Growing Up Bin Laden - Jean P. Sasson [129]
Those toilet seats created havoc for humans as well as dogs. Human waste had nowhere to go but down. Of course, when pedestrians walked on the narrow sidewalks, they found it was necessary to navigate mounds of human waste. The odor was so strong it was paralyzing. Despite the fact farmers came into the city several days a week to collect the waste to use on their fields as fertilizer, the stench of human waste hung over the city.
Afghanistan proved to be a dangerous place for the bin Laden sons. My brothers and I came close to death more than once. Most of our near misses resulted from the mishandling of grenades or other explosives, for weapons were everywhere and not always in expert hands.
Once we moved from Tora Bora to Kandahar, my father set up weapons training classes within the compound, ordering us to return occasionally for a refresher course. We didn’t complain, for we were often bored and looking for something to do.
On one particular day my brothers and I decided to check in on a grenades class run by certain general. One of his rules had to do with “what to do with a grenade when the pin is removed.” Well, as fate would have it, he dropped the grenade while talking. He reassured the class, “Don’t worry, it’s not activated.”
I examined the grenade rolling around on the floor. Seeing that the pin was separate from the grenade, I immediately ordered my brothers, “Get out of here!”
Several of us ran for the door, but Abdul Rahman froze in place, merely covering his head with his hands, which, of course, would have given him no protection from a blast. I struggled to get him moving when the general started to laugh. He, too, had noticed the danger and had quickly replaced the pin or deactivated the weapon, one or the other.
To reassure the wary class, the general related a short story about how teachers often used such tactics to frighten students, to see how they might react, looking for students who kept their cool in such a situation. He said chaos had ensued not so long before in a class that was packed with gullible students. On that occasion so many students tried to run out the door that they had tightly wedged their bodies in the door frame, the result being that no one could get out and no one could get in. Another soldier, still physically fat from the good life in Saudi Arabia, had made for a small window exit. Unfortunately, his body was larger than the opening, so he had become jammed with his head and shoulders outside and his chest and lower body inside.
Thankfully the exercise was only a ploy, or all those trapped in doors and windows would have been blown to bits.
In another class we were observing, the situation became more serious. My brothers and I were trying to hide our laughter because the teacher looked more like a scholar than a soldier. Most troubling to me, he appeared to be half-blind, even though he was wearing very thick glasses with double lenses that made his eyeballs seem huge. That nearly blind instructor was holding a lighter in one hand and an explosive in the other, telling us it was important for a soldier to know how long a fuse would burn. He moved the lighter so close to the fuse that it started smoldering. Unaware that he had accidentally lit the fuse, he threw