As I Saw It

by Scott, Marvin; Rather, Dan;

  In one camp, I watched a three-year-old on a tricycle pointing a toy rifle into the air and crying out, “Bing, bing, bing.” Nearby, a nine-year-old carried a real one.

  The younger boy’s mother, watching over her son, told me, “He’s been born in the worst of times. All he sees are the weapons. He has nothing else to play with. He wants to play with guns.” Bursting with pride, she declared, “When he’s nine, he’ll have a real one.” The battle against Israel was justified, she claimed, because “there is no meaning to life without your homeland.”

  A 22-year-old neighbor echoed her sentiment, saying, “I have my homeland in my heart. Death is no problem for me, if I die fighting for it.” The deep crevices in her face and circles under her eyes bore witness to her years of struggle and hardship.

  Tensions rose during a visit to the PLO offices, located on the ninth floor of a building in the Hamra section of Beirut. Below, there was a tractor-trailer loaded with crates blocking the street, the driver nowhere to be found. We heard a cacophony of blaring horns. I was unnerved and fearful that this might have been an abandoned truck heavily laden with explosives. An anxious 15 minutes passed before the driver finally showed up and moved his truck. I had just about calmed down when I got word of a massive anti-American protest that had erupted nearby, after two U.S. fighter jets shot down two Libyan warplanes. As many as a thousand angry demonstrators had congregated, and were burning the American flag and an effigy of President Reagan.

  I kept my head down as my driver hustled me back to the Commodore Hotel, a heavily guarded sanctuary for journalists in the war-torn area. Around the hotel bar, reporters shared stories and talked about close encounters. We acknowledged that we were all fatalists, fully aware of the hazards we faced while in pursuit of our stories, but the things we saw and heard here, on a daily basis, were truly surreal. We saw a Syrian soldier kicking a mule with the heel of his boot, in an effort to move it along the street. We saw a well-dressed man getting a shoeshine in the midst of a cloud of dirt and dust whipping across the street, standing beneath a poster of a Palestinian martyr. Dozens of these posters hung throughout the city. We regularly heard the crack of gunfire from inside the hotel; once, hearing it very close to the back of the building, some of us went to investigate. We found an eight-year-old boy firing an AK-47 at a fence.

  * * *

  It was 8 o’clock on a Saturday night when the hotel concierge summoned me to the phone. My PLO contact was calling to inform me that tonight was the night. Yasser Arafat had agreed to meet with me at 11:30, for a half-hour exclusive interview. The other reporters at the hotel were surprised and envious that I had scored this hard-to-get interview with Arafat so quickly. Apparently, the PLO saw it as an opportunity to reach a vast American audience through the article I was writing for a national publication.

  A couple of hours later, I was picked up and driven to a residential section of Beirut. After a cursory security check—very surprising, given the many attempts that had already been made on Arafat’s life—I was led into the finished basement of what appeared to be a private home. The room was thick with smoke. Nearly 20 men were smoking Marlboro cigarettes and fondling their worry beads. Several Kalashnikov assault rifles lay on top of the large brown and beige squares that made up the carpet. I sat nervously, wondering whether or not the controversial leader would be responsive to my questions. Soon, the doors to an inner chamber opened, and everyone stood up. I hesitated for a moment, but was the last to rise as a man walked out of the room, much of his body wrapped in bandages. I would later learn that he was an anti-Zionist Jew, who had recently performed a covert mission for the PLO.

  I was ushered into the inner chamber and introduced to Arafat, and we exchanged pleasantries in English and Arabic. For a man of such stature among the Palestinians, I was surprised to see how short he was, at 5 feet 2 inches. He was dressed in military fatigues, and wore his customary black-and-white keffiyeh headdress. He seemed more personable than I had expected, and spoke with me mostly in English, though he had an interpreter at his side. Before we began, his Harvard-educated communications director, Mahmoud Labadi, offered to take my picture with the chairman. As we posed, he snapped four frames with my camera. Curiously, I would later find that three of the photos had Arafat and me perfectly framed, while the second shot had me dead center of the frame. It was theorized that if the camera had been rigged as a weapon—a known assassination tactic—it could have fired its projectile with the second snap of the shutter.

  Recognizing that my article for Parade magazine would have a potential readership of 70 million Americans, Arafat reiterated his message that it was the Israelis who were the aggressors in their conflict. He emphatically denied that Palestinian children were being conditioned to hate.

  Asked if the children were serving as pawns in the conflict, he asserted, “We are obliged to push our small children to defend themselves against Israeli aggression,” but insisted at the same time, “We are teaching them love of the motherland, not hatred of the enemy.” Not entirely satisfied with his response to my question, I waited a few minutes to ask again.

  Labadi leaned over to me, cupping his hand over my ear. “Don’t ask the same question again,” he said, “or the interview is terminated.” In the final moments of the interview, I dared to ask it again. “The interview is terminated,” Labadi shot at me.

  “No, let him continue,” asserted Arafat, who handed me a photograph to take back to what sounded like “Jew York.” It was of an infant, Fahtmi Palestine, taken from the womb of her mother, who was killed in an Israeli bombing raid. As I looked at the photo, Arafat took exception with my use of the word “conflict” during the interview, telling me, “It is not fair to say conflict. It is aggression against our children. They are the victims.” When I asked if the Palestinian children could coexist with Jewish children in a place called Israel, Arafat was quick to respond.

  “Yes,” he declared, “in the future, when they grow up—when they have their state and are living in a secure land.” Drawing our interview to its close, he invited me to ask the children myself whether they were ready to live in peace with Israelis.

  * * *

  I visited an orphanage at Souk El-Gharb known as the School of Happiness of Children, built exclusively for the orphans of martyrs. I put that question to 13-year-old Tarek. But the school’s headmaster translated the English into Arabic differently. I was suspicious, but didn’t learn until afterwards that the question wasn’t quite what I had asked.

  My driver-interpreter informed me that the headmaster had actually queried, “Can you live in peace under a Zionist government that wants to destroy the Palestinian people?” It was no wonder the boy shook his head wildly with the predictable answer.

  Out of the presence of their elders, the children of the PLO spoke much more openly and candidly. 14-year-old Khalel said he would have no difficulty living with Israelis as friends. He told me he was optimistic that through prayer and compromise, peace could be achieved. 13-year-old Hassan said he would like for there to be peace, so he could visit Disneyworld.

  12-year-old Abdul wished for peace so he could have a bicycle—but then hesitated and said, “If I had to choose between a bicycle and peace, I would rather have peace.”

  Still, it was true that for many other children in Beirut, hatred of Israel had been passed down to them over generations.

  “We teach our children that our country is Palestine,” one mother told me, “and our enemy is Israel.” Some children expressed this antipathy through their art. A drawing by an eight-year old Palestinian boy, for example, showed people on a rooftop shooting down a plane.

  The caption read, “Don’t worry, Jerusalem, tomorrow we will return back.” A grotesque painting by an eight-year-old girl showed several people hanging from gallows, accompanied by the words, “Jerusalem, fight and struggle until you are liberated from the enemies. We will fight and struggle until we liberate you.”

  We drove south to
the Palestinian camp at Rachidye, just four miles north of the Israeli border. Israeli planes had destroyed six important bridges in southern Lebanon, thereby shutting down the main roads south from Beirut and sending us on a seemingly endless meander along a single-lane highway, through monumental detours and traffic jams. Our guide angrily shouted expletives in Arabic against Israel. When our pace along the road slowed to an unbearable one mile per hour, our driver took a detour into a banana field to move us along. The heat was oppressive; our car’s air conditioner wasn’t working, and temperatures inside soared to 100 degrees as we swept past wide-leafed banana trees, kicking up clouds of dirt and dust that blanketed our clothing and left a dryness in our throats. My heart skipped a beat at one checkpoint, when the barrel of a rifle was suddenly thrust through the rear window and pointed directly at me. At the other end of the gun was a boy not more than 12 or 13 years old, his finger tight on the trigger, demanding to see my travel documents. Fortunately, shouts in Arabic by my escorts quickly defused the tense situation.

  The sprawling Rachidye camp was a sandswept, squalid oasis of cinderblock-and-concrete houses, with television antennas sprouting from rooftops of tin and tile. Each family complex was 20 by 30 feet and encompassed two or three living areas, plus a kitchen and outdoor toilet. At a designated time each day, as the sun streaked lines of shadow across a large table in a meeting room, the children of the camp were gathered together to be shown anti-Israeli propaganda and old Nazi indoctrination films. In an open field in a remote corner of the camp, a group of boys in military fatigues practiced loading and unloading firearms; elsewhere, young boys were seen shouldering AK-47s and other weapons as comfortably as an American kid might carry a baseball bat. Some as young as seven or eight were heard boasting about how well they could fire them. Nine-year-old Mesa claimed she was not afraid of all the shelling, but her eyes told a different story.

  “It’s daily music we hear,” she said. “We don’t think about it anymore.”

  In the village of Damour, 15 miles south of Beirut, the children had learned to cope after the many bombing and shelling attacks they’d endured. When the planes came, they ran to shelters, and when the planes were gone, they headed out to play again. It was good to see these children laugh—though ultimately, the joke was on me. At one point I jumped when I was startled by the sound of an explosion, but it turned out to be the sound of an Israeli jet breaking the sound barrier, causing all the kids around me to laugh uproariously. Unlike me, these kids were well able to distinguish the sound of a sonic boom from an Israeli fighter jet overhead from a bomb or mortar shell.

  Behind the laughter of these children lay deep scars. The frequency of the attacks on their villages had impacted them psychologically: many had developed a fear of the dark, suffered regular nightmares and experienced frequent episodes of bedwetting. Some children were noticeably withdrawn, and had difficulty communicating with others or showing emotion. In various ways, these children of war were urged to live, fight and, if necessary, die for the cause. Like children of war everywhere, they were taught at an early age that their lives had no meaning without sacrifice. Because of the pervasive terror and constant threat of death, these children grew up very fast. They had been robbed of their childhood.

  * * *

  When I returned to New York, I learned that my life had been threatened in connection my visit to Beirut. Callers, identifying themselves as members of the extremist Jewish Defense League, reached out to my editor to suggest that if I went to Beirut to write a positive story about the PLO, it would be a “one-way trip.” My editor reassured the callers that I was an objective reporter, and would do a fair story; but this didn’t satisfy them.

  “We don’t want anyone doing stories about the PLO,” they insisted. “He’ll fall for their propaganda. Let him go to Israel.” I later found out that the JDL had learned of my trip by intercepting a telex from New York to the PLO headquarters in Beirut, advising the organization to cooperate with me for my story. Mysteriously, at around the same time my wife found a screwdriver embedded in the driver’s seat of her car—an ominous message, we assumed. Fortunately, nothing ever came of the threats.

  After my article in Parade was published, I was sought after to speak to a number of Jewish organizations, and met with universal disfavor when I suggested that Yasser Arafat was the best hope for peace in the Middle East. Of all the factions of the Palestinian movement, I explained, Arafat’s was the most moderate. No one seemed to care; in the eyes of so many, he was still considered a terrorist. It was 12 years later, in 1993, that my view was confirmed when Arafat joined Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in a handshake at the White House, ratifying the Oslo Accord and marking what then appeared to be the beginnings of the peace process in the Middle East.

  In 1995, I met Prime Minister Rabin in New York, and shared with him the negative response I had gotten to my suggestion that Arafat was the best hope for peace. I thanked him for giving credibility to that controversial statement, adding that “it took a Yitzhak Rabin to make it happen.” He was appreciative, but told me there still was much more to be done for a lasting peace. He was never to see the realization of his dream. Two weeks later he was murdered by an assassin’s bullet, and I was sent to Jerusalem to cover his funeral.

  22

  BRINGING CHRISTMAS TO OUR TROOPS

  Dave Kimmel and I bring Christmas cheer to troops at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan 2013.

  It began with the delivery of a father’s hug to a son at war, and evolved into the massive embrace of hundreds of homesick soldiers far from home at Christmastime. And it was the proudest achievement of my entire career.

  At the height of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, I proposed to my editors at WPIX TV that we spend the Christmas holiday with servicemen and -women from New York, to let them know they hadn’t been forgotten back home. Since 2004, we have made four holiday visits to Iraq and one to Afghanistan. Each time my colleagues, cameraman Dave Kimmel and reporter Jill Nicolini, and I have brought the soldiers taped greetings from local elected officials and celebrities, along with some of New York’s world-famous local delicacies—bagels, hotdogs and cheesecake—which we were able to get DHL Express to fly directly into the base. Best of all, we arranged for a number of emotional reunions, which enabled the soldiers to talk directly with their families live via satellite during WPIX’s morning and evening newscasts.

  The experience began with the startled-to-joy expression on the face of Private First Class James Adelis Jr. when I located him at a base 40 miles north of Baghdad and delivered a hug from his father, who was instrumental in handling the logistics for our visit.

  “This is from your dad,” I said, embracing him. “I promised to bring it all the way to Iraq.”

  The location of Camp Anaconda in Balad, just north of Baghdad, was geographically Iraq; but the surroundings were more like those of a small city in the heartland of America, with a first-run movie theater, a Pizza Hut and a Burger King. With a population of 22,000 servicemen and -women, Camp Anaconda was the largest logistical support base in the country. The troops lived in so-called hooches, improvised housing units consisting of pre-fab trailers, some of which had satellite TV dishes and running water. The sound of hairdryers, competing with the rattle of armored vehicles, lured me into a small building, where I was surprised to discover a beauty salon on the lonely desert outpost. It was a bit incongruous to see M-16s and pieces of body armor resting alongside the manicure tables. Yet for the 4,000 women at this base, a little pampering was the best way to combat battle fatigue.

  Still, daily life on the military outpost could be very challenging. Discomfort was the norm. The fine, oil-tainted sand blowing around consistently coated our throats and clothing, and left layers of grit on the vehicles. Any rainfall would turn the ground into thick mounds of clay that caked in the soles of our boots. The brilliance of the morning sun rising over the Tigris River seemed to contrast with the ominous clouds of violence that lurked j
ust outside the razor wire of the compound.

  My nerves were rattled the first time the sirens wailed. It was a “red alert,” warning us of an incoming mortar attack. Our military escort rushed us into our flak jackets and helmets, and we took cover. Off in the distance, there was a loud crack of thunder that sounded like an explosion, and everyone flinched. In a matter of minutes the all-clear was sounded, and we learned that the “incoming” had been destroyed. But that wasn’t always the case. The base had been hit so many times, it earned the nickname Mortaritaville. Shortly before our visit, a shell hit near our broadcast position, wounding ten people.

  The spirit of Christmas was in the air. Santa made his ceremonial rounds with an M-16 rather than a sack of toys slung over his shoulder. Soldiers sang Christmas carols as lights flickered on a robust tree. Peace on earth and good will toward men was the prayer for the season—and sadly, not much more than a stated goal in a country deep in the throes of war. Still, the spirit of the soldiers remained high. As we arrived bearing our holiday gifts, some of them were delighted to see a familiar face from home.

  “Hiya, man—so good to see ya,” burst Sergeant First Class Antonio Baird, of Brooklyn. “I’ve been watching you on TV for years.” As glad as he was to see me, though, he was more excited to hear about the bagels and hotdogs we brought along.

  Not that they were in any shortage of food. The question I was asked most frequently back home was, How do the soldiers eat there?

  “Quite well,” I would reply. The tens of thousands of meals served daily at Camp Anaconda were surprisingly lavish. At breakfast there was a full omelette station; after dinner there was a Ben and Jerry’s ice-cream counter for dessert. The menus there were quite diversified, and more than substantial. For Christmas dinner, they served turkey, Cornish game hen and—would you believe?—lobster tails. The spiked eggnog, however, was nowhere to be found. Unlike in previous American wars, when soldiers were permitted to drink alcohol, it was utterly forbidden in Iraq. Getting caught with booze at Camp Anaconda could quickly get you arrested and thrown into the brig. With the intense 20-hour days we had been working, Dave Kimmel and I figured we would need a few moments to relax. Before we left New York, we spirited vodka in a large empty mouthwash bottle, and added vegetable coloring. We took a shot or two before our naps in Iraq. But having failed to thoroughly clean the bottles, I have to tell you that Listerine Vodka was difficult to swallow.