- The mass burial site for the victims of an Israeli air strike on Qana on July 30, 2006.(FEYROUZ / CC)
- By Tom Sleigh
- When we drove into Qana last year," Joseph told me, scanning the gray concrete houses on either side of the road, "we heard flames roaring, the sound of the jets, people screaming, and the ringing of cell phones." He looked at me and shrugged. "The relatives of people were calling to see if they were okay." Joseph worked for the Red Cross during the 2006 war with Israel and was one of the first to enter the village after an Israeli bombardment massacred twenty-eight Lebanese civilians. Soft-spoken, slight, he was solicitous on the surface but, like many Lebanese, reserved, even wary. When I hired him as my driver and interpreter to take me south from Beirut, I knew only that he drove a taxi with his father and worked as a draftsman in an engineering firm to pay his way at Lebanese University. But then he offered to take me to Qana. He could show it to me, he said; he could tell me what he'd seen.
Tom Sleigh most recent volume of poetry is Space Walk. He teaches in the MFA Program at Hunter College. His essay "The Deeds," from the Summer 2008 issue of VQR, was selected forBest American Travel Writing 2009.
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To get to Qana, we needed military clearance, and so we'd stopped at the central army compound in Sidon, one of the major cities in southern Lebanon. The Lebanese intelligence officer who handled foreign press was dressed in blue jeans and a checked oxford, his shirttail hanging out. His wire-rimmed glasses gave him a bemused air, and his thoroughly unmilitary bearing unsettled me. I knew that he knew that I knew he had all the power, and while he seemed to enjoy this, he also seemed to appreciate the absurdity of his own position. Why should he be the one to control who went to the south of Lebanon?![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=50b9a3f2-82c9-4f1b-a97d-4451edc5868b)
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