TOM CLONAN, a former Irish Army officer who served with the UN and spent much of the 1996 Israeli-Lebanese conflict inside a tank, offers his own take on Samuel Maoz's movie
MY FIRST introduction to Lebanon – the country – was in 1995. As a twenty- something army officer, I spent six months inside an armoured personnel carrier patrolling Lebanese villages and towns along the border with Israel from October 1995 to the intensely renewed Israeli-Lebanese violence of April 1996. The names of the villages remain with me 15 years later.
I commanded many of these patrols in darkness. Sometimes standing high up in the metal hatch – exposed. Sometimes, hatches locked – in the ‘hull-down’ position – peering through a metal aperture. Most of what I saw in Lebanon was from inside an armoured vehicle. As such, much of my memory of the war there is intimately linked with a dark, confined metal space. It is linked to the smell of diesel, warm metal and human sweat. I had forgotten about the overwhelming wave of sound inside armour. I had forgotten about the intense vibration of the engine, and other higher-frequency sounds such as the whine and chatter of our Israeli-manufactured radio sets. And, I had forgotten – or somehow buried - the memory of the gradual and tragic escalation of violence I experienced in Lebanon as a young man.
So, when I went to the press screening of Samuel Maoz's Lebanonin the IFI, it took me by surprise. Filmed entirely from inside an Israeli tank, the film captures that cramped environment almost perfectly. Compounded by the darkness of the cinema, the opening scenes pulled me – against my will – back to Lebanon. As the tank crew started their engines on-screen, I felt an involuntary surge of adrenalin and anxiety.
In the opening sequence, Assi, the Israeli tank commander looks through the night sights at the foliage of an orange grove in Lebanon. At that point, I had an uneasy and unexpected flood of total recall. As Assi and the tank crew manoeuvred the tank to its first grid-reference, I was transported in time and place to the battered orange groves along the coastal highway near the Israeli-Lebanon border at Roshaniqra.
The narrative structure of Maoz’s film takes the audience – from the claustrophobic perspective of the tank – across the border into Lebanon during the Israeli invasion of 1982 and confronts it with a chaotic sequence of events.
The film’s succession of disturbing images – involving, for the most part, interactions with innocent Lebanese civilians – is a frank reflection of the violence and disorientation of modern combat, which is typically fought in urbanised, populated areas. Maoz’s film explores the loss of innocence experienced by the tank crew by focusing on their exposure to combat trauma.
Unlike most Hollywood versions of war, their experience is not bound up in the false mythology of male-bonding and rite of passage. Rather, Lebanonfocuses on their growing paranoia, dis-inhibition and dysfunction as sentient human beings. In this respect, the film's edginess and lack of narrative closure is an authentic commentary on combat.
My own tour of duty in Lebanon coincided with a dramatic escalation in violence between Hizbollah and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) – which resulted in the deaths of many hundreds of Lebanese civilians at the hands of the IDF in and around the Irish area of operations. In April 1996, the IDF launched a punitive campaign into Lebanon which the Israeli government called operation “Grapes of Wrath”. It culminated in the massacre of more than 100 men, women, children and infants at the village of Qana, just down the road from Al Yatun where I was based.
Irish soldiers were amongst the first to witness this carnage and were among the first troops to pick their way among the dead and dying – offering aid where they could and comfort where they couldn’t.
Maoz’s film does address the issue of civilian casualties in Lebanon. In one scene, he shows an innocent family being used as human shields by Hizbollah fighters. Before the Israelis open fire, the camera focuses on a painting of the ‘Madonna and Child’ in the family’s apartment. More than most, Israeli audiences will not miss the irony of the slaughter of a Christian family in Lebanon by the IDF in a war intended to pacify Islamic resistance. Maoz is to be congratulated on this honesty – particularly in the aftermath of more recent Israeli operations in Gaza which have resulted in the slaughter of hundreds of innocent Palestinian men, women and children.
If I were to be very picky, I'd say that some of the scenes in Lebanon– from strictly military and technical perspectives – are questionable. For example, Maoz's tank crew carry no personal weapons and allow all sorts of people to approach their tank and enter it through the top-hatch. This would not happen in reality. Nor would a cable suspended from a helicopter be lowered into a tank, as the static charge on such a cable would likely electrocute the crew.
In addition, the IDF infantry do not move in the way that Maoz depicts. In the movie, they move in small groups, tightly bunched – and as such would be particularly vulnerable to a short burst from an AK-47 or an RPG.
So, on basic tactics and field craft, the film errs a little. Overall however, this film accurately depicts Lebanon and the realities of war in a way that most others fail. I would particularly recommend Lebanonto an Irish audience. It might provide some insights into the untold and unknown experiences of thousands of Irish troops in Lebanon from the 1970s until the Israeli withdrawal in 2000.
Dr Tom Clonan is The Irish TimesSecurity Analyst. He is a retired army officer and served in Lebanon during
the Israeli occupation of the 1990s
