The Man with the Bad Leg
Aug 4, 2006 by Constantine Markides
ONE OF THE most disturbing sights one can experience in a wartime evacuation is that of a disabled old man or woman trying to flee a conflict zone.
The young have their sturdy legs and their health, and when lacking those, a constitution th at can endure, even thrive, in the changes and uncertainties of a refugee’s plight. Even the sight of young mothers being evacuated with their children gathered about them is somehow not as gut wrenching as we feel it should be.
Of course in the actual war zone it is different; there we lament the huddled family trapped in the shelled house or the hospitalized child staring unblinkingly out of a face pockmarked with shrapnel wounds. But in the evacuation it is the laborious stilted movements of the old that most upsets us.
The young—mobile and adaptable but less practiced in suffering—can handle evacuation better than war. But not the elderly. Having experienced almost the entire domino of life’s troubles and private failures, they have learned to cope with hardship. But they have also progressively lost the mechanisms to handle tribulations on the move. Their roots, though tough and weathered, are also deep and brittle.
One avoids dislodging the elderly from their environment for the same reason one avoids transplanting ancient trees: while they may survive the uprooting, they may not have the strength to re-root themselves. This regard for elders is just one of the countless reasons why war—that great destroyer and uprooter—should be an absolute last resort.
One realizes how insensate and feeble are the reasons cocksure jingoists often give for going to war—the respectable term for strafing a country with bombs—when you see its effects firsthand. Casualties aside, war is a sprawling mess even when merely witnessed on its outer edges. If the media did not oblige their respective governments and their governments’ allies by portraying their war efforts as well-intentioned, albeit complicated, surgical procedures to remove tumors, then there would be more of a public clamor to exhaust all options before resorting to violence.
But these other options, often as elementary as “do not commit aggression,” are rarely exhausted for a straightforward reason. Most wars are not the acts of self-defense or liberation that they claim to be, but rather conscious efforts in the old-fashioned imperial sense to control resources and territories and to crush national independence movements. While the rhetoric and, to a lesser extent, the techniques may be less barbaric than in the conquests of past centuries, the motives are as old as war itself.
For several weeks in July, the predictable dead-end pontifications on the Cyprus problem that dominate headlines in Cyprus came to a halt. Tens of thousands of foreign nationals were flooding from Beirut into Cyprus, mostly by sea, to escape the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon. Since Israel had shelled the Beirut airport as well as the road to Damascus, a boat ride to Cyprus—a little over 100 miles to the east—had become the safest way out of Lebanon (or for war correspondents, who travel against the flow of terrified traffic, into Lebanon).
For foreign and local reporters covering the evacuation, myself included, it was a busy time. Aside from writing the evacuation stories for the Cyprus Mail, I was also working for CNN with the Anderson Cooper 360 degrees crew for a few days as a “fixer”—the local go-to journalist for everything from translation and research to chauffeuring, lugging, and food delivery. International news crews run exorbitant tabs when they travel to other countries, so sleep does not pay. For them to squeeze four hours of sleep per 24 hours is a rare luxury; the norm is two or three. After several days at the port the pavement at the Larnaca port started to undulate. It was the first time I could say I was hallucinating from lack of sleep without lying.
It did not help that I was trying to simultaneously work two jobs. It demanded unscrupulous improvisation and cunning. At one point I had to drive to the Larnaca airport with the show’s producer to pick up the crew’s body armor, which Israeli security had confiscated the day before at the Tel Aviv airport. We left the dock at the very same time that a French-chartered cruise ship bearing 970 evacuees, including 200 unescorted children, was docking. Now I was supposed to do a “color piece” on the boat arrival for the newspaper.
Obviously I had missed all the color. But upon returning with the body armor to the hotel, I managed to get a rundown of what happened at the port from two other members of the CNN crew. I dashed off the article from the hotel lobby. The next morning I was amused to see at a newsstand that the editor ran my story—or rather Tommy and Neal’s story—as the cover piece.
The port was abuzz at almost all hours with correspondents, photographers, film crews, warships, cruise ships, satellite trucks, makeshift tents, police officers, embassy workers, Red Cross medics, counselors, and of course evacuees. Thousands arrived each day. Boats would dock between evening and early morning, the evacuees would disembark, and the vessels would return to Beirut for the next load. The night hours were a tumult of floodlit activity and press commotion.
As it was already peak tourism season, the hotels quickly filled. The Cyprus government converted a number of schools into temporary housing centers. Check-in lines at the airport extended out the front doors. But despite the tens of additional daily evacuation flights out of Cyprus, more were still arriving than departing. It was like scalping a grassed-over anthill with a lawnmower: there was no end to the evacuees.
And compared to what has happening in Lebanon, it was a mere scratch. It was just a small spillover from the war: the evacuation of those who were privileged enough to have a US, European, Canadian, Australian or comparably precious
passport. One French-Lebanese woman who arrived in Cyprus on the French-chartered vessel had to leave behind one of her daughters in Lebanon who, unlike her sister, had not married a Frenchman and therefore had no French passport. The daughter was pregnant and soon due. But though separated from her sister and mother, she would not be alone in the act of creation, at least not according to Condoleezza Rice, who in a Nietzschean moment of poetic inspiration, said the region was presently undergoing “birth pangs.”
Though it was never voiced, the evacuation was a big media event because it was about “our people,” the citizens of the well-to-do nations. There would not have been nearly so much fuss over a boatload of brown-skinned refugees. Just as economy class passengers must wait for business class to board first, so too would the tens of thousands of Sri Lankans and Filipinos working in Lebanon have to wait for the wealthy nations to evacuate its citizens before their turn came, if it were ever to come. As for the Lebanese, they would be left either to fend for themselves as displaced people amidst the growing rubble or to flee to Syria and hope to be spared a bon voyage aerial bombardment.
It was about a week after the evacuations began, as I was preparing to indulge in an escapist Sunday afternoon of sloth, when I got a phone call from a US military press officer. It was regarding my request several days prior to join a US evacuation mission. Three hours later I was on a Navy Seahawk helicopter bound for Lebanon.
There were five journalists onboard—two from WAVY-TV NBC Norfolk, two from Inside Edition, and myself. The helicopter ride, not including a half-hour stopover on the USS Whitney to refuel, took just over an hour. We touched down off the coast of Beirut on the deck of the USS Nashville, a troop transport vessel that had already made two evacuation trips to Cyprus carrying 1,200 on one trip and 1,000 on the other.
In wars and mass evacuations, inevitably nothing proceeds as planned. Not only was it unclear if we would be able to pick up any evacuees but there was also some initial doubt as to whether the vessel would even be returning to Cyprus or would be headed to the southern port town of Mersin, Turkey.
But it was finally established that we would indeed be picking up about 500 Americans from a Beirut beach in an LCU [landing craft utility]—vessels used to transport troops and equipment to shore, recognizable from war films like Saving Private Ryan. Upon returning to the USS Nashville, we would steam for Limassol, Cyprus.
It was approaching sunset when we finally set out in the LCU along with several dozen marines. There seemed nothing out of the ordinary about the verdant mountainous Beirut shore except for a patch of smoke in the distance and the numerous helicopters and warships in the area.
As we neared the shore, the bow ramp lowered, revealing a desolate beach buffered by some concrete barricades. It was no Normandy, but neither was it the hectic Beirut port I had earlier expected. We braced ourselves as the boat ground to a halt on the pebbly beach and then spilled out down the ramp and onto the shore. A bulldozer, which had been stowed at the stern, followed us and began to smooth out the pebbly shore in front of the bow ramp so that evacuees did not stumble while boarding.
The American evacuees, who were waiting on a dune above the beach, descended in the dark towards the LCU, first those in wheelchairs and then the elderly. Lebanese soldiers and US marines worked side by side to help people board. It was an odd and silent collaboration, and the silence was maybe not entirely due to the language gap seeing that Israel could never have gone on its Terminator mission in Lebanon without the consent of the US, its diplomatic bodyguard and sugar daddy arms dealer. Of course, it was also a curious sight to see marines saving Americans from possible incineration from weapons that the US had delivered to Israel. Just two days earlier it had been reported that the US was rushing a delivery of satellite- and laser-guided munitions to Israel.
There are plenty of scenes from that trip that will remain with me: the Beirut skyline viewed from the open doors of the helicopter; the flush of eagerness on the faces of the marines (“people go through entire careers and don’t get to do something like this” one marine told me); the beaching of the LCU in Beirut; the panic of evacuees fearing they were going to be left behind 
when the LCU began to fill; the Lebanese Americans girls flirting with the marines in the USS Nashville’s dining hall over fried chicken and grilled cheese sandwiches; the rows of evacuees sleeping on deck in cots and on mattresses, many of which the marines had offered up from their own beds; the dark outline of an unlit assault warship trailing us for protection as we steamed towards Limassol “all lit up like a goddam party boat” as one officer put it; the chaplain who spoke to me on the upper deck about Jesus and the exorcising of the demons of Vietnam and how on Sundays they hit golf balls off the deck and shoot skeets and spar with giant boxing gloves and dress up in Sumo suits “to return a degree of normalcy to these marines.”
But one sight particularly affected me. It was while the evacuees were disembarking from the LCU onto the USS Nashville. A heavy older Lebanese man with a cane and a severe limp began working his way down the ramp, assisted by several marines. On the Beirut beach it had taken about ten minutes for two Lebanese soldiers to assist him from the dune to the boat.
He made it to the end of the ramp and then paused. There was a minor swell and the ramp was slightly shifting about. He stood in tottering hesitation as the water splashed around his feet, soaking his shoes. The marines had their arms around his waist but he was a big man and if his good leg gave out on him, as it seemed it might, they might very well all go down.
It was then that the enormity of war struck me. And I had seen none of the violence. I had merely experienced, at least in these last few hours, the first leg of evacuating a fraction of the Americans seeking to escape Lebanon, who in turn made up a fraction of the total evacuees, who in turn made up a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of people [by now over a million] displaced within Lebanon. And yet the effort and project required to handle this tiny fraction was enormous.
Most declarations of war are an act of hubris. The rest of the world must accommodate itself to the decision. It is a decision that leaders can take with little physical and psychological discomfort—guarded as they always are by a ring of troops and a cushion of yes men—while those who lack the protection are left to suffer the consequences.
There were few illusions about Hizbollah’s indiscriminate and deplorable attacks against Israel but when Israel in turn demonstrated it was scoring an almost perfect 10 in civilian deaths, respectable media outlets soberly explained this was due to Hizbollah’s use of civilian shields. IDF officers assure that Israeli strikes are precise. But unless Israel can offer evidence that Hizbollah recently recovered Tolkien’s Ring, with its power to grant invincibility, from the Mount of Doom, then they are going to be increasingly at a bind to explain the strikes on Red Cross ambulances, humanitarian convoys, hospitals, power plants, a UN observer post, fuel storage tanks, fleeing civilians in cars, and hundreds of homes throughout Lebanon’s south.
On the steam back from Beirut to Limassol I spoke to a number of evacuees about their final days in Lebanon. One American had been trapped up in the mountains north of Beirut after Israel had bombed the bridges and highways leading north. She managed to escape thanks to an intrepid US embassy worker who knew some secluded side roads up into the mountains.
A pair of Lebanese-American siblings who lived in the border village of Yaroun described to me how an Apache helicopter had one night beamed floodlights through the windows of their home. The Apache hovered in place for some time and then flew off. Their grandparents’ house, however, had not been spared. Fortunately, their grandparents had moved into their underground garage a few hours before the shelling and emerged unscathed.
But these stories, dramatic as they were, were not in my mind as I drove back to Nicosia from Limassol the next morning, exactly 24 hours since I had received the phone call from the press officer.
It was the image of the limping man that stuck with me. The man with the bad leg pausing at the edge of the ramp, drenched to the shins, worrying about his next step.
Constantine Markides
*To see a slideshow of all of my photos from this evacuation mission click here.
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