Six Day War, Lebanon, Trip from Athens to Rotterdam

 

Six Day War, Lebanon, Trip from Athens to Rotterdam

 We were living in Zahrani, about 5 km south of Sidon, Lebanon in June, 1967.  I was Technical Service Superintendent at the small (20,000 bpcd) Medreco (Mediterranean Refining Company) refinery, a joint venture of Chevron Texaco, Exxon and Mobil, operated by Caltex.  We had been there since mid 1966.  John Creecy was refinery manager.  Len Rayburn was Operating manager and Dick Doyle was Engineering/Maintenance Manager.

 Life was idyllic.  We had a large house in a lemon grove overlooking the refinery, and about 1 km from the Zahrani Country Club and 18 hole, (alternate tees), golf course.  Swimming in the Mediterranean was also available about 1 km away.  We had a young maid who also served as nanny and baby sitter for the kids.  The kids went to local English language schools, but who were also learning French and Arabic.  Our daughter Suzanne acted as interpreter for our maid, whose only full language was Arabic. 

 My wife Eileen called me at about noon at the refinery on June 6, 1967 and advised that war had started between Israel and the surrounding Arab countries.  Refer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Day_War.  At about 2 AM the following morning, we were advised to pack travel bags and to car pool to Beirut to the apartment of Bob Benkiser, who was the Caltex Marketing Manager for the area.  We did that and congregated at the apartment, where Ms Benkiser served breakfast  and snacks to about 25 men, women and children.

 David Wessel and I drove to the Medreco office in the eastern part of Beirut on personal business with no problem.  We returned and had some breakfast, and at that point I heard a popping sound, like popcorn popping.  The 3^rd floor apartment we were in was on the Corniche, about midway between the U.S. and British embassies.  The popping was the sound of gunfire & we later learned that U.S. Marines fired over the heads of rioters that were storming the embassy.  Note that this is the same embassy that was later bombed by terrorists in 1983, killing 63 people.  Beirut link

 A riot was in progress in the street below us, with burning cars and a lot of shouting and noise.  There was no gunfire or explosives, other than the warning gunfire by the marines.  We had anxious hours throughout the day as our management sought to find air passage for our dependents out of Lebanon.  The rioting abated and we moved en mass to the American University of Beirut campus and waited several long hours there for finalization of the flight.  It turns out that our dependents were able to get on the last flight out of Beirut.  They evacuated safely to Rome, while several of us stayed back to run the refinery and other Caltex interests in Lebanon.

 We had no particular issues running the refinery.  Len Rayburn and I stopped in Sidon on the way back to the refinery after getting our dependents off.  We got a few stares, but nothing more.   We were told later by several Lebanese refinery employees, who apparently were members on the Christian right wing, that they would offer protection in case of any real trouble.

 The worse thing that happened to me during our several week stay in South Lebanon involved golf.  I was playing particularly well on one Saturday and was on the way to winning many golf balls in a Nassau round when we heard a rumor that the Israeli forces had invaded Lebanon from the south.  We curtailed our round after nine holes and I did not win as many golf balls as I would have liked.

 As time progressed, I arranged for wife and children to go from Rome to Athens, where I later joined them by loading our 1964 VW Beetle on a small Yugoslav cruise ship/freighter out of Beirut and wending my way through the Mediterranean toward Piraeus/Athens.  We stopped at Rhodes for an evening, and at Crete for a full day.  Most of the passengers were Soviet Bloc, which made for interesting cocktail conversation at the ship’s bar in the evenings.

 While in Athens we saw some of Greece, particularly Athens and Delphi, and later drove with our fully loaded VW Beetle and three children, from Delphi to Rotterdam, where we had once resided.  While the family was in Athens, my son Craig learned to swim in the pool at the Athens Hilton.

 We tarried along the way in what was then un-balkanized Yugoslavia for about three weeks, and vacationed primarily along the Adriatic Coast.  I retraced our route recently.  We could not enter Albania at that time, so our route took us through what is now Macedonia (Skopje); Kosovo(Pristina, Peja); over “the top” of Albania to Montenegro (Podgorica, Petrovac on the Adriatic).  The drive from Skopje, Macedonia to Petrovac, Montenegro was a 15 hour ordeal.  For part of the trip we sat on mud roads behind donkey carts on the way to market.

  Over the rest of the three-week period, we continued along the Adriatic coast through what is now Montenegro, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia.  We stopped for several days in Zadar, Croatia, where we saw a marionette show and a real European circus, among other things.  We continued through the Austrian Alps into Austria and Germany, stopping at Salzburg, Austria and Munich.  We also visited Dachau, near Munich. 

 I shipped the Volkswagen from Rotterdam to New York, the family sailed to New York on the Holland America line, and I flew on ahead to prepare for our resettlement in Peekskill, NY.

Ray Gruszecki

January, 2016