ON BOARD the Aer Lingus airliner which carried the first contingent of relief troops to Lebanon on Tuesday morning, some of the soldiers were reading copies of a booklet outlining details of the redundancy offer which could release them from their military careers.
Hundreds of service people received the copies of the "voluntary early retirement scheme" on Monday, and on Tuesday some were on the flight out to Lebanon for a six month long tour of duty. The Department of Defence hopes 450 soldiers will take early retirement this year and 2,300 leave over the next three years as part of a plan to reduce the size of the defence forces.
Those eligible for the early retirement scheme pondered the details of their redundancy money and pension entitlements on the flight out to Beirut. Soldiers over 50, those below the required standards of fitness, naval personnel suffering from chronic sea sickness, and officers from cadet classes 46-53, who joined the force in the early 1970s, were all handed the booklet on Monday.
The booklet added a further touch of uncertainty to the apprehensive atmosphere on board the aircraft bringing the soldiers of the 79th Irish United Nations Battalion to Lebanon.
At Beirut, the men disembarked to sit in buses, part of a 34 vehicle UN convoy waiting to take them to the Irish battalion headquarters "Camp Shamrock" right in the centre of the area being bombarded by the Israeli defence forces. A solemn atmosphere developed in the buses as the men sat outside the hangar and watched the 200 soldiers they were replacing march off gleefully to the gleaming Aer Lingus airbus which would take them home.
The new arrivals waited for another hour enough time for them to watch the airbus take off over the Mediterranean before they headed down the coastal highway to southern Lebanon, their base for the next six months. There was already considerable uncertainty about their safety. Earlier in the day, Israeli gunboats had raked the road with canon fire but it had let up before the UN convoy moved.
One Israeli patrol gunboat could be seen off Sidon, a black dot against the setting sun. There was almost no traffic on the highway, normally a nightmare of ferocious, erratic Lebanese driving. All movement other than the UN convoy disappeared at Sidon. The convoy then turned west, into a landscape of darkness broken only by the lights from UN bases on hilltops around south Lebanon.
For another hour the convoy wound its way through valleys and up the steep, winding back roads passing through deserted villages, the occasional wrecked house or car caught in its headlights.
OUR arrival at Camp Shamrock was greeted by a piper, who failed miserably to lift the spirits of the 200 men and women beginning their six month tour of duty. Israeli jets were flying overhead and within minutes, there was the thump from an Israeli mortar being fired. Seconds later, the ground crackled as it exploded in the distance. Then two more, then silence.
The 79th Battalion members assembled in the camp's square to be addressed by a man with a megaphone who informed them that a state of "Garryowen" was in place which means they must wear flak jackets and helmets at all times outdoors and in unprotected buildings.
The next, more urgent state of alert, he explained, is known as "Groundhog" which means there is an Israeli shell warning and the threat of the camp being hit. They should then walk, not run, to their allocated bomb shelters.
An officer, a rugby player with a droll sense of humour, when asked the derivation of the "Garryowen" term, suggested that a "high ball" was coming in.
The reception was mercifully short lived and initial anxiety quickly forgotten as the new battalion members mingled and then headed to the messes for drinks. The sound of shells became less intimidating as the volume of conversation rose around the bars.
That night, as they slept in their new quarters, the road we had passed along in the darkness was bombed as Israeli jets began cutting off the routes into south Lebanon.
They rose on Wednesday morning, an hour or two after sunrise, to the sound of more Israeli mortars, this time passing overhead and landing in a ravine half a mile away in territory they call "Ghanbatt" - the area of operations of the Ghanaian UN battalion.
Mortar explosions sent up grey smoke from the ravine. The firing went on intermittently throughout the morning but only the new arrivals seemed to take any notice. The outgoing members of the 78th Battalion due to return home within the next 10 days showed no reaction. They bad experienced 10 days of it, and at night when the Garryowen alert became a Groundhog alert they had climbed from their beds, taking their blankets to the confinement of the bomb shelters.
During the first day of the rotation of the battalions the 78th members showed their replacements around the camp and drove them out into the area of operations.
They visited the neighbouring town of Tibnin on a hillside beneath a crusader castle. The hospital in the village has become a safe haven for about 600 people who were unable to flee north with the exodus of 400,000 south Lebanese driven out by the Israeli offensive.
Women and children have their beds in the hospital corridors. Outside the maternity ward, an old man lay wrapped in blankets on a mattress. He was feeble and in the early stages of death, lying there surrounded by chattering children and expectant and new mothers.
The soldiers visited the local orphanage, improved over the years with the help of previous Irish battalions. The orphanage building - normally teeming with laughing children - was silent and in darkness. Most of the children had been evacuated but 20 stayed throughout the bombardment with two or three women to mind them. They were sheltering in a featureless basement and had not left the building for almost two weeks. They were withdrawn and wan, sitting silently around the walls of the room on mattresses watching a 12 inch black and white television.
In the corner, just as in the hospital, there was an old man, wrapped in blankets and close to death.
The following day the soldiers visited a village which had been fell of large, elegant villas until it was hit by airbombs dropped from Israeli jets. The previous week, the 78th battalion removed two corpses and five badly injured members of one family which had taken a hit from a 500 kilogram airbomb. There was a crater exposing red clay and rock like a huge wound where the garden had been.
The concrete roof was blown upwards and stood at a crazy angle over the wreckage of the house. Broken furniture, bedding and clothes were blown out onto the road. The family's photographs, pictures of handsome men with moustaches and elegant women and children, were lying all over the wreckage. A corpse remained hidden inside, under the rubble.
ON Thursday they brought food through the empty reads to other villages where more houses had been destroyed by bombs. Hundreds of women, children and elderly are still hidden in cellars throughout these villages. They peered through wrought iron gates as the Irish soldiers in their sky blue flak jackets and helmets unloaded plastic bags of food and drove away.
All the time, there was the sound of gun reports in the background and overhead the sound of jets passing over to bomb somewhere else outside the Irish battalion area.
There was also the ever present sound of the little pilotless observation aircraft, the "drones" which spy on the countryside in south Lebanon and direct their fire from the artillery and aircraft. They could be glimpsed only rarely in the sky, tiny little craft like model airplanes. They even sounded inoffensive, something like a diesel lawnmower or a moped.
The Irish soldiers call them lawnmowers and hate them. "Those f**king lawnmowers," one officer said. The same drones had been hovering over Qana when the Israeli shells fell in the Fijian UN base there last week, and those same drones helped direct the proximity fused shells which exploded meters above the refugees sheltering there, lacerating and dismembering 102 civilians. The shells also injured four of the Fijians, neighbours of the Irish in south Lebanon, and two other UN soldiers lost limbs.
On Thursday the Israelis issued a statement saying the UN was irresponsible in continuing to supply food and shelter to the south Lebanese during the course of their operation, which all the world now knows was code named "Grapes of Wrath".