Incommunicado in Amman

While it raged, the battle for Amman was one of the best-staffed but least-reported in journalistic history. More than 100 correspondents, representing 41 news organizations round the world, had front-line accommodation at the Jordan Intercontinental Hotel. But that was about all they had. Virtual prisoners for a week, they could learn little beyond what they could see in dangerous peeks from the hotel's windows. Worse, after the first day they could not file on what they saw; telephone service was cut. TIME Correspondent Roland Flamini tells what it was like to be sitting helplessly on top of one of the year's biggest stories:

Two words dominated our lives inside the Intercontinental--"incoming" and "outgoing." The first was shorthand for "We're being shot at." It was usually uttered while diving to the floor. The second meant we could relax, the bullets were headed in another direction. For some time to come, whenever I hear "incoming," I will probably have to restrain myself from falling flat and thinking suitable last thoughts.

The battle for Amman began at 4:30 a.m. Sept. 17, with armored cars of the Jordanian army hammering at an unfinished apartment block outside the hotel. We drifted down to the lobby and listened to Amman radio. As dawn rolled gently over the dry, brown hills around us, we could see tanks firing and armored cars speeding through the city. The air became filled with the sound of breaking glass and whistling bullets. The hotel, it turned out, was in the crossfire of opposing troops.

By the end of eight days of fighting, not one room remained unscarred. A rifle bullet smacked into the wall above my bed while I typed in the bathroom. I thought bathrooms were safe until a .50-cal. bullet smashed through a balcony into a fourth-floor room, penetrated the bathroom wall, shattered the mirror and landed, spent, in the bathtub. The hotel was indirectly pasted by Rudolph the Recoilless Rifle, a monstrous weapon stationed outside by the army. Every time Rudolph was fired, its deafening blast shattered one more of the windows in the lobby walls.

All through the first day, we waited in vain for the Jordanian army to acknowledge our existence. At one point, some photographers and TV cameramen ventured into the hotel garden, hoping to attach themselves to a group of soldiers and get closer to the war. The soldiers waved them back and fired over their heads. Undaunted, the reporters climbed to the balconies of the hotel with their equipment. A Swedish cameraman waved to a Bedouin soldier in an armored car and was promptly shot in the leg. By some miracle, there were no more casualties among us.

Beer at $1.40. On the first day, New York Timesman Eric Pace managed to get the U.S. embassy on the phone to dictate a pool dispatch. In the middle of a second dispatch, the line went dead. Soon the hotel--and indeed the whole city--was without electricity or running water. The hotel bar shut down, but an enterprising employee did a brisk business in Jordanian beer at $1.40 a bottle.

We had to depend on the sun for light to work by. We awoke at 5 to the accompaniment of guns booming and small arms rattling; we went to sleep soon after dark, exhausted and frustrated. Most of the correspondents and guests trapped in the hotel dragged their mattresses into the corridors. This put an extra wall between them and stray bullets. In the morning, they would creep back into their rooms on all fours.

There were other problems inside the hotel. Without running water, toilets became clogged; without electricity, food spoiled in the refrigerators. The atmosphere began to grow fetid. Some newsmen had filled their bathtubs before the water stopped. They doled it out for a shave and a wash that even a kitten would regard as perfunctory.

Stalag Diaries. After one dismal lunch of rice with rice, the newsmen formed a committee to help run the hotel. Heading the committee was Michael Adams, a former Middle East correspondent for the Guardian who now heads a pro-Arab lobby in London and who was in Amman to negotiate the release of the hijack hostages. Adams drew on his experiences as a prisoner of war in Germany to organize the correspondents. Though they included some major byliners from the U.S., Britain, France, Italy and other countries, they set about cleaning toilets and performing other menial chores. Los Angeles Timesman William Tuohy swept the lobby floor; NBC's Douglas Kiker staggered under the weight of a trash can; another newsman risked drawing fire to mend the water tank.

The committee came in for gentle gibing from some of the newsmen, but it raised morale and helped to avert a serious health crisis. It may also have saved some lives. Hussein's trigger-happy Bedouins were constantly threatening to shoot photographers who tried to film the fighting from the hotel. The committee finally persuaded the photographers to stow their cameras until the situation improved.

The frustration of not being able to transmit copy or pictures continued. Despite being essentially restricted to the hotel, we had a great deal to write about. From our windows on the war and from a couple of quick expeditions into the streets, we were able to piece together a partial picture of the fighting. Some of us also kept diaries of life inside "Stalag Intercontinental." In the occasional lulls, the sound of typewriters could be heard all over the building. Friendly embassies accepted some pool copy when we could get it to them. But not until the first newsmen were evacuated from the Jordanian capital last week were we able to fulfill our assignments: to write our own stories of the battle for Amman.

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