I wasn’t the only one who thought that the situation was bizarre. To disregard the presence of an Israeli-supported military unit, much as the UN was trying to do, was almost like the British government ignoring every Roman Catholic in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

That was Lebanon then. It is also Lebanon today, where anything but the most serious kind of bloodletting rarely gets the attention it might deserve.

I discovered afterwards that the man who’d let fly at the guard post came from Marj’Ayoun, a stark hilltop town of cinder blocks and rutted streets. This was the most Christian village in the eastern part of the security zone. It was also Israel’s forward command and control centre in the region and the headquarters of the SLA while that element was still active.

Modest, even by Arab standards, Marj’Ayoun was a rather nondescript Middle Eastern village which boasted barely 12,000 inhabitants. With Hizbollah today dominating the entire region, only a fraction of the original Christian families remain. The majority have suffered the same fate as other Christian communities in the Arab West Bank further to the south, like Nazareth, Taibe, Ramallah and Beit Jala.

Marj’Ayoun was an important focus to many Lebanese Christians then, just as staunchly Shi’ite Nabatiya is to Hizbollah today. Before Israel pulled its troops out of South Lebanon, Marj’Ayoun was the nerve centre of all SLA operations in the region. Most of the senior officers of this Christian militia lived there. Almost all its houses were gathered in untidy clusters round several large hills, some half-finished, others two or three storeys high and still unfinished, in large measure because of ongoing hostilities. Marj’Ayoun saw a lot of action in its day and many of the men with whom I came into contact, a few of whom became friends, ended up dead because of it.

The main road wound through the town. Near the centre, even today, it is sometimes only wide enough for a single vehicle as it twists and turns on its north–south axis. In the old days, roads branching out from Marj’Ayoun would shoot off in all directions and stop where the minefields began.

There were scores of shops on either side of the main road, but not as we know them in the West. These are adjuncts to the family dwelling, so there were always old people and children about, the latter playing almost under the wheels of passing cars. Elsewhere, there were cluttered little workshops, usually with two or three men sitting out in front drinking coffee or pulling from a hookah.

The smell of cooking was everywhere; falafel, or mutton ribs or a shank over an open fire by the roadside, much of it dominated by the powerful scent of cardamom.

In those days, if you sat on the flat roof of one of the houses near where Samy Talj ran his little garage, you could see much of the surrounding countryside, usually with a couple of GPMGs covering local ground from behind clusters of sandbags. Anybody who has used a ‘Gimpey’ in combat knows what a comfort these guns are in a scrap.

These were Western weapons though, and the SLA used captured Soviet stuff. I concluded from the deafening silence from my escort on this subject that they’d probably been filched from one of the UN squads.

Unlike Beirut, where everything leads up to the mountains, the country around Marj’Ayoun is largely rock-strewn. Many of the high points were defended, though you saw little of those fortifications from the town. In the valleys and wadis between them, there had been some hard fighting.

To the south, on the road to Metullah and what was known for many years as the Israeli ‘Good Fence’ border crossing, you could just make out El Qlaiaa, another Christian town. The place became unsafe after Ahmed al-Hallaq, the SLA security chief, was abducted by some of his own men who had been got at by the Hizbollah command. They were paid good money to hand him over to the Party of God. In Israel such an act would be roughly analogous to Hamas partisans kidnapping the head of Shin Bet, torturing him and then putting him to death.

That is what Hizbollah did, I was told often enough. They forced al-Hallaq to reveal the names of many of his agents, who were then rounded up or killed. He couldn’t resist their entreaties, they said afterwards, because they had their own ways of making him talk and the human body can only take so much …

From the same roof you could also see some of the buildings on the outskirts of El Khiam, with its notorious prison that during the Israeli period of occupation drew a lot of attention, especially from human rights groups. There was plenty happening at Khiam when I was around – a bit like Guantanamo today – but it wasn’t the sort of place that visiting journalists made too much of.

Both the Israelis and the SLA always maintained that the prison inmates were criminals who had committed what were euphemistically referred to as ‘military crimes’. There were no details given, even if you asked, except that if Khiam did not exist, ‘then the war would go badly for everyone’, an Israel colonel told me. Then Hizbollah might be within small-arms range of Israeli settlements, he warned. He was probably right because now that the IDF has finally pulled back, many Jewish settlements, moshavs and kibbutzims are being fired at from across the fence.

What was disconcerting was when some people in a couple of villages adjacent to Khiam told me that they could sometimes hear prisoners screaming at night. Who knows what went on behind that structure’s 13-foot walls topped with razor wire?

All this was happening in an area roughly 30 miles from east to west and about 8 miles deep and officially under UN control. Those Europeans operating in South Lebanon at the time knew very well about what was going on at El Khiam when the Israelis were still in South Lebanon, but they tended to look the other way whenever this reality faced them. In this peculiar never-never-land, most UN contingents pretended that the place simply didn’t exist.

The man who created the SLA south of Beirut was an Israeli officer, Colonel Yoram Hamizrachi, who was originally a journalist, a very good one, we were told. For the purpose, he was given the rank of lieutenant colonel and told to get on with it. Initially the new unit was called the Christian forces, and only later the South Lebanese Army.

Hamizrachi, whose idea it was in the first place, was an impressive fellow and I got to know him well over the years. After his tour of duty with the IDF, he stayed with me for a while in South Africa and then went on to live in Canada.

Some journalists who arrived at Metullah – where Beata, his German-born wife, and he operated out of – suggested that Hamizrachi’s job with the SLA had all the makings of something quite glamorous and derring-do. It was anything but.

The man was tall and, frankly, far too heavy for the popular notion of an Israeli Army officer. He usually wore a billowing kaftan at home, where he received most of his callers – Jewish or Arab – and that would sometimes give him an almost brooding, Buddha-like image. He was also impressively well-read and as fluent in Arabic as if he’d been born to the culture.