of cultures, the food and wines, the tanned and sensual young women, the perfume of many million flowers, the pine hills and cold white peaks, all imbued it with a near-sacred substance. This, I felt, is a place where all peoples come together, vibrant with history, wisdom, lust, and delight.
It was soon a battlefield of smashed buildings and bloody streets, its Phoenician treasures blasted, its forests and vineyards burned, its people huddled in bombed-out basements or sniping at each other from shattered windows, hating, killing, raping, pillaging. I survived by luck, by tricks, even in dark places where discovery was death. Everywhere I lived is gone, every good friend is dead. I refuse to let them die, to see it gone, without a testament, a memory.
As the years went by, broken-hearted by Beirut, I tried to understand – why do we war? Now, after having covered wars on three continents, I can find no answer beyond the experience itself. What I mean is this: only when we have lived war do we hate and know it well enough to make it stop. For in every country, every city, neighborhood and family, Beirut is waiting.
If everyone could live Beirut, I thought, we might war less. If I could tell one small true story of Beirut, let the reader fear the bullets, crouch beneath the thundering bombs in airless cellars as the concrete floors come crashing down, see loved ones die, grope for passion and belief amid terror and death, that it might make a difference.
Every book must be a failure because it fails to say so much. Today fiction withers because it is too literary, and ceases to be relevant. But if we are to learn we must do so through the heart, not through the mind – a book that does not touch the heart conveys no experience at all. If readers turn away, we need look no further than ourselves.
Like many people I still live Beirut every day, every night, and will probably the rest of my life. I have tried in Holy War to tell its story.
1
THE TROUBLE’S Sylvie, Yves decided. How she's never happy with what I am, what I'm doing. Wants me home.
He stretched in his army cot, twisting his back to let the muscles flex up and down his shoulder blades. Shards of sharp blue through the sandbagged window. Another lovely day in the lovely Levant. Red-golden sun through the pines, the green hill sweeping down to the sea. Incense of cedars, salty cool wind, warm earth; promise in the fragrant air, the buzzing insects, the gulls crying over the waves.
Off duty. Luxury of nowhere to go and nothing to do. Nowhere to go but a sandbagged perimeter and sentried corridors, maybe a quick trip to town in an armored car, the machine gun nervously scanning, the driver watching through the hot slit for an RPG, some mad kid with a Molotov. Vive la France, damn you, for sending us here...
He rolled out of his cot and ambled down the corridor to the WC. Why do all urinals smell like Beirut? Ask the philosophers, he decided, the ones with all the answers. Yawning, scratching his overnight whiskers and under his arms, he wandered to the officers' mess, found a dirty cup and rinsed it, clamped fresh espresso into the machine, drew up and pulled down the handle, two streams of black gold dribbling into the cup.
Makes you feel better already. He filled the cup to the brim and stood by another window, peering through chinks in the sandbagged concrete blocks at the day growing bright blue. Sylvie would still be in bed, the Paris light gray through the blinds. He imagined waking beside her, her lovely sleepy smell, the roughness of her morning voice, the smoothness of her skin.
In Normandy, Papa would already be out in his garden, watering, picking on the weeds, Mama taking fresh brioches out of the oven, Papa coming in with a handful of onions and leeks, taking up his coffee cup in his big fist. André on maneuvers somewhere, playing at war. Trying to get stationed back here, where there's plenty of war. But none for La France, for the Multinational Force, impartially observing the slaughter. The United fucking Nations: you want to murder each other, we'll pay to watch.
He made a second cup, loitered back to his cot and slipped into his thongs, tossed a towel over his shoulders and headed for the showers. A thunderclap cracked, the floor lurched, shivered, the thunder louder. Christ, we've been hit, he thought, dropping the cup. He raced to his cot, snatched his FAMAS, the explosion shaking the sky, men yelling now, down below.
The earth was shaking, an earthquake; he raced up the stairs to the roof, smashed into a sentry coming down. “It's the Marines,” the sentry screamed. “A bomb!”
From the roof he couldn't see the U.S. Marines' compound to the south, just a great billowing dark cloud. He raced downstairs to the radio room. Chevenet, the communications chief, was crouched speaking English then listening to the headset as he loaded his rifle. “A truck,” he said, “somebody drove up in a truck. The whole building. The whole fucking building!”
Yves sprinted down the corridor and down the stairs. “Battle stations!” he screamed. “Battle stations!” Pumping a round into the FAMAS he dashed across the lobby into the parking area. Dark smoke filled the sky. “They hit the Marines!” he yelled to the sentries at the gate. “A big truck!”
A Mercedes truck, the kind used to collect rubbish from the embattled streets of Beirut, geared down and swung into the parking lot, snapped the gate barrier and accelerated toward him. A ton of plastique he realized as he fired from the waist exploding the windshield but the driver had ducked, the truck's grille huge in Yves' face as he shot for the engine now, the distributor cap on the right side, the plugs, the fuel pump. It was too late, the truck would have them. His heart broke in frantic agony for the men inside, the men who would be trapped, crushed to death, the Paras, fleur de la France, his beloved brothers. The universe congealed, shrank to an atom and blew apart, reducing him to tiny chunks of blood and bone, never to be found.
2
“IT’S YOUR LAST NIGHT, Neill – please let's not fight?” Beverly poured the noodles into the strainer and dumped the strainer into a bowl. “Can you get the butter?”
Her close-cropped round head made him think of an eel peering from its hole. Waiting to sink her fangs. “It's just three weeks.” He spoke carefully, not letting the whisky slur his tongue, upbeat at the end. “Good to put a little distance between us.”
She took the butter from the refrigerator. “There's been no lack of that.”
He turned as if to hold her in his arms, opened the freezer door and took out the ice cubes. Everything you say, he told himself, she turns right back on you. He twisted the ice cube container and popped some into the low octagonal glass. She spun round. “There's wine with dinner.”
He poured in extra Knockando, for what she'd said. “What I mean is we'll have a little time to see how it's like, living alone...”
“I'll hardly be alone with two teenagers to cook and clean for, to drive around and worry about when they're not here and try to run my own office at the same time.”
Under their feet the ground rumbled, a District Line train slowing for Earls Court Station. He took a sip. “And slip Timothy a quick fuck when you can.”
“And you! With that Dutch bitch!”
“Hardly, in darkest Beirut.”
“You'll find somebody there. You always do.”
He tossed back the whisky and put the glass in the sink. “There's no point, Bev. We can't keep this up.”
She came close, took his elbow. “For all the years we've had, Neill, let's not take it out tonight on the kids? Let's have a quiet evening and then in the morning you can go
