When heavy street fighting forced the Associated Press to abandon its headquarters in Beirut's Kantari district, one staffer left a note pinned to the wall. "Welcome to our guests," it said in flowery Arabic. "We hope our guests will protect the contents of the office because they are a trust in their hands. Thank you." Last week the A.P. reporters returned and found that somebody had left a note underneath the first one. "We are deeply sorry," it said, in equally flowery Arabic, "but we damaged the building because there was a sniper..."

All wars impose an ugly risk on the reporters sent to cover them, for sniper fire recognizes no neutrals. So far, two reporters--one Iranian and one Lebanese--have been killed and several others wounded. "There are no rules in this game," says U.P.I. Correspondent Michael Keats, who lost his car to a bomb.

TIME'S Beirut Bureau Chief Karsten Prager and Correspondent William Marmon, both veterans of battlefront coverage in Viet Nam, had a ringside seat in TIME'S office in the seafront hotel district. They too had to abandon the office to the street fighters for almost a week. Prager evacuated his wife and four children to safety in Athens, Marmon moved his family to London. Returning to the office last week, they found that it had taken about 30 hits, mainly from .50-cal. armor-piercing machine-gun bullets. The desks were covered with shards of glass and plaster, but the telephones and telex were still working. Says Prager: "The relatively safe areas have become smaller; the box has shrunk." Marmon took advantage of the latest cease-fire to explore further.

He found the scene almost comic. "We drove slowly past the Nasserite position at the Palm Beach Hotel and the idle warriors posing for macho pictures for photographers," he reported. "One of the leftists squatted with two AK-47 assault rifles at the ready, one in each hand."

As an illustration of the current mood, Prager talks of a messenger who last week came crashing into a press office to report the announcement of the new ceasefire, the twelfth in two months. Half a dozen correspondents were sitting around a battered desk, engaged in a high-stakes poker game. They all looked up, shrugged, then anted up and went on playing.

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