I spoke to a couple of dock workers and they asked me if I was an American. I answered no, definitely not! They were sceptical and for the moment left it at that. Then an official came on board, but he had worry beads in his hand and I didn’t risk telling him anything. I only found out later that the beads are as common among Christians as among Muslims.

At about eleven that morning a taxi deposited a passenger at a ship farther along the quay. When the driver had turned his car around I stopped him. Was he going into town?

‘Sure,’ he said in American English. Where did I want to go? I looked for any indication that he might be a Christian. There was: a St Christopher badge among the artificial fur on the dashboard.

‘You Christian?’

‘Yes, I am’ he answered, his eyes narrowing. He looked at me, now also suspicious. ‘Why you want to know?’

‘Just curious. Can you wait while I get my bags?’

When I got back in his cab I took my life in my hands and asked him whether he could get me through port control without having to show my passport. ‘I want to get to the offices of the Lebanese Force Command’, I told him quietly, and for once I was deadly earnest.

It was a gamble, of course, but I had no alternative. I explained what I was trying to do. I was a journalist and a Christian. I wanted to report on the war from his side.

‘You sit in front here with me,’ he said quietly. With that he got out, put my bags in the trunk and came back with a dirty old cap which he told me to wear. ‘You are my brother. I talk when we go through checkpoint.’

Three minutes later Michael Chamoun (who became a good friend until he was killed in a mortar attack on a crossroads in Bourj Hammoud three years later) dropped me off at the offices of the Lebanese Force Command. It was a fine old two-storey building about 500 yards from the entrance to the port and it had taken a battering.

I tipped Mike $20 US which, for a freelancer in those days, was a lot of money.