" From Beirut to Jerusalem " by Thomas Friedman

On a rainy night in April 1984 I decided that it was time for me to leave Beirut. On that evening

a terrible thunderstorm was beating down on Beirut. I somehow managed to get to sleep,

but was jarred awake at about 2:00 am when several explosions shook the apartment and rattled

the windows. I listened carefully and detected the whistle of incoming mortars. Our whole west

Beirut neighborhood was being shelled from East Beirut.

My first instinct was to jump out of bed and run into the bathroom, because it was the only room that did not have any windows . There I sat on the toilet, my head in my hands, waiting for the shelling to stop. As the shelling intensified, my news instinct came alive and I crawled on my hands and knees from the bath room into my office and dialed the telephone number of the Times in New York. Before anyone answered I put the phone down.

You idiot, I thought to myself, this kind of shelling has been going on every night since the civil war started. Nine years, today it just happens to be your house, but it is not news. So I crawled back into the bath room, sat back down on the toilet and waited for the cease-fire. All I could think was : this is really crazy. I am the New York Times correspondent in Beirut and am being shelled. Its time to leave.

It would be few more months before I could actually depart. But as the day approached I began having second thoughts. I was drawn to Beirut story like a moth to a candle. Some of my colleagues had come to Beirut and could not leave (Just like Robert Fisk who is still here) , because they become hooked on their own adrenaline. I was not immune to that myself. When I think back on Beirut now, I barely remember the close calls or the adrenaline highs. Instead, I remember all those remarkable human encounters I got to witness that taught me more about people and what they are made of than the previous twenty-five years of my life. I got to see with my own eyes the boundaries of men's compassion alongside their unfathomable brutality, their ingenuinity alongside astounding folly, their insanity alongside their infinite ability to endure.

It is for such moments that a reporter is drawn to Beirut, and stays there long after good sense tells him he should leave. All were good thrills at the time, but they don't last, only the moments do.

Having said all this, I know there is some attraction Beirut held for me that I can't explain, not even to myself. It is a sort of irrational pull that I think many newsmen feel once or twice in their careers, and it prompts them to do something normal people would consider utterly crazy, like covering Beirut and enjoying it.

That went for a lot of us who covered Beirut. Plenty of times it just didn't make sense to be there, but we kept coming back because we needed it.