Read Online Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals by Wendy Dale - Free Book Online

couldn’t help but be concerned. “Pete, aren’t we in danger of the shelling going on there?”
    â€œDon’t worry, Wend. They usually only shell in the morning,” my friend said with a maniacal grin.
    The southern border of Lebanon was not a warm, fuzzy place to be. It was like a huge dodgeball field—though instead of avoiding the path of a red rubber ball, today’s task would be to drive out of the trajectory of any shells pelted at us from the Israeli army on one side, Hezbollah guerrillas on the other.
    It sounded terrifying, but I had decided to say yes to the possibility of excitement and danger. I was determined to take life less seriously.
    â€œSo why is it that everyone wants to kill us?” I asked Peter, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible as we began our trip through the hilly and dusty brush-covered terrain.
    â€œThey don’t want to kill us, silly,” Pete said, consoling me. “They want to kill each other. We just happen to be driving down the middle of their firing zone.”
    This was not the Lebanon of thirty years ago. Several decades earlier, Lebanon had been one of the Middle East’s success stories, a nation where Christian, Muslim, and Druze 5 families lived side by side in relative peace and harmony. Beirut was “the Paris of the Middle East,” a thriving adult playground on the shores of the Mediterranean filled with exotic restaurants, expensive nightclubs, and international shopping centers.
    Shopping lost a lot of its allure in 1975 when civil war broke out. Initially, the Muslims had felt they weren’t adequately represented in the government, and it was a war between Muslims and Maronite Christians, but after a while the situation got so complicated and the alliances so tenuous that it was nearly impossible to remember who was against whom at any given time. One day it would be Sunni Muslims against Christians; the next week, it would be Sunni Muslims allied with Christians against Shiites. And then the alliances would shift all over again, like a game of musical chairs.
    These days, the country’s internal religious conflicts had simmered down, making Beirut a relatively safe city—so Pete had wanted to drag me down to the southern border of Lebanon, where a different but equally complex conflict was taking place: Hezbollah guerrillas were fighting against Israel. 6
    I was at one of the world’s most notoriously dangerous borders, one of the hotspots in the ongoing conflict between Muslims and Jews. But my friend and tour guide made it sound as if we were just taking a ride through Disney’s Small World attraction.
    â€œOn the right-hand side, you’ll notice the Israeli bunkers, the mounds of earth on the horizon, and on the left, don’t forget to snap a photo of the Hezbollah flag.”
    He was right—a real black and yellow Hezbollah flag was waving in the wind right in front of me. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I wanted to grab the flag and take it home, the ultimate travel souvenir, but contented myself with snapping a quick photo.
    As Peter sped up the car and drove on through the dust, I wondered if my friend was right—maybe this was no big deal. Maybe there was nothing to be afraid of.
    â€œAnd coming up ahead,” Peter continued, “those men with camouflage gear and machine guns—those would have to be soldiers.”
    I knew from all my reading that a Hezbollah soldier encountering an American basically took one of three actions: (1) killed the American, (2) kidnapped the American, or (3) screamed,“Welcome to my country. Would you like some coffee?” In Lebanon, you really had no idea which of these actions was most likely to take place, because guerrilla logic on the subject seemed to be open to some debate. Some felt that Americans were Israeli allies and therefore the enemy. Others thought that since the United States was generally considered a