Season of Betrayal by Margaret Lowrie Robertson

The magnitude of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the United States has tended to obscure the tragedy of earlier acts of terrorism. With so many lives lost or shattered on that terrible day, it is often difficult to recall the victims of earlier days of terror.

Margaret Lowrie Robertson’s novel Season of Betrayal recalls one such date, Oct. 23, 1983, when car bombings of the U.S. Marine and French Army bases in Beirut killed 241 Marines and 58 French soldiers. Sent as members of a peacekeeping force in the civil strife between Christian and Muslim factions, the troops died in the service of a policy that all but ensured its own failure. Too few men were deployed in an untenable tactical position. No clear guidelines or diplomatic protocols were established to help the troops deal with the bewildering forces arrayed against them. The Marines and French troops were targets waiting to be killed.

With them died something else: the belief that Westerners, especially Americans, were somehow invulnerable by virtue of their special status. Vietnam had dented America’s international image, but it still seemed beyond question in the 1970s that Americans could observe the carnage overwhelming Lebanon and other Middle Eastern nations without risking more than temporary inconvenience at airports and border checkpoints.

Robertson was a veteran Middle East reporter for CBS Radio and CNN. Her protagonist, an impressionable young woman named Lara McCauley, lacks any insight or experience that might help her adapt to the deadly complexities of Lebanon. She arrives in Beirut with her husband, Barrett, a seasoned journalist, and is totally unprepared for the daily peril of life in Lebanon. On their trip from the airport to Beirut’s Commodore Hotel, headquarters and watering hole for Western journalists, she witnesses the routine kidnapping of a Muslim family by Christian militiamen. Barrett’s “don’t talk, drive on” response sets the tone and is underscored later when he clinically covers civilian deaths when he might have helped save lives. Getting the story is what matters, not who dies or why.

Much of this moody, introspective novel is set in the bar of the Commodore Hotel. There, reporters and photographers hold forth over their third scotch like the experts they presume to be. But Barrett McCauley and his colleagues are dependent on Lebanese translators and go-betweens to get the story. In Barrett’s case, his translator, Nadia, helps him gain access to vital contacts, while pulling back the sheets of her bed for other services.

When Lara avails herself of a Polish expatriate named Tomas to help her negotiate the deadly terrain of Lebanon, Barrett reacts with scorn. Tomas is indeed a questionable source, perhaps a Russian spy, perhaps linked to a right-wing Christian leader. But Lara cannot resist the offer of help and — predictably — love, as her marriage slowly unravels.

Why does Lara choose the dangerous path of engaging with Lebanon’s self-destruction? It certainly isn’t because she craves the adrenaline rush. Lara lives in constant fear, not only of injury, capture or death, but also of becoming a meaningless statistic of the war. She muses on how her husband’s colleagues would remember her over their nightcap:

“There were too many ways to die in this, a war I hardly understood, a war that started long before we came, and would continue long after we left. Most of all, perhaps, I feared irony would underpin my death in the Commodore closing time conversation. Hey, remember Mac’s wife? Afraid she would die — and look she did!

Lara begins to dabble in Lebanon’s suicide pact. She takes a job editing film for a Japanese TV station and then accompanies Tomas on a perilous trip across the Green Line separating the battle zones of Beirut. Barrett reacts with fury and escalating brutality as Lara begins to create a separate identity for herself. Like the peacekeeping U.S. Marines, being picked off in increasing numbers by snipers, Lara’s “limited engagement” in the Lebanese conflict becomes a death trap.

Robertson’s novel ends with a tangle of mutual betrayals and deaths that serve as a counterpoint to her terse yet searing account of the suicide attack on the U.S. Marine and French Army barracks.

Death is the ultimate victor in Season of Betrayal. Yet its triumph is futile, serving no purpose, achieving no end. Soldier or civilian, Christian or Muslim, Westerner or Lebanese — all are betrayed by one creed, or ideology, or code of life, including, and perhaps especially, the ideal of love.