The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [68]
Embarrassed and exhausted, the fighters returned to the Lion’s Den in groups of five or ten. Dawn found twenty-five Arabs and twenty Afghans gathered in the ruins of the camp, dismally celebrating the feast day at the end of Ramadan. There was practically nothing to eat since the kitchen had been blown up. Each man received three lemons. Later in the morning, Bin Laden returned with ten more fighters. Chastened and unwilling to assert his authority, he let his Egyptian military commander, Abu Ubaydah, take charge. The sight of the needless destruction of his camp at his own hand must have been unbearable.
Abu Ubaydah decided to give him something to do. “Go and guard the left side of the camp,” Abu Ubaydah told him. “I think they will only enter from this place because it is the shortest path.”
Bin Laden led the men to a promontory and spread them out among the trees. They could see a Russian force only seventy meters away. Bin Laden called out to his men to advance, but his voice was hoarse and they didn’t realize he was talking to them. He climbed a leafless tree so that they could hear him and immediately drew fire. A rocket-propelled grenade nearly knocked him out of the tree. “It passed by me and exploded nearby,” bin Laden said in one account, “but I was not affected by it at all—in fact, by the Grace of Allah, the Exalted, it was as though I had merely been covered by a handful of mud from the ground. I descended calmly and informed the brothers that the enemy was in the central axis and not on the left wing.” In another retelling, bin Laden’s most intense experience of combat seems less composed. “There was a terrible battle, which ended up with me half sunk in the ground, firing at anything I could see.”
Bin Laden and his men were pinned down all day by enemy mortar fire. “I was only thirty meters from the Russians and they were trying to capture me,” he said. “I was under bombardment but I was so peaceful in my heart that I fell asleep.” The story of bin Laden’s nap is often told as evidence of his grace under fire. He may simply have fainted. He suffered from low blood pressure, which often made him light-headed. He always carried a bag of salt with him, and whenever he felt dizzy, he would wet a finger and stick it in the bag, then suck on the salt to keep his blood pressure from sinking.
Amazingly, by five o’clock in the afternoon, the Arab forces, led by Abu Ubaydah, succeeded in outflanking the enemy. Without air support, the main body of the Soviet troops withdrew. “There were only nine brothers against one hundred Russian Spetsnaz Special Forces troops, but out of sheer fright and panic in the dense forest, the Russians were unable to make out the number of brothers,” bin Laden related. “All in all, about thirty-five Spetsnaz soldiers and officers were killed, and the rest fled…. The morale of the mujahideen soared, notonly in our area, but in the whole of Afghanistan.”
He had achieved his greatest victory immediately following his worst defeat. After the battle of the Lion’s Den, Abu Ubaydah gave bin Laden a trophy from a dead Russian officer—a small Kalikov AK-74 assault rifle, with a walnut stock and a distinctive rusty red ammunition magazine that marked it as the advanced paratroop version of the weapon. In the future, it would always be on his shoulder.
The entire action lasted three weeks. It was actually waged more by Sayyaf (who then took over the Lion’s Den) than bin Laden, but the Arabs gained a reputation for courage and recklessness that established their legend, at least among themselves. Their guesthouses quietly reopened in Peshawar. From the Soviet perspective, the battle of the Lion’s Den was a small moment in the tactical retreat from Afghanistan. In the heightened religious atmosphere among the men following bin Laden,