A month of living dangerously in south Lebanon

Burnt vehicles littered the roads, some having slammed into phone poles. Others had been struck by missiles. Two weeks into the conflict, the car rental agency called. "Mr. Nicholas, I am just calling to see if it you are OK." I could picture their unease, though they didn't ask about their car.

As the war unfolded, the days turned into a collage of frantic and tense action. There was the déjà vu of racing along the winding road southeast of Tyre to investigate reports of a massacre at Qana. Ten years earlier, I had followed the same route to witness an earlier massacre. More than 100 civilians were killed when Israel shelled a UN base in 1996, making Qana, for Lebanese, forever synonymous with violent mass death. It had been my first experience of large-scale carnage, and it seemed inconceivable that Qana had been struck again.

Yet we watched as the dusty bodies of children were extracted from a half-collapsed house struck hours earlier by aerial bombs. The fatalities in this new tragedy did not compare to the earlier one – 27 dead – but they seemed to symbolize the grim cycle of invasion and resistance, retribution, and forgiveness that has mired south Lebanon for more than three decades.

Home base during the conflict for most photographers and my fellow print journalists was the Al-Fanar Hotel, a small traditional building in the Christian quarter on the tip of Tyre's promontory. In the afternoons, I could write and watch through the porthole-style window as the sun sank below the Mediterranean. Listening to the sea lap against the toppled ancient stone columns on the beach below, it was easy to forget briefly that a war raged nearby.

The Al-Fanar was being run by Raymond, the somewhat disgruntled father of the proprietor, who had fled. He sat at a table each day writing receipts, counting money, and handing out bills at "wartime" rates. With Tyre under siege, black-market gasoline ran $100 for 5 gallons.

Now and then, the hotel would reverberate to an underwater explosion as children blew up a batch of fish with a hand grenade. We would eat their catch in the evening. The town's fishermen, unable to put out to sea, idled each day at quay-side cafes.

For reporters at work in the upstairs dining room, there was a strong sense of camaraderie, work pressures and danger eroding the normally competitive nature of the job. Some careened off into the hinterland, making perilous journeys far from Tyre that sometimes, as one American ruefully put it after such a trip, "make a great dinner story but not a newspaper story."

On Aug. 7, the Israelis slapped a curfew on all traffic south of the Litani. Jets bombed the causeway we had crossed three weeks earlier and destroyed a makeshift alternative of steel girders and rocks. The airstrikes effectively grounded the press crowd in Tyre.

On Aug. 14, a shaky cease-fire took hold as the UN finally reached a deal on a resolution. In border villages like Aitta Shaab, Hizbullah fighters emerged from the rubble, hugging, perhaps scarcely believing they had defended against the mightiest force in the Middle East. But victory had come at a price. More than 1,000 Lebanese died and damage is estimated at about $6 billion. The heady optimism expressed in last year's "independence uprising," when hundreds of thousands took to the streets to protest Syrian domination, seems further away than ever.

When I arrived here 12 years ago, Beirut was just embarking upon a multibillion dollar post-civil war reconstruction. But this war destroyed in days what it had taken more than a decade to build.

Two days after the cease-fire, I left Tyre, crossing the newly rebuilt causeway at 2 a.m. In a few hours, I would be reunited with my family. And my dusty but unscathed BMW, with an extra 923 miles on it, would be reunited with its very relieved owners.

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