Prelude to War

Yesterday was the 45^th anniversary of the Lebanese civil war which started on the 13^th of April 1975. I’ve been wanting to tell this story for some time now. So now is a good time.

It was in the late spring of 1974. I was doing my ‘retraite’. This is a period where you ‘retreat’ with some of your friends to study before the baccalaureate exams. This was my Baccalauréat 2ème Partie. My final year at school. We were in a mountain resort which is usually full of tourists in summer. But this being spring, it was mainly the local villagers that were prominent in the streets. The ‘retraite’ was a mixture of fun and hard work. We did a lot of work. But we also had a lot of fun. As much fun as a bunch of 17 years olds occupying a house on their own can have.

One of us was a serious car freak. He not only knew everything about car mechanics but he was already a serious driver. His name was Grégoire Audi. I later heard that not only he became a successful dentist somewhere in Europe but that he ended up racing older prototypes of cars at Le Mans. I am dwelling on this because it has everything to do with what happened during that retraite.

As part our fun time, Grégoire was teaching us powersliding. This is where you turn a corner with your car by making it slide into place in order to maintain speed and traction.

So here we were on this road and ahead of us was a sharp turn. We wait for cars to pass, and when there is no one coming we take turns at negotiating the turn by doing a powerslide.

At one point, Grégoire was explaining to us something about turning the steering wheel that all of us were not doing so well. A car passed us. He waited a bit. Then he sped through the corner showing us how to sharply turn the steering wheel while accelerating. For some reason, the car that had passed us a short time before had slowed down. And as we surged through the corner we found ourselves slightly too close to it. Not dangerously close, but uncomfortably close.

We stopped. The car ahead of us stopped. Grégoire was saying something like ‘Damn idiots why did they slow down?’. But suddenly the two guys who were in the car got out. 

They had revolvers in their hands. 

The one on the right, pointed his gun up in the air and pulled the trigger. The sound stunned us. The guy was now pointing the gun at us. We were petrified. The guy shouted: ‘Come out of the car you sons of whores’.

Then he said: ‘Kneel on the ground. Kneel all of you’.

We all knelt. I don’t know about the others but I knelt and I was very close to peeing in my pants. Then the guy asked: ‘are you from here?’

My friend who had invited us to his house replied that he lived here. The guy with the gun said: ‘Whose son are you? what's your father's name?’ My friend told him his father’s name.

The guy said: ‘your father is a respectable man but that doesn’t mean you own the place. Do you understand? Next time I’ll take you to the Party’s headquarters and we’ll ask your dad to come and get you! Do you understand?’ My friend replied ‘Yes’. The guy said ‘Now you go home all of you’.

They were members of the Phalangist Party. My friend actually recognised them. I did not have the intellectual tools to think this at the time but I clearly remember feeling a distinct sense of class and regional resentment in the way the two guys were behaving. Especially from the guy who did the shooting and the talking. Regardless of the fact that we might have genuinely scared him as we surged behind him, in the way he talked to us, in the way he talked about my friend's father, in the way he said 'you don't own the village', there was a kind of ‘my time has come you bourgeois city dwelling shits’ oozing out of the way he spoke to us.

While I consider this my first taste of the civil war to come, it was, however, what happened afterward that signalled to me that a major transformation was taking place.

Throughout my youth my father had been an influential Colonel in the gendarmerie. And at the very moment when those guys were terrorising us, and even though, I was very scared, I was also thinking ‘you wait till I tell my dad about you fuckers’. And indeed, the first thing I did when I got home was ring my dad and tell him. He asked me a few questions, asked me to put my friend on the phone. Asked him a few questions. I was sure they will end up in jail. But towards the end of the week as my friends and I were out to get a pizza, we had to endure an uncomfortable encounter with those same two guys. Not only this, but the guy who pulled the gun on us looked us straight in the face and said: ‘keefkun? (how are you?’ and he added ‘I hope you are studying well.’ 

When I went home. I asked my father what happened. He muttered an answer in a way I've never heard him speak before. He said, that he called the local police headquarters and he was told: ‘These are members of the Phalangist Party. We cannot touch them’. It became clear to me then that a new social order was coming into place.