Silas’s Choice

And of course Silas Collins was right. We only found nineteen Palestinian refugees, in three families, who were willing to get on the bus in the trust that their faraway relative who worked for the Americans in some unspoken way somewhere beyond the Levant knew what was best for them. Seeing the conditions in the camp, the filthy-covered narrow dirt streets between makeshift hovels and the lack of sanitation and safe water use, made me wonder why they didn’t all jump at the chance to get out of here. But to them this was their land, and they were afraid that if they ever left it, they would never get back to it.

But to my surprise—Silas always had yet one more surprise for me—he had come prepared for not being able to fill the bus with those listed. We stayed there in the camp, almost beyond the time allotted to us, until Silas had found someone willing to fill all of the empty seats in the bus, and he’d come prepared with primitive, but effective, means to document each and every one of them as someone whose name was on the original list so that we all could get back through the checkpoints and to Beirut, where they were put on a small ship to be smuggled into Cyprus and somehow resent somewhere safer in the world from there.

There would only be three of our Palestinian colleagues that night who would think America had done enough “give back” to them for the intelligence services they were rendering. But Silas would say that three was better than none.

And just as the Israelis had warned us, they invaded and flattened the Nahr al-Bared camp as a hotbed of terrorists just two days later.

Imagine my surprise after we managed to get back to Beirut without being gunned down between all of the independent armies stretched out between Nahr al-Bared and the Lebanese capital when Silas told me this wasn’t the mission I’d been called to Lebanon to carry out.