board, it will be the cruelest torture.
The driver grunts then climbs out of his door and lights a cigarette. He’s theoretically braver than his brother or cousin or brother-in-law, the one who owns the yellow Chevrolet Caprice, the one who turned out to be a chicken.
We’d found him outside Queen Alia International Airport in Amman, a city we all despised for being boring and stable. He’d been lounging under an artificial date palm at the edge of the hot parking lot, and we told him we needed a lift to Beirut. His eyes lit with money signs. Amman to Beirut was just over a 300-kilometer trip and usually took four hours, up through Syria on the M5, cutting west just outside Damascus on the 1, past the border, through the Bekaa, over the Mount Lebanon mountain range, down into Beirut. A hefty fare by any measure. A nice wad of cash.
A wartime economy bump.
We would have just flown into Beirut, but its airport had been bombed defunct in the first day of the war. Large smoking craters in the middle of runways. Windows blown out of terminals. Aeroflot didn’t have any good deals flying into Damascus, plus it was quicker to get Syrian visas at the border rather than sending our passports to the consulate in Washington, DC, so Amman it was.
And while we all found the Hashemite Kingdom terribly droll, quickness was a commodity more valuable than exotic danger at the present time. As soon as we’d gotten home from Fremantle, I’d emailed Current TV telling them it was their lucky day, that they had a most rare opportunity to get us headed into a war but that they had to act immediately. They responded right away, wondering if we had camera experience, editing experience, or producing experience.
“OF COURSE!” I punched back, even though we had none of those.
“Can you send a reel?” they inquired.
“THERE’S NO TIME!” and I nearly broke the “N” key from a very chubby older-model MacBook. “THIS WAR COULD END AT ANY MOMENT!”
I was worried it really would end at any moment and that we’d miss the whole thing. Israel was throwing its entire mighty mite strength at a political party/terrorist organization that didn’t have an air force or a navy. Lebanon, as a country, was split in theoretically equal thirds between Christians, Sunnis, and Shi’a, and I didn’t imagine the Christians and Sunnis were too happy taking a shellacking on behalf of their fellow Shi’a after all fighting each other for fifteen years in one of history’s most brutal civil wars.
“JOSH!” I screeched over my shoulder. “Can we film, edit, produce five-to-twelve-minute segments on the road, and somehow get them to Current’s San Francisco offices from the middle of war-gutted Lebanon?”
“I’m sure we can sort out a camera…” he said while making an extra strong pot of coffee in my kitchen, “…and probably figure out how to point it at each other, I suppose. And I just met a woman named Mimi at the Roosevelt a few nights ago. She told me that she had run away from home as a child and run to Andy Warhol’s factory, where she had learned the art of filmmaking from the foot of the man who said, ‘Everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.’ And then…I couldn’t really follow her. Apparently many award-winning documentaries, trips to the Alps and various other projects. It all sounded dubious, but while we were sitting there, a never-ending stream of producers, executive producers, content creators, directors, writers, show runners, and those who had development deals with major, major studios came up to trade her air kisses. Not that any of that means anything. I was also on my second vodka soda.”
We were lightweights back then.
“CALL HER!” I screamed, reaching hysteria. We’re gonna bag this! We’re not only gonna get to go surf in a war, we’re gonna getfamous for at least fifteen minutes but probably a lot more. This is finally our moment. This is where it all comes together. Fuck Timbuktu!”
“There’s no summer surf in Lebanon, bro,” Josh responded.
“Remember?”
Two days later we were on a plane to Amman, Jordan. We snagged Nate, who, as fate would have it, had just come back from Lebanon, and he instantly secured an ex-classmate’s apartment bordering Hezbollah’s neighborhood, an area that was getting hit by Israeli bombs every night, and doubled up by enlisting one of his old friends who was currently in a Los Angeles film school as our cameraman. He would have to fly out fifty hours later, as he had film school finals, but it was better than nothing and better than us.
Mimi, Josh’s contact from the Roosevelt, had promised that if we got her film she’d turn it into art, and that, mixed with boisterous all caps emails to Al Gore, got us fifteen thousand dollars wired within forty-eight hours.
Everything was working seamlessly, without the slightest hiccup, until we neared Syria and our tough guy started to get fidgety, telling us that Israel had been pounding the crossing between Syria and Lebanon and he didn’t feel safe taking us into the country but did have a brother or cousin or brother-in-law living in Syria that would do it no problem and started dialing him on a tiny Nokia. We were naturally incensed, having negotiated our deal, and there was no way he could back out of it now. Absolutely no way at all. I didn’t believe the brother or cousin or brother-in-law actually existed, either, and burning hours on the border was not an option. We’d done that sort of business enough in our “Global War on Terror” years and there could be a giant shift in this actual war at any mo- ment, some seismic happening that we could not afford to miss. This was, after all, our first war—our first real declared war—within the broader, endless Global War on Terror, and I didn’t want to be late.
I continued browbeating our driver with Josh looking back from the front seat alternately amused and befuddled. It was usually his job to rudely harass locals trying as hard as they could to help us, Nate’s job to be paternally dismissive, and my job to keep the mood light while semi-carefully stealing snacks when people weren’t looking. My Arabic had, thankfully, improved slightly, and I kept up an almost sensible barrage of insults until we reached the border, he stopped the car, pulled our shiny Mylar surf board coffin off his roof, and handed it to a man sitting next to a microvan underneath a scrubby tree.
Lo and behold, the brother or cousin or brother-in-law was real and had a Johnny Ringo-from-Tombstone air about him. Strong jawline. Keffiyeh wrapped loosely around his neck like a bandana. Moustache that exuded strength under fire. He took the coffin without saying a word, lugged it over, strapped it to the top of his van, and bid us to enter with a subtle tilt of the head.
We waved goodbye to our old driver and it seemed as if he harbored no ill-will from me calling him “a very bad little girl, a very naughty bad little girl” over and over. Even I had to admit we had been upgraded. Not only was the van roomier than the Caprice, but his windows had nice curtains—thick burgundy drapes that lent an air of luxury.
We drove along without incident until we were fewer than twenty kilometers from the Syria-Lebanon border, when our new driver became intransigent, seemingly without provocation
“We need our boards,” I say again, even though we don’t.
“We’re going to find a miraculous swell and surf the war,” I add even though we aren’t.
The driver mutters something while looking at his phone. Josh translates, “He’s saying there are reports of Israeli jets hitting the border right now. One of his buddies is there.”
“We’re missing it…” I groan. “We’re missing the war. Tell him we’ll stick the boards inside the van, how’s that?”
Miraculously that is an acceptable solution, and we’re back on the road in five minutes flat, pressed against the van’s burgundy drapes while the shiny Mylar surf board coffin gets comfortable between us.
We’d been shot at by pistols, uzis, briefcase uzis, shotguns, Kalashnikovs, and heavy caliber machine guns but had never been bombed, which somehow seemed less menacing. Couldn’t jets be heard screaming overhead? Couldn’t bombs be heard whistling though the air? Bombs seemed like the most easily dodged ordinance and the least personal.
Ten minutes later we see our first real signifiers or war. Vehicles of every make and model clogging the single lane heading out of Lebanon, flatbed trucks crammed with people clutching dusty luggage. Bigger trucks jammed with blue plastic barrels filled with who knows. Cars with men riding on top of concaving roofs, dusty children hanging out of windows. Wives walking alongside holding bunches of carrots in plastic bags.
None of them seem overly bummed. An almost festival atmosphere permeates, Lebanese “habibi” hits floating through the stifling hot air, and especially for us since our way is clear as it seems we may be the only ones headed in, and, like that, we reach no man’s land.
The border between Syria and Lebanon includes a ten-kilometer buffer—Syrian soldiers on one end, Lebanese soldiers on the other. A geographically handsome strip of land featuring red dirt, rolling hills, and clear, higher elevation air. Real estate that would make any California developer lust over potential. It has agold rush quality, and I can easily imagine a prospector-themed amusement park doing well. Something a little like Knott’s Berry Farm, but instead of Snoopy as the mascot it would be Ol’ Hassan, the grumpy claim-jumping militant.
We’d passed through it a baker’s dozen times and are used to the Syrian seriousness first modeled by Hafez al-Assad and then aped by his eldest son Basher, who speaks with the most fragile lisp on one side. The Lebanese arrogance born of having better music videos, better food, better Mediterranean-fronting day clubs on the other.
I want to begrudge the Lebanese their arrogance but simply can’t. Their Mediterranean-fronting day clubs rival the best of Europe, with delicate, seasonally appropriate cocktails and satisfying cuisine. I want to mock the Syrian sincerity but also can’t. Their bureaucracy was a humming machine. A “secret policeman around every corner, government employee in every kitchen” dynamo.
Our driver pulls into the entirely empty military instillation and we drain from his van, sauntering into the generic cement building featuring painted Persian-esque “windows” on the walls and bold “Syrian Arabic Republic” painted elsewhere. The room, usually teeming with fathers, mothers, and children, is empty. We stand for a few minutes at a half window, rudely clearing our throats until a Syrian military man ambles out from his smoky office and asks why we are going into Lebanon. Didn’t we know now was not the time? Hadn’t we heard that the Lebanese were getting pummeled?
We tell him we had heard, that’s why we are here. We’re war journalists now, carrying out an important mission, informing the people of America what is really happening on the ground as humble servants of Al Gore. He shrugs dutifully and stamps our passports with Syrian exit visas. It isn’t what I expected, to be honest. I thought real wars upended life. I thought that wartime humans reverted to a basic form of anarchy.
We file back to the microvan and continue pressing toward our destination, seeing the first physical signs of war. Massive bomb craters, some still smoking, some half-filled with still smoking semitrucks and cars twisted like burned pretzels. It was difficult for me to understand why the drivers hadn’t heard the screaming jetsand whistling bombs and gotten the hell away from trouble. The closer to Lebanon we get, the more craters we see, until they are clipping and then obliterating the road leading out.
Thick, jagged chunks of concrete forming grotesque miniature Matterhorns. The masses shouting and pushing their vehicles over them. Clearing paths off to the side. And then they clipped our road. Red dirt mixing in with the brokenness. We drip out of the microvan for the first real crater once we hear the axle grinding then catching, helping push it over the next real crater when it becomes clear that the microengine and microwheels don’t have what it takes. We lift the whole damned thing into the air in the third crater, making me truly understand and appreciate miniature vans for the first time in my life. Very practical things. Moveable little squat machines.
I’m sweating through my plain white V-neck T-shirt, and my thighs are burning underneath my 7 for All Mankind jeans featuring slight ankle flare by the time we arrive at the Lebanese end of no man’s land. I’m proud of the jeans, having just discovered designer denim and finally jettisoning surf fashion. That godforsaken industry could keep its big logoed Spy, Globe, StickGrip, Joven, Ocean Pacific, Seven2. We are serious now, not needing surf dollars to fund our exploits, and we’re on the verge of major fame. It’s time to look the part, and I look through my Versace sunglasses with rococo golden suns adorning the arms at Josh as he wedges out of the microvan looking the part in black women’s Dickies and a black T-shirt. He’d gone perpetual black on black before it was cool for non-goth kids. I look at Nate in his white button-up soaked through with sweat like my V-neck and his loosened black pencil tie and black pants pressing after Josh. He’d adopted that as his uniform at some point during his graduate degree and wore nothing else, but it suited him. I bend around the surf board bag and follow underneath the oversized red and white flag featuring a massive green cedar in the middle.
The Lebanese border agents don’t appear particularly rattled as they take our passports and ask after our business. We tell them we’re war journalists, and I make sure to dip my Versaces for emphasis. They rifle through the pages, flipping back and forth, studying Somali stamps, Yemeni stamps, and the multitude of Lebanese stamps, apply one more, and we all turn around, climb back into the microvan, and start to jabber excitedly about what we should do first.
“We should get to the apartment and see if it’s still standing,” Nate says. “But we’ve got to get a car before anything else, and also, Jossy hungry,” Josh parries.
Nate sighs.
“Hey, Nate…” I clamor from the back, “…do you think that shawarma place is open? And do you think the apartment has TV?”
He doesn’t hear me because the surf board coffin is burying my head.
“Chicken shawarma!” I repeat, louder. Josh hears me this time and says, “Mmmmm. Shawarma.”
Our driver has sped up noticeably now, and we fly past fresh craters just off the road. Smoldering cars and trucks twisted and grotesque guide us up toward the mountain range separating Lebanon’s verdant Beka’a Valley from its coastal strip. He periodically thrusts his head out the window, listening, looking into the sky. His radio is on loud, crackling, and I can hear the names of southern Lebanese towns.
“They’re really hitting the south!” Nate says above the din.
“We need to get down there ASAP!” I holler back.
“Hungry!” Josh adds.
The sun has almost dipped into the Mediterranean by the time we reach Beirut’s outskirts, painted a dark red as the light filters through smoke. The city looks the same—the same Burger Kings, same billboards advertising jewelry featuring puckered-mouthed sensual beauties, same EuropCar rental place that we’d used before.
“Pull over!” Josh tells the driver, who seems relieved to be getting rid of us. Before even seeing if it is open, he hops out, runs to the passenger side, slides the door open, and starts tugging at our surf board coffin. I guess this is our stop no matter what.Josh grabs his passport and heads into the office. I gather our bags into a small pile while Nate pays our man his fare. He’s in such a hurry that he doesn’t even try to haggle for more, just takes his wad of US dollars mixed with Jordanian pounds and skedaddles into the sunset.
There’s absolutely no way they’re renting cars,” I tell Nate, feeling one hundred percent certain that we will have to get very creative in acquiring a vehicle.
“I don’t know. The civil war didn’t end that long ago. I think the Lebanese are generally more comfortable with risk.”
“Yeah, but this is EuropCar,” I remind him, “owned by the notoriously sissy French. They love nothing more than rolling over. I bet the clerks have received orders directly from Paris to hide under the customer service counter and only peek around when the Gauloises run low.”
Josh comes bouncing out smiling before Nate can respond, and says, “I upgraded us to an Audi.”
“What? I’m shocked. Honestly shocked. They’re renting Audis?”
“Yeah,” Josh says. “It’s only an A4, but it was either that or a Pajero for their ‘luxury’ vehicle selection, and while I know Nate would have preferred the Pajero, I made an executive call.”
“The Pajero does have four-wheel drive,” Nate deadpans, purposefully ignoring Josh’s Spanish joke. Mitsubishi’s mid-sized SUV is ubiquitous throughout the Middle East, including Yemen, and Nate had mistakenly told us that in his native Bolivia, “Pajero” meant “masturbator.”
“Well, epic,” I say, really feeling the glow of our concurrent successes and only slightly bad for needlessly denigrating France. It was rare to stack so many in a row and especially in the modern Middle East, where confused God’s unknowable will is a way of life. We’d spent countless hours in smoky backrooms waiting for this general or that terrorist to sign off on this or that step. We’d become masters of outwaiting men with no real sense of time, persisting up various chains of command, making lemonade out of lemons, but this adventure seemed positively blessed. Our Aeroflot flight had made it to Amman, we’d found a taxi driver to take us all the way to Beirut, we hadn’t had any visa issues in Syria or Lebanon, and now we have an extremely low-miles, gunmetal gray Audi.
“Let’s get the coffin on the roof and head south. We’ve got a war to cover here. Time to make Al Gore proud.”
Josh helps me lug it up while Nate fishes nylon straps from its side pocket and slides them through the open rear passenger doors, cinching them down like we had to roofs in Yemen, in Somalia, in Syria, and in Lebanon on seven separate occasions. I snag the other strap, slide it through the front driver’s side door and front passenger door, tug it tight, and finish it with a nice shoelace bow.
Even though this is Nate’s city, where he came to study, where he boxed with Hezbollah, where he fell in love with two sisters— one who shaved her head and made progressive art, the other who wore a hijab and worked with Palestinian refugees— it had become such a regular feature in our last three years that I knew more hot Beirut nightspots than I did in LA, which happened to be one.
“You think BO 18 is open during this war?” I ask Nate as soon as we get on the main road heading through downtown. He twists his head to answer. “I hope so. It stayed open every night during the Cedar Revolution.”
“But wasn’t the Cedar Revolution just a street party? Like a giant Electric Daisy Carnival featuring anti-Syria interventionist DJs?” I ask, wondering if I had fundamentally misunderstood the Cedar Revolution while it was happening.
“Yes,” he answers simply.
BO 18 is a fantastic club, no doubt, in an underground graveyard with a giant helicopter pad roof that opens each night when the party hits full tilt, revelers dancing on coffins beneath the stars, but it has the stupidest name of any club on Earth. BO 18 stood for Be Over Eighteen, Lebanon’s legal drinking age—or at least that’s what I had heard.
Beirut zips past us, strange but intact. It’s always strange, not in an off-putting way but layered in surreal tulle, having played host to that incredibly violent, drawn-out civil war in a region famous for them followed by a multi-million-person demonstration that left no dead and quickly achieved all of its goals.
Hovering over us now is the darkened hulk of the Holiday Inn, which had been the center of the green line during that civil war. Snipers from all sides—Christian Phalangists, Palestinian Liberation Organization, early rendition Hezbollah—would hide up in its suites and pepper those scrambling for cover below, hitting whichever side represented the current, shifting enemy. Alliances were formed, broken, reformed, rebroken, but the green line didn’t move more than fifteen feet in either direction for all those fifteen years, and at the end of the war the Christians agreed to give up five percent of their official stated population numbers, dropping them from fifty-five to fifty percent, even though they were probably much closer to thirty-five, and that was being generous. Muslims just had more babies than Christians no matter if they were Sunni Muslims or Shi’a Muslims, whether they were native born or had run up from Israel during the various other wars.
Bridges, freshly destroyed from Israeli sorties, set off the newer Emirati- and Saudi-funded properties downtown. All this destruction, figuratively yesterday and literally yesterday, gives Beirut its magic, its undeniable magnetism. That and the French occupation, which gives it best-in-class baguettes, smoky-eyed supermodels, and fashion designers who use layered tulle for their progressively chic collections.
The common refrain is that the Middle East is always hell, always pulling apart at the seams, but that is a tired, lazy song.
From 1200 to 1900 Europe was either a disease-ridden backwater or a complete bloodbath. Meanwhile the Ottomans ruled over one of the largest empires in history, stretching from Morocco all the way to Iran, across the entire region. The only wars were with Italian city-states and Eastern European hovels, and only then to keep its soldiers sharp. There were major advances in medicine, science, engineering. There was gorgeous art, beautiful literature, awe-inspiring architecture, fantastic cuisine, and dance and music folding various elements from North African, Mediterranean, Arabian, and Persian cultures.
After 700 years of stabbing each other in the eyeballs, Europeans finally got decent and immediately began lecturing everyone else on how to live, and thus the tune begins. “The Middle East is always hell, always pulling apart at the seams, always fighting like the tribal savages they are. Fighting exactly like they are fighting right now, Muslims pitted against other Muslims. Muslims pitted against Christians. Muslims pitted against their most ancient enemy: the Jews.”
This last falsehood is particularly egregious. Ingrained, systemic trouble between Jewish populations living in the Middle East and their Muslim neighbors only began in 1948, with the establishment of the state of Israel on lands previously occupied by Palestinians.
When swaths of Spain were rolled under the Ottoman flag in the sixteenth century, the peninsula’s Jewish inhabitants happily stayed with their new Muslim rulers because Spanish Christians loved rounding them up and setting them on fire. We loosely debate heading to our apartment or heading south, where the action is, but it’s all half-hearted and mostly in vain because there is only one real option. We must head toward shawarma, another gift from the Ottomans claimed hardest by the Egyptians but made better than anywhere on Earth at Barbar, right in the middle of Beirut. The ubiquitous spit-carved meat sandwich is so good here that it bustles from very early in the morning to very early in the morning, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and has since its founding in 1979. Four years after the civil war started, eleven years before its end. Lebanese are proud that Barbar never closed once, even in the darkest, bloodiest days, because all Lebanese from Christian Phalangists to Palestinian Liberation Organization to early rendition Hezbollah needed the tender meats—the succulent, garlic-drenched tender meats folded into miniature flattened French baguettes—exactly like we need them now.
Josh pilots the Audi through the crowded streets. Men sit outside smoking shisha, listening to crackling full-volume radio reports from the field. Women huddle around tea tables beneath bright fluorescent lights, listening to crackling full-volume radio reports from the field. Hezbollah has its detractors here in central Beirut where intellectual Christians, Sunnis, and Shi’as mingle.
Nate’s American University of Beirut is a stone’s throw away, but this major Israeli incursion seems both asymmetric and odd. The tit for tat has been going along the border for a decade. Why did the hostilities escalate so quickly and destructively this time? What is Israel’s end game? Will they actually send troops across in a full invasion or just continue to bomb the south and strategic targets like the airport and main bridges? Will they start hitting Christian and Sunni neighborhoods too in order to put maximum pressure on the Lebanese government to cut a deal they would be unable to actually cut?
These are the questions suburban natives are asking while Josh, Nate, and I chew silently, lounging against our surf board coffin, studying them with bright red eyeballs. Obviously, I don’t know the answers, and it does seem like a weird fight for Israel to pick.
Hezbollah is serious and disciplined, well-backed and well-trained by patron Iran. Those boys won’t be cowed by a few bombs, or at least that was my impression when I got busted kicking mongo in front of their super-secret police building.
Apartment or south?
After Josh goes back for seconds we get down to hard business. In a rare moment of food-born comradery, we all agree at once: south.
The crackling full-volume radio reports outside Barbar and the flickering BBC reports inside suggest it is all picking up. That the whole southern half of the country is getting hammered. Low-resolution video footage shows red flashes and white tracers against a grainy black backdrop.
We decide to point toward Nabatieh, a predominately Shi’a town some seventy kilometers inland and south. It was mentioned by name more than anywhere else, and so we speed down empty streets past the freshly destroyed airport that had been named Rafik Hariri International Airport after the influential Prime Minister who ruled over the fractured country from 1992 to 1998 then again from 2000 until his resignation in 2004 when he flew to Saudi Arabia and claimed that Iran was unduly influencing Lebanon’s politics through their relationship with Hezbollah. He was one of the richer men in Lebanon thanks to a construction firm he had formed up in Saudi Arabia used for major Saudi royal family projects.
In 2005 he was assassinated by a massive truck bomb detonated in the heart of Beirut. Four Hezbollah operatives were held responsible, which led to the Cedar Revolution, Syria’s ouster from the country, and likely Israel’s current power move.
“Look, there’s Wafik Hawiwi Intewnational…” Nate says at
the first sign. He loved mimicking Rafik almost as much as he loved seeing Josh agitated. Hariri apparently couldn’t pronounce his “Rs” and it tickled Nate to no end whenever archival footage of the man played on television.
It’s odd to see the airport completely darkened and difficult to imagine how Lebanese of all stripes, not just painted Team Hezbollah yellow and green, didn’t take the attack personally. The ostensible reason given by the Israeli Defense Forces for the wide scale destruction of bridges, border crossings, and Wafik Hawiwi Intewnational hours after the Israeli soldiers going missing was to stop their transport around the country. Also, Ehud Barak, Israel’s Prime Minister, made it be known that all of Lebanon would be held responsible for the actions of those few bad apples.
A large SUV flies by heading north with a giant T and V taped to its hood and its doors. We all start snickering about the sissy newsman headed north instead of south, like us. In an SUV heavily branded TV instead of a sleek Audi, like us. Very clearly lame, like CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who on last report was having trouble getting into Lebanon and was currently reporting from the Israeli side of the border in his helmet and flak jacket.
We had spent much of the dead time between Amman and Beirut chuckling about the aesthetics of covering war. Not Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War, World War II, or Vietnam coverage, but the modern embedded reporter. Helmets and flak jackets, puffy microphones and shifty eyes that I always imagined were completely manufactured. None of us had ever covered a real declared war before, but we’d all been in radically pear-shaped situations, shot at, shot around, detained for questioning by non-governmental organizations, i.e., declared terrorist groups, and been to Somalia. A damned helmet and flak jacket don’t help. They are very hot in already hot climates and are impossible to pull off with any sort of style unless the wearer is in some branch of the military or paramilitary, wears no shirt, has a pack of smokes tucked into the band of his helmet, and replaces all his shifty-eyed stares with devil-may-care sneers.
Worst of all, the heavy “TV war journalist” branding completely destroys any ability to blend in and get a real story. Accoutrement
or the sake of accoutrement makes a complete mockery of Henry Crabb Robinson, Martha Gellhorn, and Michael Herr. It’s a silly, narcissistic affectation that draws attention to the journalist instead of the conflict, and at that very moment an ugly whipping sound shatters our luxurious Audi interior.
Flap, flap, flap, flap.
“Nate…” I scream “Did you not cinch the damned surf board coffin down properly? Is that what that is? Are we somehow rookies again?”
He doesn’t hear me because he is already sitting there where the window should be, grimacing and pulling the straps as tight as he can while Josh accelerates then slides around a bomb divot.
It totally isn’t Nate’s fault. Both he and Josh tie exceptional knots. I was the one who took care of the front with a nice enough shoelace bow.
Josh drifts around another fresh bomb divot then drives right though one, sliding the Audi’s chassis across the broken asphalt and creating an ugly grinding sound that makes me laugh so hard I can taste the succulent garlic Barbar shawarma for the second time. It’s gross but also very funny, and I really don’t know what Europcar was thinking renting Audis, or even Masturbators, during a war.
Most of the lights are off as we hit the coast heading toward Sidon, the roads choked with trucks, taxis, motor scooters and motorcycles sitting lonely. The billboards featuring models with plenty of duct tape applied to where the cleavage should be advertise to no one. This is Hezbollah country here, and the decadence of the Christian north, just thirty kilometers back, is not welcome. There, smoky-eyed, scantily clothed models showcase all manner of sensuality. Sensual dishwashers, sensual perfume, sensual chocolate. Scantily clothed models with shirtless, clean- shaven men as their props. Here some of the same images are used but they are all doctored to reflect conservative social mores, and the only men that appear are bearded and severe, usually martyrs.
Another TV SUV rips north, flying so quickly that it is a blur of light and dust, and I only catch the TV tape on the back window as it disappears into the night.
“Why’re these war journalist bastards so damned chicken? It’s not like you can’t hear the bombs coming and go hide,” I tell Nate.
“Speaking of, where’s our cameraman?”
We had a Handycam with us and had been passing it back and forth so far, looking directly into the lens, pointing at bomb craters, and saying vaguely sarcastic things about war and human suffering. It didn’t feel great. Anytime the camera turned on and was pointed at me, I could feel my face, the muscles twitching, my tongue moving, the words coming out stilted as opposed to well- timed and funny like they were in real life, but I was sure that I’d ease into a natural camaraderie with the camera. I was born to be a star and just needed a bit more practice, and for sure, I looked good. My hair was just the right amount of sweaty and falling over my Versace sunglasses with just the right amount of flair.
“He was supposed to leave two days after we did, that’s when his finals ended and when his ticket is booked, so he is theoretically getting ready to head out,” Nate responds.
His name was also Josh and we were really throwing him to the wolves. He had never traveled outside of the well-developed West, and we gave him minimal instruction.
Fly to Amman. Figure out how to get to Beirut. We’ll meet you there.
Nate had only texted him to say we had arrived and to hurry.
We are covering a war here, damn it, and Cameraman Josh’s trial by fire is necessary. Plus, we have the Handycam, and along with growing into stars, I have no doubt we’ll make excellent soundmen and cameramen too, or good enough for Al Gore by any stretch.
Just past Sidon, which seems a complete ghost town, we cut up into the hills, winding toward Nabatieh. Ten or so kilometers out we hear our first bomb hitting the ground. Dull thumps that reverberate through the spine and my heart flutters. We all look at each other slack jawed, and Josh pulls over and slides to a stop at an overlook. A valley drops sharply in front of us and a rock-strewn hill gradually climbs toward the starry sky behind us.
With the engine cut, a sickening silence fills the air. We all get out and sit on the Audi’s hood, listening with newborn ears and seeing with newborn eyes.
Thump.
Thump, thump, thump, thump.
The ridge on the other side of the valley is getting hit—and nhard. Flashes of red precede each thump and the destructive force is mesmerizing. Picturing being right there underneath the hits must be absolutely terrifying. How do humans survive such things?
How does anything survive?
Suddenly I’m aware that I don’t hear any jets and I don’t hear any bombs whistling to the ground. Sickening silence until the thumps rattle the earth, and I whisper, “Wait. Where’s the sound of the jets? Where’s the whistling of the bombs?”
Josh whispers, “I think the jets fly too high to be heard, and do bombs whistle?”
In that very moment I realize that my entire vision of war has been stitched together from slow-motion World War II documentaries and Apocalypse Now. Mostly I’d been imagining slow- moving propeller bombers flying at relatively low altitude dropping slow-motion bombs while a gravelly voiced narrator describes how German forces had been pushed from some town sounding like the name of a fancy cheese to another town sounding like the name of a fancy cheese. Or Martin Sheen’s laconic drawl.
Suddenly I’m aware that we’re the only vehicle here, no more than ten kilometers from where the earth is being punched, we have a Mylar surf board coffin strapped to its roof, and for sure Israel’s vaunted Air Force has satellite imagery piercing the darkness with that nighttime vision technology, showing three figures standing next to a vehicle bathed in Desert Storm green with some oblong shiny thing on its roof
Shit.
We all get the same idea at the same time and without a word between us untie the surf board coffin straps, drag it down, and slide it under the car before tiptoeing into the rock-strewn hill behind us and lying out flat on our stomachs behind three neighboring boulders.
Josh sets the camera on one and keeps recording.
And we watch modern warfare playing out in a tableau before us. It all seems so wildly impersonal and so unfair. So heartless. There was no angry-faced man wagging a gun, no apparent escalation, no sense or even nonsense to be talked.
One moment, silence. The next moment, a fiery red ball on the horizon. It is terrifying in its impersonality.
After a few hours, during a fifteen-minute break in the action, we sneak back to the car, take the boards out of the bag and shove them inside, fold the Mylar surfboard coffin and jam it in the trunk, put the Audi in neutral, and push it back until we’re on the road then hop inside.
Josh coasts without the engine on, manhandling the steering wheel in order to navigate the curves until we reach the bottom, and then he fires the engine. We sit at an intersection, debating whether we should race north like those TV SUVs before us or creep slowly toward Nabatieh—but, again, there is only one real option. We can’t let Anderson Cooper win, so we creep toward Nabatieh.
There’s no way we’re going to die tonight. We’re coated in Teflon.
Untouchable, though slightly shaken if not stirred.