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"Nehafeesh!" don't be afraid, a woman was scolding her daughter, who was crying with each new round of shells. Anne and Jessie bought water. The waiter brought them glasses, but they didn't drink much. During a lull, he took them upstairs and hailed one of the few taxis who was still on the streets. "They've all gone home to be with their families," he explained as the battered Mercedes pulled to the curb. The taxi driver, a man in his 50's, voiced his opinion about the evening's activity. "Israel…airplanes…Lebanon…nothing." Jessie's limited Arabic couldn't get much more from him other than that something had happened at the airport and Lebanon hadn't started it. They passed a row of tanks winding their way slowly down a dark street.
As the taxi headed into East Beirut, the presence of the troops was less noticeable and the streets were slightly more illuminated. Nonetheless, there was a power outage in their building, a boarding house for female students located in the upscale primarily Christian neighborhood of Achrafieh in East Beirut. Shanty, the Sri Lankan maid, gave them a candle, and they walked up the four flights of stairs to their apartment. Still sweaty from their jog they plopped into bed because there was no water for showers. Because they hadn't heard any noise for an hour, they tried to sleep. Only to be harshly awoken by the poppings a short while later. From their fourth-story windows they could see the red balls fired into the air, one after another. They seemed to go directly over the apartment. "Get down," yelled Jessie as they both rolled onto the floor.
Now what? Anne and Jessie didn't know what proper siege protocol was, having never lived through a war. Shaking, they lifted their heads to watch the red missiles overhead. "Why did we come?" Anne asked herself, and then Jessie. They had come in the spirit of discovery, wanting to report on a country that had been largely ignored by the American press since the end of an endless civil war. When friends and family had counseled them not to go, because, "it was too dangerous," they had shrugged and responded that that was precisely why they needed to go, because Americans still thought that Lebanon was a war zone. Now here they were, two weeks into their summer, being bombed. Or so they thought.
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