Reports From Hell by Chas Smith

Author:Chas Smith [Smith, Chas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Essays & Travelogues, Fundamentalism, Middle East, Terrorism, Yemen
ISBN: 9781644280751
Google: -_-zxgEACAAJ
Amazon: B089QFDC92
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2020-07-15T03:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

The next few days blended into an exhausting blur. We’d chase destruction wherever it was happening, which happened to be more and more places. Random little towns in the south, bridges and overpasses in the north, the oil refinery on the coast spewing black smoke for days and staining my white V-neck a pallid gray. I paddled out next to the refinery even though there wasn’t a wave in sight. Surfing just felt like the right thing to do, all things considered.

Israel seemed to be frustrated that the first shock and awe didn’t bring Lebanon to its knees and was intent on making the country’s diverse population feel the weight of war, but the whole enterprise seemed to backfire. Hezbollah had dug in, and the group’s pluckiness even earned the grudging respect of Christians and Sunnis who, were normally very much at odds with their Shia enemy.

We’d scamper around, up with the first light with almost no time for music videos. Just one, maybe two while Josh put his contact lenses in and Nate made grumpy coffee in our apartment’s kitchen. If we were lucky, we’d catch a short run of American or European artists like Sean Paul or Nickelback instead of mournful Lebanese hits.

“How much for Chad Kroeger?” I asked one morning at five.

“Mmmm, yeah, veddy nice,” Josh answered, blinking his contact into place. “I can’t go any less than ten.”

Nate shot him an ugly look from the kitchen and muttered, “What the hell, guy? You’re blowing the scale this early?”

But Josh was right. Chad Kroeger had never looked better than he did right then in an apocalyptic glow, giving him an undeniable rock star sheen. Nickelback’s latest video, “Rockstar,” was peak Nickelback without even showing the band, but I knew, thanks to my traditional airplane US Weekly, that Chad Kroeger’s hair was cut into a sharp, bleached bob. His moustache plus goatee were very on point. His choker necklace tight but not sado-masochistically tight and his black T-shirt leaving very little to the imagination. Josh’s numbers made sense, and while I couldn’t go higher than a four, I understood.

It was a small wonder that music videos were still being broadcast, seeing as Israel was trying to demoralize the entire population. It also seemed surprising that our apartment was still standing. It was close enough to Hezbollah’s Burj al-Barajneh neighborhood on the south side of town, where the pounding bombs a few kilometers away would have kept us awake if we hadn’t been absolutely drop-dead exhausted.

In the morning we’d head into the Bourj, some of the only Western journalists able to do so thanks to Nate and his boxing pals. He had steadily and determinedly built his Hezbollah Rolodex during his two years studying at the American University of Beirut and living Burj al-Barajneh adjacent. They didn’t necessarily trust him, nor were they happy to see us, but he was at least a known quantity, and after many phone calls and much passport examining, we’d get through to the organization’s operational heart.

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