I didn't witness, at first hand, the destruction that was being wreaked. I didn't see dead people, and I didn't see people crawling through rubble. But we were in this terribly surreal position, that from around a swimming pool on a hill in Beirut, we watched - morning, afternoon and night - bombing runs and missile strikes. We heard from people we had met just a few days earlier that their homes had been flattened That was strange The hotel would shake on some of these bomb runs. It was the uncertainty, insecurity, that was the most difficult to deal with.
After we moved from the southern part of the city, to the Christian area, I didn't feel any sense that we were going to be bombed. We did go through counter-surveillance and evacuation drills in the hotel, but it didn't feel too serious compared to what we knew was going on in the rest of the country We could watch television in the hotel. There was one network that was available in the hotel that had a 24-hour feed of both professional and amateur footage of the destruction in the south and in the city. We saw the Hizbollah channel, some European channels, including Sky News, and CNN.
What little we saw, brought it home to us, what a surreal experience this was. The hotel we were staying with was filled with a lot of Americans. We all went out nightclubbing, and we stood on top of a roof, at an opening night party with well-dressed young Beirutis dancing and drinking and having a good time as Israeli jets flew overhead. The full gravity of the situation didn't dawn on us until we woke up the next morning, and I looked out of my window. About a mile off, was the airport we had flown in to, and it was in flames That night, we watched as they rocketed the airport again.
And the same Lebanese that had been telling us, "Don't worry, we'll just party right through this" started to melt away and run for Syria We were left to our own devices. The television network was anxious to get us out of harm's way, and our loved ones back in the States were worried, too. Even we were aware about how worried everyone must have been, but we did still bear that that shameful sense that, "We're American, we're in a Western hotel, we're invulnerable". We became anxious only later, when our driver, our fixer and everyone else started to leave us and we were assigned a Western security expert to move us to a safer part of town But at no time did we fear for our lives. There was much more a sense of shame and of helplessness as we watched the people who lived there being bombed out of their homes.
We were worried about losing power, losing communication, losing touch with the embassy, than the immediate threat of death We were evacuated by the US Marines. The immediate reaction among the people we were with was embarrassment. One of the guys looked resigned, saying: "They'll destroy the country over this. We're all going to pay for this." But I think, at least that first night - and you know, the Beirutis love to brag about how they partied through the civil war, and how strong and resilient they are - we all took some of the local bravery on board. And right into the middle of this scene, we saw a few cars, filled with Hizbollah supporters, who were firing guns in the air, and setting off fireworks. Then we heard automatic weapon fire in the distance, as people started to celebrate the kidnapping of these two Israeli soldiers.