How do you wait for an army to retreat? In a week or two - at most seven - Israel's last soldiers in southern Lebanon will withdraw under Hizbullah fire. And the Irish will be in the middle of it.
Lieut Robert Kearney of the Irish 87th Infantry Battalion showed me around his frontline observation post. His men were playing volleyball within the confines of one of their most forward positions. Three sentries were watching the Israelis through binoculars. Be sure the Israelis were watching them.
A few minutes earlier, Hizbullah guerrillas had attacked a nearby "South Lebanon Army" (SLA) compound, but the Shia movement's heavy machinegun, anti-tank missile and mortar assaults on Israel's militia allies are a daily occurrence here.
Irish troops are barely fazed by the explosions which they so carefully record for the archives of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. When their own lives are endangered - as they were by SLA heavy machine gun fire into another Irish position the previous evening - the response is more angry, but equally impotent.
If Lebanon is on the verge of liberation, the Shaqra position feels like a prison. Irish soldiers are surrounded by 10-foot high gabions - thick walls of crushed stone topped with barbed wire.
Their watchtower faces the Israeli-occupied zone - indeed, one of the volleyball teams has arrived in an armoured personnel carrier from a sister position down the road inside the zone. Giant, scab-like crests - a series of SLA and Israeli compounds soon to be abandoned - dot the horizon, staring menacingly at the small Irish positions.
The young officer from Kilkenny is new to Lebanon, but Lieut Kearney's unit has already seen its share of action. Just seven days ago, Hizbullah guerrillas drove up next to the Irish position. The sentry sounded the alert and the Irishmen went to "groundhog" - bomb shelters.
The Hizbullah were driving a silver pick-up with a TOW wireguided missile launcher in the back. "It made a hissing noise as it went over our heads," Lieut Kearney said, pointing at the copper missile wire still entangled in the unit's electrical power line. The TOW exploded 50 metres short of its target, an SLA compound on the hillside opposite the Irish.
The Israeli-backed militia usually retaliates against the Irish troops or the villages they are trying to protect. Within the past five weeks the Shaqra position has been hit twice by .5 heavy machine gun rounds. Lieut Kearney showed me a large stone with burn marks that was split by one round. The other left a half-inch hole through the ceiling of one of the unit's billets.
What would happen if one of these rounds hit him? "There wouldn't be much left of me," Lieut Kearney answered. At the Haddatha position two weeks ago an entire billet was destroyed. It is the surprise explosions - such as the Israeli Merkava tank round that killed Cpl Dermot McLoughlin while he slept in his Bradchit village position in 1987 - that are most lethal. When the soldiers of Irishbatt are not on checkpoint, patrol or observation duty, much of their time is spent thinking and talking about the Israeli withdrawal. The pullout - for which the Lebanese and the Irish have waited 22 years - has already started, with the SLA and the Israelis abandoning several positions. But the bulk of Israeli forces, some 1,500 men, are expected to leave suddenly, some time before July 7th.
UN headquarters in New York has not yet decided what to do. The role of 535 soldiers in Irishbatt will depend on decisions taken by the UN, the Israeli, Lebanese and Syrian governments, and especially Dublin. If the SLA is not disarmed - one of the greatest dangers - UNIFIL will consider that no withdrawal has taken place, and the Irish and other battalions will stay put. Although no firm orders have been given, the assumption is that in the event of a real withdrawal, stationary units will be transformed into mobile armoured infantry. The Irish soldiers would fan out through the 8 km broad zone separating their battalion from the Israeli border.
You might think that a time of such danger and uncertainty would slow recruitment. On the contrary - there have never been so many Irish volunteers for Lebanon - and most of them have served with UNIFIL before. If you include the men deployed with the Force Mobile Reserve and at headquarters in Naqoura, Ireland has 650 soldiers in Lebanon - by far the State's largest military commitment abroad.
Over 22 years, Irish soldiers have served more than 26,000 individual tours of duty in the area. Forty-four have lost their lives here, the highest price paid by any contributing state. That each battalion's flag is sent to Arbour Hill, the chapel opposite Collins Barracks where the dead of the Easter Rising are buried, is a measure of the mission's importance.
Lieut Col Chris Moore, the commanding officer of the 87th battalion, says the 535 Irish soldiers under his command could not be more aware of the crucial moment of their deployment. "They all feel they are living in historic times," he said in his office at Camp Shamrock, the battalion's headquarters at Tibnin.
"They are extraordinarily hopeful for the people of southern Lebanon. I first came here in 1982, and I know several generations of local families. We have lived here among the people and suffered with them. The feeling that you're in a situation where history is being made is very strong."
But as Lieut Col Moore knows well, the history of Lebanon and Irishbatt is as tragic as it is heroic. He is still haunted by the memory of discovering the bodies of three Irish soldiers who were murdered by a colleague on Tibnin bridge in 1982. The colonel - along with all of UNIFIL - received orders to "move out of the way" when Israel staged its massive 1982 invasion.
In the aftermath, he and his colleagues had to respect UNIFIL passes given to plainclothes Israeli agents who kidnapped Lebanese and Palestinians in the peacekeepers' area of operations.
According to Brig Gen Jim Sreenan, the Deputy Force Commander of UNIFIL and overall Irish contingent commander, the three key dates of UNIFIL's deployment were the 1982 Israeli invasion; the July 1993 assault which the Israelis called "Operation Accountability" and the three-week April 1996 bombardment which Israel named "Grapes of Wrath".
"You had hundreds of thousands of civilians fleeing north of the Litani River," Gen Sreenan explained. "These people would never have returned if UNIFIL hadn't existed. Southern Lebanon would have been a free-fire zone. We set up the conditions that allowed them to come back."
One of the principal fears about Israel's imminent withdrawal is that Israeli aircraft and gunboats will fire massively on southern Lebanon in response to Hizbullah attacks, as they did in 1993 and 1996. Both times Irishbatt sheltered terrified civilians and used its vehicles to transport refugees and wounded.
"Yes, 1993 and 1996 were terrible, dreadful experiences," Lieut Col Moore said. Could the summer of 2000 be like that again? "Yes it could," he answered. But the Irish officer's belief that southern Lebanon may soon regain its freedom seems to outweigh his apprehension about the danger of bad days to come.
"The Israelis have been retaliating into this bloody place for as long as I care to remember," he said. "So what's new?"