Seven Days in a Small War

Monday, Jul. 19, 1982 By ROGER ROSENBLATT
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This sunstruck, ruined place where the world's heart beats

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Late last month TIME Senior Writer Roger Rosenblatt set out for Lebanon in order to find several children described in a story he had written six months before, "Children of War" (Jan. 11, 1982). The children included a ten-year-old girl named Lara, whose parents were killed by the explosion of a car bomb in Beirut last September; a 15-year-old boy, Ahmed, a leader in a P.L.O. youth organization; a baby called Palestine who was born when her mother's stomach was slit open in a bombing raid of Beirut in the summer of 1981; and Samer, the four-year-old son of Colonel Azmi, head of the P.L.O. forces stationed around Tyre. The hope was to find these children alive after three weeks of war; if not to meet them face to face, then at least to learn of their whereabouts.

The following journal is partly an account of that search, and partly a record of events observed in Lebanon during the week of June 28 through July 4. Although his journey began on June 23, Rosenblatt did not arrive in Beirut until the afternoon of June 27, due to the necessity of going first to London, then to Cyprus, and from Cyprus by container ship from Limassol to Junieh, a small port in northern Lebanon. On the Friday before Rosenblatt's arrival, the Israelis dealt West Beirut the heaviest bombing and shelling of the war to that point. That same day Alexander Haig resigned and Philip Habib announced a "permanent cease-fire." On June 27, Israeli jets dropped a shower of pink leaflets, warning all civilians to get out of the city at once. Rosenblatt's journal begins the following morning.

Monday, June 28

The sun is high at 5 a.m., the air already very hot. The day begins with a spurt of machine-gun fire and a shriek in the street, followed by a low moaning. One learns that these sounds are normal. Late yesterday afternoon, a car bomb exploded a few blocks from the hotel, killing two, shooting a gray-white pillar of smoke into the sky, which turned black before vanishing. Destruction is everywhere. An apartment house on a corner is cracked in the middle like a bone. It sags and heaves. Fragments of cement and wire hang from the structure at impossible angles. A carton of unopened Pepsis rests on a slab, waiting to fall. There is a hole in the building where the garage was; it gives the place the look of an ancient cave. In the rubble a bashed-in Mercedes, a book on the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, a pair of black shoes lying in the Charlie Chaplin position. The air is thick with dust and decay. There is so much glass on the ground, each step sounds like an army's.

From the outside, the hospital does not look as bad as that other building. The hospital for mental and psychological diseases was hit directly on several sides in last Friday's raid, but except for dozens of tiny smashed windows, its main damage shows in a lateral gap high on a wall, the shape of a huge expressionless mouth. When the twelve bombs hit the drab, gray structure, six people were killed and 20 injured. Two female patients sitting in the lounge were sliced to pieces by the shrapnel. It could have been worse. A rocket that hit the children's ward got entangled in a blanket and miraculously never went off.

This is a private hospital for the aged as well as the mentally