Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [110]
All of that, for a story I never wrote. Newspaper stories ought to have endings, and Ahmed’s tale didn’t—it just stopped.
SIXTEEN
KILLING THE DEAD
The operation didn’t even take ten minutes. On a fine and cloudless July morning, Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon scrambled south over the Israeli border and attacked a pair of Israeli Humvees. Three Israeli soldiers were killed and two others spirited back into Lebanon. And with that, another war erupted. Most likely, thirty-two-year-old graduate student Ehud Goldwasser and twenty-seven-year-old law student Eldad Regev were already dead when Hezbollah dragged them over the border to use as bargaining chips. More than one thousand dead Lebanese people and billions of dollars of crushed Lebanese infrastructure later, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, acknowledged that if he had anticipated Israel’s wrath, “we would definitely not have done it.” It wasn’t an apology, exactly, but it was as close as the Party of God has come, at least in public.
The two Mediterranean neighbors had been clawing back and forth for decades. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 and 1982, attacked again in 1993 and 1996, and had occupied southern Lebanon until 2000, when attacks from Hezbollah guerrillas finally drove Israeli soldiers out of all but a small corner of the country. Hezbollah brags that it is the only Arab army that has driven Israel off a piece of land, and in a sense, it’s true. After the withdrawal, Hezbollah continued firing weak rocket salvos into northern Israel. Just enough to say, we are still here. Israel, in turn, barged its jets into Lebanese airspace. Just enough to say, we are still here, too. Escalation was always a possibility, but until the day Hezbollah guerrillas grabbed those two soldiers, it seemed improbable.
The morning after the raid, I watched the first flush of light creep over the desert airfields of Cairo. I was burrowed into a hard chair at the gate, head wrapped in the wool of sleeplessness. The suitcase had been handed over, the boarding pass clutched, the passport stamped. Every limb throbbed for want of sleep. The cell phone rang. It was the desk in Los Angeles.
“Israel just bombed the Beirut airport,” the dry, calm Los Angeles voice said.
“What airport? The civilian airport? In Beirut?”
“That’s what the wires are reporting.”
“No.” I was impervious, half dreaming. “That’s impossible. Because I am sitting here at the gate and they gave me a boarding pass to Beirut and nobody has said a word.”
“It just happened.”
The beacon of Jazeera glowed from a mounted television. A jabber of confused breaking-news voices; scratchy pictures of fire and smoke. No, it couldn’t be—Israel wouldn’t bomb the newly renamed Rafik Hariri International Airport, with its cappuccino bars and sunburned tourists and duty-free Cuban cigars. It was one thing to jab back and forth with acts of war; it was another to actually have a war, to bomb the civilian airport.
“Hello?”
“I’m here.”
Sunrise spilled on the dirt, flecked the wings of planes.
“I have to go figure this out.”
The steady, dry Los Angeles voice was correct: there was no flight to Beirut, and there wouldn’t be another flight for more than a month. That night, a haggard, chain-smoking taxi driver and I stood on the Syrian border, at the lip of Lebanon. Darkness had slammed down. The war had begun.
“They’re bombing the road into Beirut. It’s very dangerous,” the driver said accusatively.
“I have to go, anyway.” Soldiers and workmen clustered stone-faced around the immigration offices. Is there another driver reckless enough to breach the dark mountains with bombs coming down? No, I see no such fool. Desperate, half-ashamed, I pulled the one trump card that is truly fail-safe in the Arab