Growing Up Bin Laden - Jean P. Sasson [148]
On September 19, 1998, my father finally gave the order for us to leave the guest house in Kabul. We were going to Khost, to see the damage for ourselves.
The passengers in our vehicle were quiet as we drew close. The last time we had seen the camp, it was bustling with activity. Classrooms were filled, men were sleeping in bunkers, and others were praying in the prayer halls. There were numerous training and storage facilities.
We could not believe our eyes. Where a camp once stood, there was nothing but ruins. It was amazing that anyone had survived.
We piled out of the vehicles and followed my father as he surveyed the damage. By then we had heard that the Americans had fired over seventy cruise missiles into the country.
The attack had been so violent that tough fighters were still shaken even after a month. They told us they had continued celebrating after we left. Everyone, instructors and trainees, had been abuzz with the events, on an emotional high, discussing the visit of the sheik. Then, without warning, the atmosphere changed. At first they believed that stars were springing from their place in the sky, hurling their heavenly glowing bodies to earth, falling bright and white.
My father explained, “What you were seeing was the heat rushing from the missiles.”
The air was suddenly full of menace, with bright flashes and crashes so loud that their eardrums were bursting. They recognized the danger too late. Men met grim deaths as they rushed in one direction and then the other. Friends were pulverized before their eyes.
Wherever the missiles hit, life was obliterated. Buildings evaporated and large craters opened in the earth. I was told that my Saudi friend was dead, his remains splattered in a large crater. When I asked about Abu Mohammed, a good friend I had met through Abu Zubair, I was told that he, too, had received a direct hit. Led to the crater that held small pieces of his body, all my anger concentrated into a dark ball in my heart. Confused by the messages I had heard all my life, I had no reign over my emotions, one second furious with the Americans and the next second angry with my father. Another friend had been thrown about, the whirling, metallic storm tossing him from one point to another, finally leaving him after piercing his body with large chunks of shrapnel. I was surprised to discover that he survived, although with massive wounds.
Animals had suffered, too. Abu Zubair wailed about his black and white cow and her baby calf, both of whom had been blown to bits. Witnesses had reporting seeing the cow flying through the air. Although the mother cow dissolved into nothing and not even the hide of her body was ever discovered, the upper half of the baby calf was found crumpled in the training camp.
Life can be very perplexing. Many tough fighters discussed their sorrow at the loss of the cow and her calf for many days to come.
After finding out more details about the American embassy bombings, I became even more agitated. I imagined that governments in the West were plotting my family’s demise even as my father planned more strikes. Any time I looked at my mother or the youngest children in our family, I worried that they too one day would simply evaporate as a result of a powerful missile.
My father was devastated at the losses, yet he composed himself and, like the leader he was, surveyed the damage, plotting his revenge, I am sure.
I had been ruminating on the subject of killing and death for days when I was with my father and a few men. I decided that I was going to raise the topic of killing. I had matured and didn’t launch directly into a subject that I knew would anger my father. Rather than discuss the current violence overtaking our lives, I eased into the conversation by first asking him, “My father, how many men did you kill in the Russian war?”
My father ignored me.
I persisted, determined not to accept silence as an appropriate