Pumpkinflowers (12 page)

36

T
H
E MOST IMPORTANT
event in both Lebanon and Israel that spring of 1998 was the World Cup in France. Soldiers huddled around the television with an intensity they rarely devoted to guard duty, and we saw Nabatieh draped with flags. The most popular was Brazil. The duty roster had to be carefully engineered because certain soldiers could not miss certain matches. It might have been our imagination, but the shelling seemed to drop off.

The showdown that everyone anticipated was between the national teams of America and Iran, our patron and theirs. If Iran lost, so went the joke, the men of Hezbollah were certain to take out their frustration on the representatives of American imperialism conveniently located on a hill overlooking their town. Being from one of the few corners of the earth where this sport is ignored, I knew nothing about it and could not help but notice that all the people here—the Israelis, the Lebanese—were joined by something that excluded me.

It was at around the same time that someone came up with the idea of executing a series of one-night ambushes on the hilltop directly to the south, on the outskirts of the Forest. The infantry had to venture out of the outpost on foot, or we were no better than the lookouts or cooks. In the “real war” our company was supposed to destroy enemy tanks using a venerable American rocket, the TOW, and because Hezbollah had no tanks the army had produced a version of this rocket that was supposed to work on people. The idea of the ambush was to use the launcher's thermal sight to spot guerrillas on the outskirts of Nabatieh and surprise them with a missile from an angle they were not expecting, and from far away. Far away sounded good to us.

We went through a few days of rehearsals. We removed candy wrappers so the crinkle wouldn't reveal us. One of the traditions in Lebanon at the time was to take a group photo before a mission while leaving space around the head of each soldier—this was to make things easier for the newspaper graphics people who would obtain the photograph and use red circles to indicate who had been killed. In our case this didn't represent true fatalism, though. We knew we were invincible. We loaded our weapons in unison and set out, the moon absent, the stars a brilliant smear across the middle of the sky.

Soon we were in low vegetation around the launcher's tripod. The cold got to work on me right away, though I was wearing an army sweater discovered at the bottom of a kit bag, which smelled as if it might have been used in 1967 to warm a dog. When it was my turn to look through the thermal sight I saw a version of Nabatieh appear in shades of red that corresponded not to gradations of light but to heat. It's a curious way to see a place. Some cars were colder than others, their engines having been inactive longer. Streetlights were hot. Boulders were cold. There were still people about, hot little shapes moving through cold streets, and I wondered if any knew there were soldiers looking down at them from the slopes above their town. I found the Cal-Tex gas station, al-Ghandour Hospital, a familiar minaret. Every so often I pulled myself away from the thermal sight and glanced around at my friends spread silently around the launcher, their backs to me, looking into the darkness with helpless human eyes that could see only light.

The tournament progressed, and the Iranians beat the Americans by the grace of God, 2–1. We enjoyed another quiet evening on our hilltop. On the very night that France was set to play Brazil in the finals, orders came down for another ambush. We spent the night outside, and out of pity the soldiers in the war room ran back and forth to the Pumpkin's TV set, checking the score and radioing updates to us.

Zidane—1–0 for France. This was passed around the squad in whispers. Then it was Zidane again, 2–0. Finally Nabatieh erupted. Cars began honking and driving up and down the streets with their headlights flashing. Music blared. From our position in the bushes we stared miserably down at their celebration. My radio murmured: France, 3–0.

A few nights later we were back. I had my eyes in the sight and saw the monastery of Saint Anthony and the abandoned villas. I scanned the dead zone between us and the town: a cow grazing, a few stray dogs. Another soldier, Ro'i, took my place, and I crawled away to guard the perimeter and wait for the night to be over. Harel mumbled acknowledgment of a radio transmission from the Pumpkin. Prepare to fire, he said.

We had done this so many times without seeing a thing that we no longer believed we ever would. We were slow to respond.

Move, he growled, and finally the soldiers in front of the launcher moved so they wouldn't be hit by the rocket as it flew forward, and the ones behind the launcher moved so they wouldn't be scorched by the blast. Harel was explaining something to Ro'i. The lookouts at the Pumpkin, who had better night vision equipment than we did, saw two guerrillas on the edge of the town. They were setting up what looked like a Sagger rocket outside someone's house. The lookouts were certain, and we could shoot when we were ready. Except for Ro'i with the thermal sight, none of us could see a thing. This drama was happening in the darkness a half mile away.

Are you on them? asked Harel.

It was a while before Ro'i said yes; the launcher's sight was primitive, and he wasn't sure at first.

Harel tapped his arm. Fire, he said.

A soft pop; a hiss lasting a long moment; then a roar as the yard-long rocket leapt from its tube. Ro'i began counting down seconds to impact, as we had been taught: Eight, seven, six. The red light of the engine swayed gently back and forth, growing smaller as the rocket hurtled away from our position on the ridge, passing out of the security zone and into Lebanon proper. In our little group crouching in the undergrowth there was silence except for the countdown—three, two, one, flash. I was surprised that an action we had taken on our side of the line had an immediate effect on the other side, as if the outpost and the town were part of the same world after all.

Ro'i saw hot shapes in the same spot, so we reloaded and he fired again. After the second rocket hit, a low boom came from a different part of the town: the guerrillas had a few other squads out that night. The lazy crimson glow of a Sagger passed in front of us from left to right, and we watched it explode on the embankments of the Pumpkin. Another one floated by and did the same.

Nimrod, a soldier with a vocabulary influenced by a childhood in the Dominican Republic—he called his rifle
pistola
, pronounced with an exaggerated Spanish accent and a dramatic twirling of the fingers—helped me dismantle the launcher. There was a thud and an odd buzzing sound, and for a moment something glowed a malevolent yellow on the ground between my boots and his. Later we understood it was shrapnel ricocheting off a rock, but just then it looked like black magic, and we stared at each other for an instant before diving behind some boulders and staying there until the shells stopped. The squad walked back to the outpost single file. By the time we arrived, thanks to overheard radio messages or rumors emanating from the war room, everyone seemed to have heard the story that we'd killed two enemy fighters. We were greeted like conquering heroes.

The lookouts in the surveillance post videotaped the incident, and they showed us the footage. It showed two guerrillas near a house, bent double and wearing backpacks, setting up their rocket. Then they disappeared. A few seconds later our first rocket hit a safe distance away. Our second was nowhere close. The guerrillas' ears might have been ringing, but both were alive and well. Maybe they still are today.

37

T
H
E RAINY SEASON
was over, the grass drying, the hills fading to light brown. Our time was almost up, and another company was set to replace us on the hill.

Just then the army decided to embark on some kind of commando excursion across the Red Line into Hezbollah territory, and our company was ordered to dispatch a squad from the Pumpkin north to Red Pepper. This outpost was manned by a crew from the South Lebanon Army, the Christian militia allied with Israel, and the raid was too secret for the militiamen. It was too secret even for us, the regular infantry, and we were told nothing beyond the fact of its existence. This happened with some frequency at the Pumpkin: soldiers with fancier gear than ours showed up, the garrison was kept in the dark, and after a while there was a buzz of activity as something extremely important happened and then the visitors disappeared, after which nothing changed and we were left doing the actual work of holding the line.

We took one of the armored porcupines and traveled to Red Pepper along the ridge road, arriving at a hill crowned with a squat concrete fort. A Russian tank of 1950s vintage sat by the gate; it was, like much of the militia's weaponry, Soviet-bloc materiel seized from Palestine Liberation Organization fighters in the 1982 invasion. I jumped down after Harel, radio on my back, and we walked into Red Pepper, just the two of us at first, like square kids stumbling into the wrong bar.

In a gloomy central room I found three or four men walking around in fatigue pants, some in T-shirts and others bare-chested, one with a fearsome scar on his torso. Soviet rocket launchers hung on walls of bare cement, next to nude pinups torn from a German magazine. One bearded man with a huge belly and tattooed arm was watching Hezbollah TV on a black-and-white set placed on a chair. On the screen two dignitaries in suits shook hands while other men in suits looked on. I eyed the tattooed man and the TV from a safe distance. The man turned to me, pointed to the screen, and said, “Duruz.”

He meant that the men in suits were Druze. Perhaps he was Druze too. I wasn't sure, but he was, for reasons apparent only to him, trying to give this smooth-cheeked child a first lesson in the politics of his country. Or maybe he was just glad to have someone to talk to. I had been doing some reading and knew the name of the Druze leader in Lebanon, so I decided to try my luck. “Jumblatt?” I asked. I thought he seemed impressed.

“
La
,
”
he said. No. He ignored me after that.

The South Lebanon Army was in many ways a familiar arrangement—the kind of local force you are theoretically supporting but which in fact supports you and follows your orders, more or less; which is usually said to be on its way toward operational independence but never quite arrives; and which in the end turns out to exist only as long as you are there. The militia was a remnant of the Lebanese civil war, when Christians in Lebanon's south allied themselves with Israel to protect themselves from Palestinian guerrillas and from their Muslim neighbors, but though the senior officers and some of the men were Christian, by the nineties many of the soldiers were Shiites and Druze who were in it for the salary Israel paid in American dollars.

Residents of the security zone—there were about two hundred thousand of them, mostly Shiites—had been severed from the rest of their country and were suspended between us and Hezbollah, sustaining themselves with agriculture, work permits for jobs inside Israel, and smuggling. Serving in the militia was one way to make a decent wage. Hezbollah also had money, of course, and its own agents and informers. In Khiam, a nearby town inside the zone, was a prison where officers from the militia and Israeli security agents worked the black arts on guerrilla suspects. We knew little of this, having no contact with anything beyond the immediate environs of our outpost. We had as clean a battlefield as one could hope for nowadays—anyone around the hill who wasn't us was an enemy, and we were to shoot them.

We were told that the Lebanese militiamen were our allies but that we were not to trust them because many had cousins in Hezbollah. They knew what we thought, and sometimes they had fun with us. One day a militiaman passing through the Pumpkin called over a friend of mine, leaned close, nodded toward Nabatieh, and passed on a tip in Hebrew. “Tomorrow they will fuck you,” he said. They were fighting a different kind of war and played by different rules, and they scorned our moral pretensions. They spoke a different language.

A new Israeli commander at Beaufort Castle, a gentle kibbutz type, once entered Arnoun, the miserable village by the castle, after another attack on a convoy. He took a platoon of militia who began shooting and throwing grenades into the empty houses, their point being that the enemy had to think you were aggressive and a bit crazy. After that the new Israeli officer met the village headman and told one of his trackers, a Druze Arab, to convey to the headman in Arabic that the new Israeli commander was insane,
majnoun
, that everyone should be careful and not dream of letting the guerrillas anywhere near their homes. The commander was trying to speak the local language. The tracker turned to the headman and spoke for a long time, with expressive hand movements, and the officer asked what he was saying, because the original message was pretty simple. Everything's okay, said the tracker. When they arrived back at the castle the new commander got a call from his superior officer, a general, who had just been contacted by the United Nations. UN peacekeepers had a complaint from a village headman saying the Israelis were threatening to rape the villagers' daughters, burn their fields, and bulldoze their homes. Did the commander know anything about this? The commander called the tracker over and said, What the hell did you tell him?

What you told me to, replied the tracker, but in their language.

38

T
H
E REST OF
our squad clambered out of the porcupine and walked into Red Pepper, glancing cautiously around. The Lebanese militiamen vanished, leaving us in the new outpost under the bovine eyes of the naked Germans.

The toilet was a hole in the floor that had to be unplugged using a long metal stake, which brought ancient fecal matter bobbing upward with bubbles bearing a sulfurous reek from the bowels of the earth. We were attacked while asleep by savage mosquitoes. We ate canned corn and processed meat from combat rations. The view from the guard posts was unfamiliar and thus more sinister. We were at the northern end of the Ali Taher range and at the outermost boundary of the security zone; it felt as if we had traveled all the way upriver to the very end of everything.

Two special lookouts from the special unit doing the special operation that was the cause of our suffering used a special kind of camera to peer out at the towns inside Lebanon proper. As time went on we became increasingly homesick, not for Israel, which seemed like too much to ask, but for the Pumpkin. The company's time on the line was over, replacements were on the way, and everyone was supposed to rotate out within days. This was to be our salvation. But there were warnings of an attack on the road, and all convoys were canceled. No one could move anyway until the special operation, whatever it was, had taken place. A week went by, and then another.

Finally we were informed that the operation had been called off. Then someone else said this wasn't true and actually it had happened, but we hadn't noticed, and we weren't supposed to know because it was secret. It was all disinformation, apparently, but the army needn't have bothered, because we didn't care. We just wanted to go home.