HE WAS A BOY, NOT more than 18 years old, and he kept firing at the UN position until his magazine was empty. Nobody shot back from any of the strongpoints that surrounded the base.
One moment the youngster was walking down the road towards Ebel es Saqi, the next he’d levelled his M16 and was firing on full auto. He obviously wasn’t Hizbollah because they’ve always preferred the AK-47 to anything Western.
At the time I’d been in one of the battalion halls, a few hundred feet from where all this was taking place, with my UN escort, Captain Fredrik Amland, Norwegian Battalion (Norbatt) in South Lebanon. The also youthful Amland was one of about 1,000 Scandinavian soldiers deployed in South Lebanon with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). Half were Norwegian, the rest from Finland.
The firing surprised us all. Though we didn’t take cover, the fusillade halted everything in the mess where we were eating at the time, automatic fire in the Levant tending to have that effect. Some of the soldiers stopped what they were doing, which was when the captain went out to check.
‘It’s one of those fuckers, shooting at us’, Amland reported when he’d returned to his meal. He spoke in an accent that reflected time spent in Newcastle in England and, clearly, wasn’t much bothered.
‘Who’s shooting?’ I asked. He didn’t answer immediately. When I asked again he said brusquely: ‘fucking DFF. Just walked up to one of our OPs [observation posts] and started shooting… no reason at all …’
DFF or De Facto Forces was argot for the South Lebanese Army, which their Israeli patrons referred to as the SLA. In fact the abbreviation signified a good deal more: DFF meant anyone ‘on the other side’ with weapons.
‘Someone hurt?’ Another officer queried
‘Nobody. Not even a scratch.’
Didn’t his people return fire? No retaliation at all? I asked.
He hesitated a moment, clearly annoyed at the inference and then replied in the negative.
‘So what’s the upshot? What you going to do about it?’
Silence. Now it was the captain’s reticence that had become bothersome.
‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing’, he finally declared. He then added, almost as an afterthought, that since the shooter was DFF, there was nothing to be done. Were they to take any kind of action against the man such as arrest him or keep him in a cell a day or a week, the local community would be in an uproar. The UN might be accused of siding with the ‘hated fucking Jews across the border’, my escort suggested and he was quite serious.
‘What about next time? It might be you or me that’s in his sights?’ I declared warily. It could easily happen and he knew that. In fact, it already had, just weeks before. Then a sniper – not a very good one, mark you – had targeted several UN soldiers and wounded one of them. The man only stopped taking pot shots when the UN commander demanded a meeting with the elders of the man’s village and from what I gathered afterwards, the man shared the views of the majority of South Lebanon’s Christian population at the time: UN troops were regarded as interlopers and were not properly doing their job.
Still, it wasn’t my problem and Lebanon, we were all aware, could be a dangerous place. Each of us had accepted that much within hours of getting there. Look askance at somebody on the open road and he might draw a gun, was the usual bar-room comment. At a hint of a pretext he’d probably kill you, happily, and then go home to his wife and kids and possibly first stop off at his mosque along the way.
I’d seen something similar take place once to a car ahead of me while driving through the Shouff during a visit to Druze positions a few years before. A car had pulled abreast of another and the two drivers were having a chat, oblivious of passing traffic trying to get through. Eventually another driver got out of his car, pulled a pistol from his belt, put it against the head of one of the culprits, a juvenile, barely old enough to qualify for a licence.
All I got was the gist of what was perhaps a 20-second discussion: if the youngster didn’t move, he’d blow him away. Moments later, in a screech of burning rubber, the car pulled away.
‘Where’s the guy now?’ I asked Amland.
‘His own people have taken him away.’ It was an absurd situation, like the war in the adjoining countryside.
Later the captain said something about it being typical of these irregular hostilities. He confided that he’d rather the whole fucking Lebanese business had never happened. As it was, he was embarrassed at having to talk about something that officially didn’t happen, probably wasn’t even entered into the log, and with an almost total stranger to boot.
Later, the captain admitted that there would be no official protest. No questions had been asked, nor would any be. Nor were any apologies asked for or given, because at that stage the 3,000 members of the SLA were held in contempt by the UN, even though they constituted half the military forces in this low-key guerrilla insurgency in an area a good deal smaller than Greater London. The other half was Hizbollah.