Dodging the Bullets in Beirut

Like everyone else in West Beirut last week, TIME staffers were engulfed by battle. As violence spread through the city, Middle East Bureau Chief William Stewart, Correspondent John Borrell and Reporter Abu Said Abu Rish found themselves caught in the crossfire. Their experiences:

As soon as fighting broke out in the streets of West Beirut, the Lebanese government ordered the army to shoot on sight. Steel shutters rang down on storefronts. Pedestrians scattered. Car horns blared incessantly. We were interviewing a former government minister when the fighting broke out, and emerged from his office to find shots ringing out amid the cafes and boutiques of Hamra Street, one of West Beirut's busiest thoroughfares. We stopped briefly to buy provisions, then hurried to our apartment building. Not a minute too soon. The half a dozen men of the Lebanese Army contingent billeted in our lobby to protect diplomatic residents were already nervously fingering their M16s. Upstairs, we hastily improvised a late lunch. Suddenly an explosion shook the building. We hit the ground and started edging toward the safest place in the apartment: a 6-ft.-long bathroom, away from any windows. As we huddled there, the clatter of M-16s and Kalashnikovs echoed off the walls of neighboring buildings. Now and then we would crawl on all fours to a window. Below us, the faint shadows of militiamen moved in the gathering darkness. Perhaps a mile out to sea, a U.S. Navy ship cruised past, a gray wolf on a gray sea beneath a hazy gray sky.

About two hours later we decided to seize the opportunity to move to the relative safety of TIME'S office, located beneath the street level in an adjacent building. As we made our way down the stairs in the darkness, we found that the army billet in our lobby had suffered a direct hit. The ceiling had collapsed. The doors of our mailboxes had been ripped off their hinges. Not a window on the ground floor remained intact. We hastened to the TIME office 50 yds. away. As the night wore on, the fighting flared up again. Sleep was shattered; shells rocked the building. The tinkling of broken glass could be heard in the street above. Rockets roared overhead. Waiting for the next blast was almost as unnerving as the explosions.

By mid-afternoon on Tuesday the fighting had subsided, and on Wednesday morning we drove across town. A carpet hung limply from a gaping hole in a highrise. The thick steel cable of an elevator shaft dangled crazily out of a police station. No armed men were in evidence, sandbagged army checkpoints had been abandoned, and traffic flowed freely for the first time in weeks. But clearly the conflict was far from over. Militiamen had thrown up barricades around the district of Maasra, while fighting still raged along the green line that separates Christian East Beirut from the predominantly Muslim western half of the city.

That night we moved to a Druze-run hotel at some distance from the area of the most concentrated fighting. But we could not escape the sound of warfare. As we reached the seaside hotel, the U.S.S. New Jersey opened up on artillery positions in the hills behind the city. Huge flashes of fire were followed by clouds of orange smoke. With each blast, the light fittings trembled, the windows rattled, and our hearts, for a second, stopped beating.