My MESA paper will combine archival work with oral history to develop a picture of everyday life during wartime. I cast light on the ways that “ordinary” people adapted to the ever changing political, social and physical geography of the conflict. The landscapes in which non-combatants lived, worked and went to school were continually and unpredictably shaped and reshaped by a dizzying array of local, regional and international political and military alliances and conflicts. In my paper I ask a series of questions about the nature of sovereignty and community by investigating the ways in which the Lebanese conceived of their neighborhoods or villages. Notions of safe or home space among non-combatants produced expectations about what could be experienced as normal and how to imagine one’s community. In this way my paper will glimpse at the lives of teachers, restaurateurs, EMTs, homemakers, students, nurses, barbers, civil servants, university professors and radio personalities shopping, strolling, sunbathing, and working over the course of the Civil War. By looking at their stories and in indexing their individual experiences to the shifts in the war my paper will attempt to connect a micro-level optic to that of the wider course of the war. In the end this will enable me to suggest a counter narrative to that of the “emergence and strengthening of sectarian identity” narrative that overdetermines writing about the war in Lebanon.