This is not a tale of tragedy or a lamentation, nor is it a glorification of war or peace, or an accusation of criminal nations who encouraged this war. It is simply a diary -- my life as a child of war, both frightening and exciting, where life was suspended but life went on anyway. A life neither happier nor sadder than that of any other child on the planet, but more unusual perhaps, and sometimes astonishing in how normal it all was to me. Which is why I like to share this piece of writing: I feel it is a unique perspective on this kind of event, as I have strived to keep it void of post-rationalisation and political context to keep it, as purely as possible, an insight into how this was experienced by a kid's mind, and for that I put myself back into my mindset of the time to write it. This shows in the "voice".

Pre-awareness

I was born in Beirut on September 11th, 1979, in the basement/shelter of the clinic where my mother had gone to give birth. We immediately left for Muscat, in Oman, where my father worked at the time. We came back 18 months later so that my brother would be born on our Lebanese ground, then barely made it back to Muscat, as the airport was constantly threatened and the road leading to it was dangerous in itself. Luck was on our side again a year later when we had returned for Christmas. I have a vague memory, my earliest probably, of a soldier (my uncle) carrying me up into a helicopter where my family was huddled, and us flying over the coast to the airport. I can still see the crashing waves below us. We took one of the last flights out before the airport was bombed and shut.

And yet, in 82 we returned to Beirut for good, despite everything that was going on. Family and friends were things my parents could not leave behind; like many Lebanese, they preferred being in the thick of it but have everyone dear to them near at hand, rather than being safe and not being able to come to their help.

I remember nights spent at my grandparents as we stayed there for a while, my brother and I sleeping in my mother's arms while my dad spent the night at his own parents' house. Very soon though we found an apartment in a neighbouring area, on the 6th floor of a building that the owner wanted to get rid of. The area was until recently the privileged residence of rich foreign merchants, but it was now too dangerous for them. I must have been 4 when we moved in. I remember more nights spent in the lobby or in the corridor. We'd pull our mattresses into one or the other and sleep there, the four of us huddled together. I didn't know why we did it, but never asked: at that young age, why would I have found it odd?

My mom tells me that her and I were on our way back from the supermarket one day mortar shells started to fall all around the car. I wasn't even startled as I asked "Mom, what's that smoke?" She on the other hand has no idea how we made it home. I only got scared once: the day we had to rush down to the building's basement because the shelling had become too threatening. I was far less scared of the bombs, than I was of the attitudes of the people running down -- this sense of tense hurrying for one's life, even if it did not involve screaming or weeping, was something I could perceive very well. That day, we hadn't even taken the time to put shoes on our feet, and my dad was (understandably) not friendly when I asked if he could go and get me my favourite toy. Our word for this basement that serves as an anti-bomb shelter is malja', and along with the words for "shell" (azifeh), "shrapnel" (shaziyeh) and others, it resonates vividly in my mind.

Shortly after this episode we went to spend a few days at my cousins' in the country, an area relatively far from the bombings. Beirut was constantly "showered", and our home was in the worst possible area: the demarcation line or "green line", marked by the National Museum, that separates Eastern from Western Beirut. While the rest of the regions in the country were shelled each by a specific group depending on whom was occupying them, that area was hit by everyone without distinction. The Museum is a place of sad memories. To this day I feel startled when I see it renovated and surrounded with life and traffic, I who first laid eyes on it when it was a scarred corpse in the middle of a no man's land that none dared approach for the snipers that nested there. I am at a loss of comparisons to express the way we felt about the Museum. The Berlin wall may be what comes closest: it was our own Wall.

I was 9 when I was able to visit West Beirut for the first time, and see all the things I had read about in books, that were in my own city and yet out of reach. Such were the wonderful Pigeon Grotto and the American University of Beirut where I became a student in 97. Beyond the no man's land, lay another Beirut that felt like another country to us. When we went to visit, we had to do it with a special escort. Our guide was killed shortly after.

Awareness breaks

I don't know when it was that I realised that we were at war. I know that at 9, I had known that a long time. A child's thoughts are strange. I knew that war was not the normal way to be (I had travelled many times, to France, Greece and even the States), but what I felt was that for us in Lebanon, that was the way it was, and it was inevitable, and would not end. I didn't look forward to its end, because I felt that this had always been the way.

I suddenly burst into maturity during that year, the year 1988. That was the year when the War of Liberation rushed everything. In the space of 2 years was condensed what feels like a lifetime of events.

In March 1989, my father was abroad, but he returned in time for my brother's birthday. He did well: shortly after it all hell broke loose. Shelling forced us all in school to take refuge in the canteen, my first truly terrifying experience, with all these teachers and kids screaming. The school shut after that: it was safer for parents to keep their children with them at all times. On March 14 a West Beirut school was shelled. My parents had been planning to send us to school in the West so that we wouldn't miss out on our school year, but that event made them change their mind for a while. The images of this event now known as Black Tuesday -- of these children burned alive -- terrified me for years.

At night we could see DCA bullets (counter-air defence) speeding through the skies. Our parents made us sleep in the corridor all the time while they stayed in their room, until one night when two bullets crashed into the bedrooms -- one in ours, one in theirs. The latter shot through the window, the curtains, the lamp, then and bounced on the wall right into the bed where it made a hole in the mattress between my parents. We were awakened by the sound of the glass breaking and my dad cursing. After that, it was every night in the corridor. Back then I had nightmares all the time, so I actually welcomed the shelling that allowed us to sleep so close that I wasn't afraid anymore. In retrospect, I suppose the nightmares were a nightly processing of all the daily input that would have terrified me as an adult, but that I didn't notice as a child. For months we stayed at home, listening to the shells outside. My mom once jokingly suggested I should tape them for my pen friend. We were experts in making out a launching from a crashing. The one was harmless: we knew we had time to get out of the way, and the closer it was to us the safer we were, since it meant that the shells would fall away from us (except of course, if they were so close that retaliation would hit us along with the cannons). The other was much scarier, not just because of its implications, but because of the sound itself. It was the difference between a clean THOOMP and a raging CRRRRAATSHH. We could also tell who was shooting, from the sound. We hardly paid any attention to them anymore -- we felt safe, though we certainly were not. It is to my parent's credit that my brother and I really believed we were safe from any harm in that corridor. The truth is, we were only protected by our luck. We knew many different kinds of weapons and shells: the 120 commonly used; the fearsome 240 that could penetrate the shelters; the grad that produced little shrapnel but a big shock wave (one fell a the building's entrance, and our entrance door on the 6th floor was blown in); the lighting rockets; the fire rockets...

In that situation, we seldom had electricity. Funnily, this is how I learned my first bad word. Every time a black out occurred, my mother would sigh: "Et merde!"...Naturally, one day the power went out and I said it in her place. And didn't understand why I was lectured for it.

Where the power was there, we dragged the TV into the corridor. The TV chains were still active: life went on, it never stopped but only paused in some places from time to time. I remember watching Charlie Chaplin's Dictator like that, happily stretched out on the corridor mattresses while my dad was working and my mom attending house chores. Many years later I learned that throughout the war, she forbade herself to think of the future, taking things one hour at the time to keep what she could of her sanity. Her hair turned white around that time, in her early 30s.

We never went down to the shelter, and I'm glad we didn't, or we would have been much more scared because of the people praying or weeping down there. Other than that first time I mentioned above, we went there only once: that was after a shell exploded right before our eyes. We were sleeping in the corridor. In its axis is our bathroom, which has a tiny window above the bathtub right opposite the door. The bathroom door was open, and it was a busy night fightingwise. Suddenly there was a light, dreadfully powerful -- for a second the world was white, there was nothing there but a void of white light so strong it felt it sear through me. Much more terrible was the sound that went with it, a dreadful cracking noise, slow enough that we wouldn't lose any sinister detail of it, like an enraged beast on the prowl. I will never, ever forget that sound, the loudest thing I am ever likely to hear. The shell had crashed into the wall of the building right outside the bathroom, and the window burst and covered us with glass. "My bed is full of glass!" I heard my brother's voice say in the dark, then my father's: "All right, put your shoes on, we're going down." It was a grim night. The terrified neighbours and guardians all crowded in our uncomfortable and smelly shelter were more unsettling than the bombs. At dawn, the battle stopped and we returned home. We all crawled into my parents' bed -- in the room, since there was no need for us to stay in the corridor anymore for that day. As we settled down for some sleep, there was silence. Not one sound in the entire city. No power generators, no cars, no birds greeting the sun. Then, magnified by the still air, voices went up -- laughter, giggles, thanks to the Lord, enquiries from neighbour to neighbour: "Was your house hit?" "Are you still alive?" No one had been hurt that night in the neighbourhood, and everyone was thanking God for it. I myself started giggling uncontrollably, giggling with delight as I felt that all these voices, my family and I were in this together, and stronger than bombs. The voices comforted me. No one was alone.

Fear and laughter

There are so many things to tell, but I should sort them out. Fun was ever present. It would seem that in such times, the slightest things could make us happy or cheerful. Since there was no school, we had a lot of time to play. In the morning we were shut at home, but the afternoon was peaceful, and so we met our neighbours "every day at 4" in the building's private open-air parking. We couldn't do it earlier because grown-ups insisted that we'd let them have their nap first. Once again, being at war did not mean we should forsake every bit of our daily lives. I am firmly convinced that the one way to stay sane is not to give more power to the events than they already have on us. This throughout the Lebanese war you could see people going to the hairdresser, giving parties and going on holidays.

When we met at 4, we played ball games until we dropped. A shell had made a large hole into the wall of our parking (and into the carpet that our concierge was beating only minutes before it fell). It was extremely convenient for us: if we threw the ball too high and it fell in the neighbouring parking, we used the hole to go get it, instead of going all around the block to the other entrance.

We would refresh ourselves with the water that constantly flowed out of a hose connected to an underground space under our building. The latter was always flooded because the building stands on top of an expanse of water. Since running water was cut at that time, the entire neighbourhood came to fill gallons from our underground reserve, and so the hose remained there open all the time. Dusk was usually the time when the fights started again. When we started to hear the first launchings, we would say goodbye, see you tomorrow at 4, and return home to a cold bath. Not surprisingly, hot water was available. That did not prevent us from taking a daily bath -- hygiene was one of the things that nobody would forsake no matter what. Sometimes my mom would heat water in huge cooking pots and have us sit in a large bowl scrubbing ourselves while she poured the hot water down our backs. I accepted the shelling as something natural, but I was never able to accept this way of bathing. Now that I can have a hot shower everyday, I cannot believe that there was once a time where I had to sit in a bowl and wash myself as best I could without freezing. I think I understand now, why my parents cut my hair short all the time.

Phones worked terribly as well and that could be simply horrible when one could not get through to one's family for news. Depending on what lines were damaged, some areas could call a certain number of other areas while the rest was out of touch. For example, area A could call area B but not area C, while B could call both. Therefore in order to communicate, people of area A who had family in C would call a random number in B and ask the person if they could call such-and-such number and give them news and make sure they were all ok. It didn't matter that the mediator was a stranger. We were all in the same boat.

Sometimes instead of returning home when the shells started falling, we followed our friends to their shelter. Theirs was big and cosy, like a miniature of the one in "Blast from the Past". People in it were watching TV, drinking coffee, playing cards. My grandparents' shelter was even more exciting; it was a little underground city where every household had its own comfortable cubicle. I remember all the old folks playing bridge while we ran around the miniature "street. I was once home alone with my mom, so bored to tears that I begged her to let me go to our neighbours' shelter. It was pouring shells outside but I said I would wait for a calmer moment. She ended up letting me go, and I ran down the street between two explosions to reach the shelter. When I returned home the same way, I found that I had done very well to go. A DCA bullet had made another hole in our window and crashed through the wood above my bed, shooting glass and wood shards all over the room. If I had been there at that moment, I'd rather not think of what would have happened to me. I have kept the bullet to this day.

During that period we often crossed the Green Line to go to the West and get essentials. It was a nightmarish area, a no man's land bordered with corpses of buildings, haunted by snipers from which we hid by crouching in the car. Half-destroyed buildings usually didn't scare me, because there were always people who took residence in them and filled them with signs of life like drying laundry. If half the apartment collapses, they go on living in the remaining half. But those on the Line were a terrifying vision because of their utter emptiness.

We would always pick comic books to take with us to school, to read in the car. At first my dad had opposed this habit, but he quickly started encouraging it. I never wondered why, but the reason was explained to me nearly 10 years later. Sometimes while driving, my parents would find themselves in a neighbourhood littered with fresh corpses. My mom says with a shudder every time she tells this story, "we'd look at each other in silence, look in the mirror at you kids reading in the back seats and pray to God you would just keep reading, keep reading".

Obviously school didn't start again that year, and we spent the summer in the mountains in the village of Faraya that is also a ski resort. A friend of my dad's lent us his chalet. There were lots to do there; the place was crawling with school friends and other kids our age -- but we were happy to leave at the end of summer, nevertheless. It was no fun hearing and watching the shells fall over Beirut, especially the times our parents left us in Faraya to go get things done in the city, and all we could do was wait for them to return.

In that sombre period we had a hero: a Great Dane named Vulcan. That dog was our idol. It belonged to a friend of my dad's who was killed, and his brother had taken him in. Vulcan was not only huge; he was black from head to toe. Imagine the scene: it is a typical evening without electricity. There is a knock on the door. You open it in the dark, and an invisible dog enters... you can hear the sound of his toes on the marble floor but can't see any of him. We always enjoyed this entrance, but it made a whole other impression on the neighbours above us the day Vulcan and his owner went up to the wrong floor: there was a loud scream and we understood.

(Many years later a strange set of circumstances came together. It was very eerie. It was March 9, 1996, my brother's 15th birthday. The war had been behind us for 5 years now, but I was pondering the date as I walked towards a place near the Museum. I always associate that day with the climax of the war, because it was around then that the most intense events (as far as I was concerned) began. I froze on the street when I recognised it. I had never walked there before: I was in the middle of the no man's land I mentioned above. I felt a chill as memories returned and I looked with disbelief at the new life that the place had regained. There was much more during that day. We had planned to sleep in Faraya, and for the first time since the war I found myself in the chalet that had been lent to us, sleeping in the same bed. The fourth event was Vulcan's death on that very day... I hadn't seen him, either, since the war, but I had been content with hearing about him. The whole thing felt like a burial of the past, something I didn't want to happen.)

On the weekends, we would go to the beach, some 12 miles away and no safer than home. Often in the middle of our games, we'd hear explosions and know we should seek shelter in the one underground room of the place. Fortunately it was a theatre and therefore a vast room -- the entire beach club would gather there. Once though, two shells fell on the grassy area where members usually set up their stuff to tan or play. One landed in front of my granddad, who owes his life to his reflex of hurling himself to the ground. The other hit the ground between my aunt's future husband and her friend; they were both severely wounded by the shrapnel. They ran hand in hand until they collapsed in a pool of blood next to the theatre room; people lifted them into a member's car and he rushed them to the hospital. We visited them often, and I remember picking the funniest comic books I knew to bring them as gifts. There was many an occasion to laugh at the hospital. My aunt once entered the room brandishing a plastic skeleton leg: "I got it! I know what happened to your leg!" She lay the prop on top of the covers to point out what se had found out, and at that moment visitors came in. "Get well soo–" and then they just froze.

After that summer, we went back to school normally. I was now 10, and it was the school year 89-90. Then March came again, accursed month as it seems! It is amazing the way small details are engraved into my mind, while dates and even time spans are impossible for me to remember. I do remember that "that" day was a Wednesday. We were in school, and we started to feel that something was going on. The school was up in the mountains (an hour from the city) with a football field overlooking the sea. During recess, we were playing in the field and we noticed bombs falling and exploding in the water. It rather made us laugh (after all, they were only bombs...), but when parents began to come one after the other to pick up their children, we started getting worried. Every hour or so there would be a knock at the class door and a student or two would be called: there were increasingly few of us remaining, a very unpleasant feeling. To our relief our father did come, at the very end of the day. The students whose parents couldn't make it had to stay in school for the night; soldiers came and lent them sleeping bags. They had a lot of fun, although they later said that the sleeping bags smelt bad! As for us, we couldn't return to Beirut. We spent a frightening night at a friend's house in the area, while shells poured around us. My mother was home alone in Beirut. She spent the night flat on the corridor floor, hiding her head in her hands, with absolutely no idea of our whereabouts, or even whether my dad had been able to pick us up from school – as I said before, phones didn't work. The very worst thing that can happen to anyone during events like these, is not knowing.

The next morning we rushed down to Beirut while the roads were open. My dad planned for us all to go back up to our friends' house and stay there until whatever was happening (I had no clue at the time) died down. Mom had already packed our bags -- we threw them in the trunk and drove back the way we had come from. I was in the car with my dad while my brother was with my mom following us in the other car. My dad asked a soldier if the road was open: "Sure, go ahead".
A minute later though, another soldier jumped into our way screaming:

"You can't go this way!"

"I just came that way", said my father, "and we want to go back up."

"Fine, if you want to die, go ahead."

We looked closer: the road was paved with mines. If it weren't for that soldier we'd have been blown to bits.

We made for home. But the road had been closed behind us. Our last chance was the nearby neighbourhood where my grandparents lived. As we arrived there, ominous launching sounds started to fill the air. We could see people running for shelter in the streets. There were sounds of explosions, and they were coming closer. Fear started creeping up on me, but my parents remained calm. Dad dropped us at the house and went to park both cars in a hopefully safe place, while I was terrified of the risks he was taking.

I remember (but my memory probably tricks me) spending a month, a whole horrible month, at my grandparents' house. Horrible because boredom prevented us from keeping our mind off things, because it was an enemy-occupied area (but we had no choice), because the house presented little or no shelter, even psychological, against bombings. It was March, and the sun set long before the electricity generator was turned on everyday, so that there was a daily hour or two where no activity at all was possible. There was very little we could do. During the day we took long walks around the neighbourhood, meeting up with friends who were trapped there like we were, and at night the 8 of us (my uncle and aunt were there too) huddled in the narrow corridor while the shelling sounded much scarier than they did back home. Sometimes my uncle would be sick, a nervous reaction to the shelling; he, my aunt and I all developed nervous twitches form that period. Ironically, we were now under the bombs of our own army. I devoured books and encyclopaediae at my grandparents', and cut out people in magazines to make a puppet show -- anything and everything to have some distraction. They had a typewriter that I would use to write myself a newsletter with made-up news and jokes. I learned my first card games there as my mom pooled her resources to help us out of the boredom. It was also there that I had the most horrible nightmare of my childhood: a hoary creature with holes in the place of eyes was coming after me. I still find myself looking nervously around for it when I'm alone in my room at night.

There were, still, pleasant moments. My uncle would call a friend on the phone to ask for news, and since the phones were probably tapped by the occupants the enquiry went like this: "How's Batman? Did he get spanked today?" We were told to never use the word "Syrian", because they had (and still have) spies everywhere and we didn't want to find a bomb in the apartment (my grandparents' apartment had already been blown up in an assassination attempt in the 70s). We should say "the Swiss" instead. We still have that habit and there's a joke that goes thus:

A man runs into a police station and says: "A Swiss just stole my Syrian watch!"
The officer corrects him: "Calm down, you mean a Syrian stole your Swiss watch?"
And our man, lift both hands: "YOU said it, not I!"

The "Swiss" were never too bright... The following story predates my birth, at a time when Syrian roadblocks were already a plague. The routine is for the soldier to ask the driver where he's coming from and where he's heading. A "Swiss" soldier once let the car before my dad's pass, but he looked puzzled and asked my dad:

"Is there a place in Lebanon called Santiago?"

"Uhhh.... No!"

"Son of a bitch lied to me!"

Another time he was with my mom's brother: a soldier asked them if they spoke French. They said yes, and he asked for the meaning of the word "fanculo". Obviously the guy in the car before them had said it to him, and my uncle managed not to laugh ("fanculo" is "f... you" in Italian). He explained that it was something like "God be with you"... Then he cleared out before the soldier found out the truth.

There are many such stories, as the Lebanese were very creative when it came to expressing their contempt of the invadors.

During a brief period of calm, we walked home to bring a few things back with us, mostly games. Right now, the distance seems small to me -- I could walk it in less than an hour. But at the time, and with the fact that we had to walk around the no man's land, it was no small distance, and having to walk it was heavy with symbolism of which we were aware even then. From my grandparents' we also walked to Western Beirut, on one memorable day. There was a crowd of people, many of which were acquaintances, all making their way on foot out of the neighbourhood to go and get essentials from elsewhere. The way was paved with mines, and there were soldiers there to help us through them. In the midst of this mine field we ran across one of our school principals who embraced us merrily. You'd have thought we were on a picnic in a field of daisies. On the other side someone picked us up in a car and dropped us as close from the border as they could. We crossed it on foot after queuing at the roadblocks, and then someone else picked us up on the other side. It was safer there – the Free area where we lived was the dangerous one -- and there was no blockade such as the one we were suffering. That evening when we returned, my dad slipped something in my little backpack. I don't know what it was, all I knew then was that we needed to bring it back without the guards at the roadblocks finding it. It weighed terribly heavy in my bag, but I played the game (a bit tremblingly) and we came through.

As soon as we could leave this accursed area we went back to my cousins' country-house, this time the entire family. Times were much happier there. At least we were all together: my grandparents, my uncle and aunt, my aunt with her husband and my two cousins, and the four of us. That area was protected. I vaguely remember that the reason for that was that a much-hated warlord lived there. It was said that the reason why the mosquitoes were so poisonous in that area was because they had stung him first.

The house has a view on the sea all the way to Beirut, and with binoculars we'd observe the bay below, and watch buildings exploding. "In the water", my uncle would say. "In the water again, they keep missing. Oh my God, look! It's the Marina building, it just went down." My brother would run to the bathroom, the safest room in the house, and stay there until it stopped.

The end

When we could finally return home, our parents decided we couldn't miss school any longer, and they sent us to school in West Beirut. Crossing the Green Line every day was pure madness. Even today, anytime I mention this I am met with wide eyes. The journey involved crouching in the car to hide from snipers. A lot of risks to send us to school! But to not take the chance would have been to lay down and die.

The traffic at some point on the road, past the no man's land but before the normal traffic started again, was extremely slow. There were numerous roadblocks and things I didn't understand. It was often funny though. One day a soldier opened a parasol and a mouse jumped out that he started chasing between the cars. My dad made friends with a couple of Syrian soldiers, poor wretches who no more wanted to be here than we wanted them to be. One asked him what make his car was. We had a Saab, a brand totally unknown to the West at the time. It so happens that in Lebanese, Saab means "it is difficult", so when my dad made that answer the soldier thought he was telling him "it's too difficult for me to tell you".

"It's ok, try."

"Saab."

"I told you, try."

"Saab I tell you!"

"What, am I dumb?"

"The NAME OF THE CAR is Saab!!"

The most hilarious thing was when those two decided to play a joke on my dad. My dad had a certain paper that facilitated our passage at roadblocks; he had obtained it through connections. The soldiers asked him to give it to them and to recover it on his way back. Very worried, he called every highly placed person he knew. Apparently they all took turns mangling the soldiers, because when my dad drove back home they looked at him pitiably:

"Brother... what did we do to you? We were just playing with you!"

"You gave me the fright of my life!!"

One day however, we couldn't return. I remember the trail of cars stopped at the Barbeer bridge, my mom staring with concern down the 500 meters of road that separated us from the Museum. It's a funny feeling, standing at one end of a road and seeing the other end, your destination, in the distance, but knowing that this empty road is the thickest wall you'll ever have to face. The Passage was being shelled, and the people at the Barbeer would never have let us attempt it. Not that my mom would have been that crazy, anyway. We turned back and spent the night at friends'. The next day my dad joined us and we all remained in the West until the end of the school season.

That school was actually ours. CLW, where I was a student from elementary until the baccalaureate, was split into two when Beirut was divided into East and West. There was then an Eastern CLW and a Western one. What we were doing was go to the Western one now, where we were already acquainted with most of our classmates; besides, many Easterners were doing the same thing we did. We almost didn't feel the change. The greatest difference between the two sections of the school is that while the East one is in majority Christian, the west is mostly Muslim. But that, we never noticed at our age. Religion was simply absent from the picture. The 10 Eastern students were gathered in a classroom of their own, an unforgettable school year.

It was the summer of 1990, the climax and downfall of the resistance.

Things were simple to us kids: there were the good guys and there were the bad guys. The bad guys were trying to take over our country (and they included a group of renegade Lebanese), and the good guys were our Army, who fought to free it. Despite the simplification, we children were very conscious of what was at stake. We couldn't fight on the field, but we did in our way. We smiled and supported our soldiers, waving the V of victory when we saw them -- and they answered with a salute. As for the others, we delighted in insulting them in subtle ways that they couldn't understand, or if they did, they couldn't do much about it: after all, we were just kids! A friend of mine, 9 at the time, would pretend he had hurt his arm, and as he held it with yowls of pain would be throwing an elbow jerk and finger at the enemy soldiers standing guard. We had fun, we would make fun of everything. Jokes on shelling, and true stories circulated. We would tell over and over again the story of how a friend of my parents', hard of hearing, who was shaving when three shells exploded in his living room. His reaction was an unforgettable: "Come in, the door's open!" A postcard was available in the stores at the time: It was all black and read "Beirut by night". Stories of acts of solidarity became like bedtime stories, as did stories of miracles -- for there were miracles, and the faith of the people never ceased to grow during "the events", as we still modestly call them. We felt bound together, a huge welded family, with God among us, and we would stand straight in the storm. "On this earth neither oppressor or tyrant will ever bend a Cedar of Lebanon," said a French song that was on everyone's lips. But we weren't oblivious to the world around. We rejoiced when the wall of Berlin fell, and we wept with Armenia when the great earthquake occurred.

The climax of this mood was the demonstration in front of the presidential palace, for someone who symbolised our resistance to the invader. We went there to dance, and sing, and laugh, and wave our flags -- a sea of red and white and green, and I waved the flag as if it were my heart that I was lifting to the sky. The demonstration was constantly going on, day and night, unendingly. There, definitely, everyone was related. Being there meant being... how can I express that? We were as one body, who refused to forsake our land. Stickers were distributed that said, "My religion is Lebanon". Many world-famous celebrities were there too, especially French, and they took the Lebanese nationality to symbolise their support. All this demonstration was happening within reach of Syrian cannons pointed at us, but no one cared. Once, they fired on a helicopter. I remember jumping under a truck with my mother for protection. But no one was hurt, and most importantly, no one left -- on the contrary, people kept coming. Another time (but I wasn't there, I saw it on TV), there was a man with a gun and assassination on his agenda. Soldiers spotted him from afar with binoculars, and they fired shots in the air to warn the crowd. Everyone ducked except the assassin. People looked at him, saw the gun... and he was instantly drowned under a sea of infuriated supporters who jumped to stop him, gun or no. The furious crowd came close to killing him; soldiers arrived in time to get him out. I don't know his fate.

There was a TV station that supported the militia we considered to be traitors. One of that station's broadcast antennae is visible from our balcony (that's what I was explained at the time; God knows what the truth behind it was, but that's' what I remember). One day a battle tank stationed itself down our street, and started shooting at it. Far from seeking refuge, the entire street was out on the balconies cheering and watching it topple. I didn't care for the noise so I ran to get the soundproof headphones we kept in a drawer and pulled them over my ears so I could continue watching.

I have left out many things, both delightful and horrible, but this is far too long already. At the time of the Gulf War (and a result of it), everything crumbled. How and why, never mind, but one morning after a great bombing I woke up to find my mother collapsed by the radio in the kitchen. "It's over", she said. "'He is gone". I didn't understand then. When I did, I fell into a black despair. Less because of what that meant (that the war of liberation had failed and we were now utterly invaded and under foreign domination), than because everyone was in the same state I was: blank and shocked incredulity, knocked-out, fearful of the future. All the energy invested in the resistance was suddenly gone, vanished, exhausted. There was also the utter shock of the assassination of a political leader and his wife and two children, both of which were acquaintances of mine. I had actually played ping-pong with the elder (my brother's classmate) a few days or weeks before he was gunned down.

Personally I only regained my balance when I was sent to France for a scout camp, a couple of years later. That fine idea constitutes a hinge between the war and my present life. The "events" left many scars, both physical and psychological. I could go on into the operation Grapes of Wrath in 96, that reminded us of the old days and created 500 000 instant refugees, but it's late now and I'm tired... Very tired of the past catching up with me. Yet the worst thing that could happen would be for all this to go forgotten. There was a time where everyone around me was going through the same things I was going through. We'd all know what we were talking about, we'd all have our own adventures to tell. This knot has dissolved, and the events I'm telling are abstract and distant to most of my present friends. A big part of the present population has either never been directly in touch with the events, or returned here after the war. It means nothing to them, and they don't take it seriously. That's nothing though compared to the utterly nonsensical image the rest of the world has of this war. It's why I wanted to tell it as I saw it, devoid of any political layer. Just as it happened, to us.


Important note

I have presented this story exactly the way I saw it while I was living it, that is through the eyes of a child who was spared the worst of it thanks to her parents and her lack of understanding. Don't let it downplay the events in your mind. The war was atrocious, and unbelievable cruel. 17 years of daily destruction of lives and places, 3 foreign armies wantonly and deliberately bulldozering a nation, infinite lies about the truth of what was going on: that was the war. To this day we are still under Syrian domination.