April 1996

A few months after arriving in Tyre,

I found myself bouncing along the coastal road again, heading south with a map that was already falling apart at the folds and a notebook that somehow survived everything.

The coordinates were written in blue ink on a page now stained with dust and coffee. Thirty years later, that little notebook is still sitting in a drawer somewhere. I’ve lost radios, uniforms, boots, and more umteen pairs of sunglasses than I care to admit, but somehow that notebook endured.

The mission was straightforward enough. Drive to the observation point. Confirm the coordinates. Observe. Report. The sort of thing that filled most days in UNIFIL.

The road hugged the Mediterranean for part of the journey. To my right, the sea flashed silver in the sunlight. To my left, the hills of Southern Lebanon rolled away inland, dotted with villages whose names I was still learning to pronounce properly.

Eventually, I left the main road and climbed towards a hilltop position overlooking the border area with Israel. We were still well within the twenty-kilometre zone we were authorised to patrol, and there was nothing particularly remarkable about the task.

At least that’s what I wrote in the official reports.

The truth is that some places get under your skin.

I remember standing there with the binoculars, looking south across the landscape. The border wasn’t a dramatic wall or fence stretching to the horizon. It was simply there, woven into the terrain. Through the lenses I could make out roads, military positions, vehicles moving in the distance.

Everything seemed strangely calm.

It is funny how often history arrives without announcing itself.

If somebody had told me that within weeks the entire area would erupt into one of the most intense periods of fighting since I had arrived, I probably would have shrugged and carried on filling in the observation log.

The notebook entry from that day is painfully ordinary.

Coordinates.

Weather.

Visibility.

Vehicle mileage.

The military equivalent of saying, “Nothing to report.”

Yet when I read it now, I remember the feeling more than the facts. The wind on the hill. The smell of dry grass. The distant sound of a dog barking somewhere in a village below. The cabri kibitz on the hill side opposite. The strange stillness that settles over a landscape that has spent decades preparing for violence.

Back then I was young enough to think that calm was normal and conflict was the interruption.

Years later I realised the opposite was often true in Southern Lebanon.

The calm was the interruption.

The conflict was simply waiting its turn.

The dogs always started first.

As the sun dropped behind us and the light turned gold, then orange, then grey, the barking would begin somewhere down in the villages. One dog. Then another. Then half a dozen, answering each other across the hills and wadis. The sound carried for miles in the evening air.

Looking south, the olive groves stretched almost all the way to the border fence. Even then the fence looked repaired and repaired again, layer upon layer of engineering and improvisation. From our position it appeared to run through a shallow gully, perhaps a wadi. In the rainy season water must have flowed somewhere through that low ground, though I was never entirely sure which way.

What I remember more clearly was the smell.

On still evenings you could smell the irrigation systems operating on the Israeli side. Fine sprays of water drifted over the cultivated land and added moisture to the air. After a hot day on the hilltop, the scent carried surprisingly far. Earth. Water. Vegetation. It was a reminder that ordinary life continued on both sides of a line that occupied so much of our attention.

Then there were the lights.

We saw them often after dark. Strange points of light hanging in the distance. Sometimes moving. Sometimes apparently standing still for impossible lengths of time. Back then I had no explanation for them. Depending on who was talking, they were observation devices, secret military technology, helicopters, balloons, ghosts, or something else entirely.

Looking back now, I suspect many of them were early surveillance drones or observation platforms. At the time they seemed almost unreal, floating silently above the border.

The hill itself became a world of routines.

Binoculars.

Observation logs.

Radio checks.

The endless process of watching.

You would settle behind the scope, slow your breathing, and scan the landscape section by section. Every road. Every movement. Every vehicle. Every flash of light. Most of the time nothing happened.

And then occasionally something did.

The border was never truly quiet. It only appeared quiet from a distance.

Sometimes there were exchanges of fire. Sometimes infiltrations. Sometimes incidents that would be condensed into a few lines in a report and then filed away. We observed more than we understood, and understood less than we imagined.

What remains with me now is not any single incident.

It is the atmosphere.

The dogs barking in the dusk.

The smell of irrigation drifting on the evening air.

The olive trees fading into shadow.

The strange lights hanging over the border.

And the knowledge that thousands of people, on both sides of that fence, were going about their lives while history quietly prepared its next chapter.