I understand that back home there was a lot of argle-bargle about what the networks were doing during America Held Hostage: The Sequel. But you have to remember a television has two sides. I was up by the head. What came out the other end, I can’t tell you. For all I know Eyewitness News starred Donny and Marie and featured commentary by Koko, the gorilla who uses computers to talk.
That night a young man named Jaafar Jalabi arrived at the ABC office. He was a friend of Nabih Berri and had been sent over to explain the real reason that the hostages hadn’t been released. I liked him immediately. For one thing he was scared, and there’s entirely too much bravery in Lebanon. Also he wore a Rolex. I have a personal theory that faithful, disciplined, highly principled, self-sacrificing people (in other words the people who are forever getting the rest of us killed) wear cheap wristwatches.
Hizbullah, said Jaafar, was refusing to release its Americans because President Reagan had said in a speech, “I don’t think anything that attempts to get people back who’ve been kidnapped by thugs, murderers, and barbarians is wrong to do.” Who knows how Hizbullah threaded its way through the syntax in that statement. Jaafar admitted any excuse probably would have done. A bureau chief led him off to make everything clear to Peter Jennings and the American public.
When Jaafar was through I asked him how he’d gotten dragged into this. He said Berri knew he’d gone to college in the United States and therefore it was felt he understood America. (So much for the theory of “highly sophisticated Shiite manipulation of American public opinion.” The last time a U.S. college student understood America, they shot him at Kent State.) “What’s going to happen,” I asked, “when the hostage crisis is over? Are the various Shiite factions going to . . . you know . . . ?”
“I’ve got a speedboat anchored down there,” said Jaafar, looking toward the Summerland’s little harbor, “and it’s packed with food and supplies.” That was something to remember. No matter how interested you are in social chaos, it’s always a good idea to keep an eye on the emergency exit.
Sunday morning I went down to the school in the Burj Barajna. The Amal said this time for sure they were getting all the loose Americans rounded up and out of there. The ride over was a lesson in what a rescue mission would have required. My Lebanese driver couldn’t find the place with a map. I suppose Delta Force could have stopped and asked directions like we did, but the Lebanese can be long-winded that way. My guess is our strike force would still be drinking tiny cups of coffee and trying to get out of buying a rug and a case of smuggled Marlboros.
The Burj was not really a slum, just an old neighborhood with haphazard alleys for streets and five-story stucco apartment buildings with gardens walled by breeze block. Dozens of these neighborhoods have been destroyed in the civil war, and creeping Miami Beachism was destroying them anyway before the war began. Small girls in what looked like first-communion dresses giggled in the doorways. Small boys followed the militiamen around and inspected the press corps’ equipment. Moms, dads, and quite a lot of attractive teenage daughters were standing on the balconies and looking out the windows with the usual tenement dwellers’ interest in local brouhaha. There were no chadors in evidence and not as many scarves as you’d see on the British royal family at the average horse show. This, then, is your howling mob of fanatical Shiites praying for martyrdom and dripping blood from the fangs.
The reporters were an uglier bunch by far. There were a hundred or more of them ganged up in the alley by the school. They looked as bad as the hostage tourists but fatter and meaner and dressed in even more ridiculous tropical travel clothes. With their panoply of tote bags, cameras, carryalls, haversacks, and phrase books, they seemed a kind of race of supertourists come to avenge the incarceration of their fellows. Indeed, it’s been suggested for years that the Beirut media should form their own militia. God knows, there are enough of them. And it would simplify many news stories: “Tonight on Nightline Ted Koppel threatens suicide attack unless he meets own demands to free self!”
The Amal were wearing any old thing. Some had on Miller Lite T-shirts and designer Levi’s, others were so laden with Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, sheath knives, pistols, spare clips, and ammo belts that they could hardly move. They looked like kids playing army. Which is what they are. The average age can’t be eighteen. They’re violently opposed to the imperialist, Zionist policies of the United States and will, however, if they speak any English, babble about which career they’ll pursue in America as soon as they get a Green Card. They have better manners than I ever did as an adolescent. I suspect it’s because they’re getting to live out all those Mad Max fantasies in their own backyards.