The Road to Fatima Gate: He(zbo)ll(ah) Two

[Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is from Michael Totten’s just-released book The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel. The excerpt is from chapter eight and picks up with Totten’s description of the 2006 July War between Israel and Hezbollah.]

War does strange things to the mind. The first time you hear the loud boom, bang, and crash of incoming and outgoing artillery, you will jump. You will twitch. You will want to take cover. You will want to hide. You will feel like you could die at any second, like the air around you is drenched with gasoline, like the universe is gearing up to smash you to pieces.

It’s amazing how fast you get used to it, even if you have no military training and grew up in tranquil suburban America. It took me four hours.

Any given location in Northern Israel and South Lebanon would almost certainly never be hit with a missile, bullet, bomb, or artillery shell. Lebanon was hit more frequently, and Israel was hit more randomly, but the vast majority of people in both places weren’t even scratched, let alone killed.

Explosions jack your survival instinct up to eleven, but after a while, straight math kicks in. You run numbers in your head, even subconsciously. Most places aren’t ever hit, so what were the odds, really, that you would be standing in one of the few places that were hit at the precise moment it happened?

Being under fire in Northern Israel was not like, say, walking around loose by myself in Baghdad. No one was out to get me. Only Hezbollah fighters and its leaders in Lebanon were targeted as individuals. All of Northern Israel was a collective target, but a very large one that I vanished into almost completely.

The odds that any given place in Northern Israel would be hit were the same as the odds that any other given place in Northern Israel would be hit. Hezbollah’s rockets landed almost at random. They were pathetic military weapons, but perfect terrorist weapons. There were a few exceptions. Kiryat Shmona was hit quite a lot. Metula was hit hardly at all, although Hezbollah did fire a mortar round into the side of the Alaska Inn two hours before Noah [Pollak] and I arrived. Still, anywhere out in the open was just as dangerous as anywhere else out in the open.

This is logical, but the mind doesn’t always work like that when sensing danger from the environment. Driving on an empty road and looking at an impact site up ahead was unsettling. Kibbutz HaGoshrim put me at ease because it was idyllic and sheltered by shade trees. Yet neither location was safer or more dangerous than the other.

The trees at the kibbutz blocked out the sky and made me feel protected. Obviously, the branches of trees could do nothing to stop or slow a Katyusha rocket, but when you’re under fire from above, the sky feels like a gigantic malevolent eyeball. When you’re underneath trees, the gigantic malevolent eyeball can’t see you. Therefore a rocket won’t hit you. That’s not how it was, but that’s what it felt like.

During my first several hours in the war zone, I constantly tried to figure out what I could do to make myself safer. Should I stand here instead of there? How about if I crouch down a little bit? Maybe if I sit on the ground, a rocket will miss my head? I figured it was better to stand near things than away from things, as long as those things were not cars.

All this thinking was useless. I would either be hit or I wouldn’t. Walking or driving faster could get me away from an incoming rocket, or it could get me closer. It was all totally random.

Fear has a purpose. It forces you to think hard and fast about what you can or must do to protect yourself. As soon as you realize there is nothing more you can do, fear loses its purpose and vanishes.

It really does.

New York City immediately after September 11, 2001, was a much scarier place than Northern Israel during the war once I got used to it. It wasn’t safer, not even remotely, but there is only so much adrenaline in the human body.

This is the fatal weakness of terrorism. What’s a terrorist to do once the terror wears off?