War Withdrawal: Part One

On Friday morning, the American and I woke up at 4, hailed a taxi and arrived at the Dbayeh Bridge 'Processing' Center by 5 am - two full hours before officials there were to start letting in the first of the Americans.

Through the windsheid of the taxi, we could see that the bridge was in chaos. The exit ramps leading up to the overpass bridge were full of cars and the pass itself was bustling with people - a mini refugee camp. We jumped out of the taxi and ran towards the crowd with sun just breaking over the mountains to the east.

The day before, the State Department had issued their infamous "first come, first serve" email. Everyone came. Talking with a few people in the crowd, many had been there since midnight, sitting on the overpass and waiting. Those same people at the front now found themselves crowded and shoved into the truck barracading us from the actual processing center itself. As the hours between five and seven ticked away, the crowd grew more and more restless; like yesterday, there were the screams of babies, the screams of mothers for their babies, the screams of fathers for the mothers of their babies, demands for entry or information or something shouted out in vain and in anger.

This crowd was far bigger than the Thursday's and it grew quickly we approached 7 am - exacerbating the overall tension of the scene. I held up my camera to take a picture so that I could better gauge the number of people only to realize that the crowd actually disappeared down the slope of the other side of the bridge. My guess is that - by seven am - there were already 7 or 8,000 people on that overpass.

"Folks - OK, folks, we just need you to remain calm, OK? Everybody's going home today, OK? We've got spots for 5000 people, OK? Everybody's going home! Let's just - hey! - let's just be civil here, OK? We've got young children here." Maybe from where he stood up on that truck (the Lebanese military had created a barrier of trucks and razor wire to keep Americans out of the American run processing camp until State Department officials gave the OK to let people in) gave him a better view of the crowd; I don't know. But the consensus among myself and the American - both of us pretty tall - was that this was far more than 5000 people already and that the gentleman from the State Department with the whining, pleading voice was terribly wrong. Not everyone was going home today - not even close. Crowds can smell BS pretty quickly; the people grew increasingly anxious.

When people are in crowds, it's amazing how quickly they lapse into talking as if they're character actors on a 1950s television drama. You've all probably seen old television shows where randoms shout out their two cents in perfectly timed increments - or at least seen such scenes parodied by the Simpsons. "Hey buddy! Let's get some water down here!" "What about my children?! Please, I have a child!" "We've all got children - wait your turn in line just like everyone else!"

Before this experience, I would have guessed that that sort of thing never actually happened, that it was just a device used by writers to introduce a large cast of characters or to give the overall "feel" of the mob. I would have guessed wrong - mobs actually act like that. It's surreal.

The only difference is that when you're there, you find your heart and your head being tossed back and forth, slapped around by people's calls for this or that...you find yourself constantly wanting too to shout, to control, to impose some sense onto the situation - you're trying to figure out who to ally yourself with as part of the bigger question: how the hell do I get out of this? And with so many people pushing you and shoving, at some point you will be called out, you will have to take sides on something. I heard yelling directly behind me and felt pushing on my pack. Looking over my shoulder, I found a woman just slapping my backpack. "Please, I must get through - I must get through I have a child!" The kid looked about two? three? "Is he sick?" "He is a child!" "He looks a lot like all the other children here" I turned around and tuned her out.

Too, at some point it dawns on you how dangerous the situation is - you realize that no, this isn't TV at all. And...oh! Reality hits. A few feet in front of me, a woman had to watch her elderly mother collapse of heat exhaustion. The sun was coming up and unlike the overcast Thursday, there wasn't a sky in the cloud today; Friday was going to bake us. Sitting, exposed on the highway with bodies packed around her like cattle, the old woman just gave out; cries for help went up. Again, though, we had thousands more in the crowd than we did the day before - but within roughly the same amount of space. With bodies so close, medics had a hard time getting to the elderly woman - her daughter had to just stand and weep and wait.

The American and I, seasoned veterans of this horrible operation, just waited it out, clutching the green waivers that we'd received after a full day of waiting the day before - an 8 1/2 x 11 promise from the State Department that we were to be the first let in today for processing, the first on the boat. This was a lie. It meant nothing to them at this stage. So, when waiving the green sheet of paper didn't work I took the $100US bill out of my pocket (my emergency travel cash) and waived that at the DontS on the truck. I don't think they thought I was funny.
Discarding the waiver system they'd put in place the night before, the Staties asked the Lebanese military to simply let us in 'first come, first serve'. The American and I had managed to work our way close enough to the front that we were let in just about nine.

Here's how the processing operation worked inside. Unlike the bridge which was primarily controlled by Lebanese police, inside you found only State Department workers and Marines. There were four checkpoints set up: 1) ID station, 2) wait for security tent, 3) security tent/baggage check and 4) manifest desk.

The ID was simple - if you had a valid US passport or visa or relative, you were through. I literally held mine up as I was walking past the Marine examining papers; he waived me through at a glance such that I never had to so much as break stride.

The "wait for security" tent was exactly that. Here's where the green waiver actually played a role - they let me bypass that tent which looked to be about a 30 minute wait. This was my reward for 9 hours of waiting the day before.

The security tent/baggage check was the bottleneck of this entire operation. This was where the combination of poor diplomacy, logistical planning and communication reached the breaking point. It was the root cause of the back up, the reason why people had to wait in tents inside the processing center and therefore the reason why people had to wait out on that torturous overpass.

Logistics: I don't think I need to talk too much to why the email system(s) they had in place failed. I mentioned in the last post that they didn't properly anticipate that more people would show up than invited (as people are naturally prone to bring their families with them when evacuating a warzone); too, their "first come first serve" system implemented and advertised the night before via email and radio meant an entirely new level of chaos - an overwhelming amount of people who would be spurred on to unruliness by the fact that there was an overwhelming amount of people. So, suffice it to say that as far as "pre planning" and communication with the public was concerned, the Department of State needed to do a far more effective census of the people they needed to move. Of course, as they were days upon days late with the entire evacuation effort (direct evidence that the US policy of "wait and see" might need some re-tooling)(well, this and Katrina)(oh, and the 9/11 CIA breif) they didn't have time for that sort of thinking or planning.

But really, simple ropes, counting of people as they came to the overpass so that the obvious extra could be told to return the next day- just simple event planning and math would have helped the situation enormously. Let's look at the stop gap inside the actual processing facility: the baggage check. As I sat in line, I clocked the time it was taking for people to get their bags checked in front of me. Getting your bags checked and getting through security consisted of: that 'wipe' thing they do to the zippers of your bags looking for evidence of explosive materials, opening your bags and going through everything you had (making the 'wipe' totally needless?)and then waving the magic metal detecting wand over you, arms outstretched.

For thirty people, my average was just over one minute per person (normally a little less, but every so often a person would show up with, say, 3 or 4 bags (in spite of the request that we bring no more than 15 kilos of luggage)). If the Military and the DoS wanted to fill their ships today, they would have to move 5000 people through that check point. At the baggage checkpoint, they only had two lines set up.

5000 people / two lines X one minute per person = 2500 minutes or over 40 hours of processing. It was taking almost two days to fill one day's worth of ships. When I asked a marine who was helping keep the lines in order how quickly they've been able to process people through this checkpoint, he said that they average about 100 people per hour (but that today they were aiming for 200). I wished that instead of aiming they would have just done some math.

So that's logistics. But to be fair, the logistical planning for half of this operation was impeded by the State Department's other huge weakness: diplomacy.

So again, 1) you wait on the bridge with the cattle under Lebanese Police jurisdiction until being let in for processing and then 2) you're processed before 3) being escorted to the ships. Granted, (2) was a wait and poorly thought out, but at least it was safe - no insane mobs there. It was the bridge itself (1) that was actually quite dangerous, where people were passing out, where US State Dept officials screamed at us over megaphones for calm, for peace, hey we've got children here, etc.

The thing here is that the bridge was still under the jurisdiction of the Lebanese police force. It was obvious that, well, being Lebanese, they really couldn't care less about the situation of 'America'. Occasionally they stood shoulder to should and held us back from pushing through to the processing center, but mostly did little more than stand there and guard the razor wire. Here, the US's inability to negotiate some sort of queue system, or counting system or something in order to quell the unrest was brutally apparent.

The irony of the whole situation was that the US would claim to us that they had to keep us on the overpass for security reasons. Within the processing center/under US jurisdiction, they were keeping us in small groups - there, they said, they weren't going to allow Americans into large groups (while on "American Soil") in case there was some sort of Hizbullah strike - I guess the thinking was that less would be killed or injured if we were in small packs. But....GAH! What of the thousands of Americans clumped together on a highway overpass?! Totally, utterly exposed? What system could have been worked out to save our bodies and our sanity there? The whole thing reeked of a) the USDoS trying to make sure that no litigation could be brought against them in the event of some catastrophy and b) a total diplomatic failure at the expense of thousands of people.

It just blew my mind. I got through the checkpoints as quickly as possible. When I reached the manifest desk (where they took your name and information so that you could then be officially registered as an evacuee) I realized I had lost the American in the tussle. I would see him again, though, on the flight deck of the USS Trenton.