ALFRED TARAZI/VESSELS
“They came in peace”. Those are the words cast in the concrete of the memorial erected in memory of the 243 marines killed in Beirut in 1983. From their vessels, they used to fire inland 16-inch shells that became known as the flying Volkswagens, for each shell was the size of a Volks. The Americans were here to implement a peace plan for Lebanon, after the great folly known as Peace In Galilee. The Israelis had invaded the country, defeated the PLO, kicked out Arafat, and offered Bachir gemayel –the leader of the Lebanese Forces- a presidency that would only last 17 days. Upon his assassination, his followers committed a blind massacre against the inhabitants of the Sabra and Chatila camps, on the outskirts of Beirut. More than a thousand people were killed. There were so many people buried under the ground that the earth was moving with rage, mourning and pain, with a feast of worms gargling in its belly. If you were to ask anyone what was the most terrible part of that episode: the smell. From the beginning of the war the biggest problem was the disposal of bodies. A massacre takes a few minutes to commit and takes little planning, but then you are left with those inanimate bodies. We would carry them, load them on trucks and drop them in valleys. With gravity fully applied on those lifeless bodies, their weights seemed tremendous. All over the country you would have found mass graves. In Sabra, the men even used bulldozers. But you cannot hide such crimes for very long, and often what betrays you the most is the horrid smell of death. It doesn’t take long after you’ve killed a person for the foul maggots and worms to consume their putrid corpses. The sight can be troubling, disquieting, but the smell…after a person has been drilled with bullets or torn apart by shrapnel, a combination of blood, urine, and fecal matter spreads out around the corpse. Within hours, the carcasses bloat and a sickly sweet cloying scent emanates. Nothing can be as haunting and impenetrably nauseating or foul as the smell of death. In the capital, we were rounding up men; young leftists, Chiites, all potential threats…they would be stopped at checkpoints, detained, interrogated, and many would go missing. What happened to all those kidnapped people who never reappeared? When the waves of arrests and kidnappings became too intense, we were faced with a logistical problem: if we kill them all, what would we do with their bodies? We had those empty containers, left overs of our smuggling activities. Sometimes, we would detain up to 30 men in those containers. And sometimes, we would load a container on a boat and sail. The men entrapped within that metallic confine could not imagine what was about to happen to them. We would tell them that they were going to be transported to another location to be released. But once we had reached the sea at large, we would drop the container and watch it vanish in the vast watery grave. The descent would take a few minutes during which we could hear the outburst and supplications coming from the coffin. At the beginning, with the air it still contained, it would float. We would then open fire on it with our rifles, creating more opening for the air to leave, for the water to seep in, and the container with human content would sink where no man would ever find it again.