
Bed that saved me from the Taliban - ahamedirshad123
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-46882917
======
0xcafecafe
Amazing read. Happy that he made it out. Loved the closing comment as well (I
wonder why everyone of us can't live like this without going through a NDE, I
myself am a guilty party):

>You know, sitting on the beach in Greece with friends I've heard people
complaining that because we had a financial crisis they miss some of the
comforts they used to have. I am like, "Come on! Enjoy your life and health.
You are eating sardines and drinking Ouzo by the beach. We are free, we have
good friends around and we laugh - this is what people are supposed to do."

>Don't concentrate only on work, stressful and bad things in your life.
Concentrate instead on creating good moments and being around good people,
because life is so beautiful.

~~~
hiccuphippo
You don't need to go through a NDE. Try going hiking on the mountains. You'll
come back with a better attitude about life and your usual problems will look
meaningless. I used to go at least once a year. Need to get back on it.

~~~
deboflo
True, it doesn’t always take a NDE, but I think it does require a certain
amount of hardship and/or trauma. People need to be pushed into a corner to
find out who they really are. They need to be truly alone, and often not by
choice.

------
fb03
It's nice when something is so well written that it almost literally
transports you to that moment. I was agitated to know what would happen next
as the narrative unfolded.

Can recommend.

~~~
NKosmatos
Same here, that would make a great movie.

~~~
krn
It reminded me of "10 minutes"[1], the Best European Short Film of 2002.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za8-THNtk-M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za8-THNtk-M)

------
pizza
Worth mentioning that the Taliban has just conducted another terrible attack
this morning

> The Wardak attack is turning into the single deadliest attack against the
> Afghan intelligence in the past 17 yrs. We are hearing now at least 40 dead
> more than 50 wounded. (some officials still insist not all are NDS officers
> - includes local upriser militias they were training)
> [https://twitter.com/MujMash/status/1087338155072724992?s=19](https://twitter.com/MujMash/status/1087338155072724992?s=19)

------
soyyo
According to his tale, he was almost killed by special forces snipers. I know
you could not blame them due to the confusion, but it would have been terrible
to survive the attackers just to be killed by the people that were supposed to
save you.

~~~
scotty79
I read this as more of a tale of a man that fell into the insides of a machine
and managed to hide in a crack to avoid getting crushed untill the machine
stopped its course.

This kind of attack and response is like mad contraption fueled by old human
stupidity and borderline futuristic deadly powerful technology.

As a civilian you are supposed to keep very safe distance from such a powerful
tech but someone, somewhere gets inevitably confronted with it mixed with a
dash or a lot of human stupidity and most often dies.

------
zeveb
> About an hour-and-a-half passed, and although I didn't know it at the time
> the attackers had by now killed almost everyone in the lobby, the
> restaurant, and on the first and second floors of the hotel. They had rushed
> through the third and fourth floors to the fifth floor and I could hear them
> running around on the rooftop above my head, where they were managing to
> keep away helicopters belonging to the international forces.

Reading that, I can't imagine being stuck in such a situation without weapons.
Yeah, a sidearm won't necessarily save one's life, particularly against
several attackers, but all it would take is a few people to fight back to
subdue the attackers. According to Wikipedia, there were only 'four or five
gunmen' and about 200 people in the hotel (42 dead, over 160 rescued): if each
person had been capable of resisting, then the attackers simply couldn't have
won the day without a significantly larger team, which would have incurred
increased cost, opsec risk & operational risk.

I can't imagine the terror of being stuck in a hotel room, waiting to die. A
weapon might not save my life, but at least it'd give me something to focus on
& feel better about.

------
sjroot
Incredible, to be hiding under one of two beds in his hotel room, and having
the other bed being searched and shot at by the Taliban.

> _Don 't concentrate only on work, stressful and bad things in your life.
> Concentrate instead on creating good moments and being around good people,
> because life is so beautiful. _

~~~
elliekelly
And to have the bad guy quite literally sitting on top of you. I cannot
imagine the mental fortitude it takes to maintain your composure to keep
perfectly still and silent in that situation.

~~~
sjroot
Right! I did think it was interesting that he said this adrenaline rush made
it difficult to keep from laughing. It seems completely inappropriate, but
makes sense at the same time. "Really, this is happening to me right now?"

~~~
beaconstudios
Laughing can be a nervous or awkward reaction as well as the usual. I don't
know if this is universal but I and others sometimes get a compulsion to laugh
when told bad news.

------
ranprieur
> Each time they would laugh afterwards, like they were just playing around,
> or like it was a big party or something.

Terrorists in TV and movies are never like this. They're always super-serious
evil, like Voldemort, like nobody ever is in real life. I wonder how much
violence could be prevented if Hollywood didn't give us such a bullshit view
of human nature.

~~~
woolvalley
It seems pretty evil to me if you laugh about murdering humans like it's some
sort of game.

~~~
StavrosK
Isn't that what all soldiers do?

~~~
muzika
No

~~~
StavrosK
I guess the Taliban are somehow different from everyone else and evil, then.
It's the most reasonable explanation.

~~~
watwut
Surely there is middle ground between "all soldiers do it" and "no soldier
except Talian ever done it".

While no army is composed of highly emphatic saints, armies differ in their
general level of violence toward non-combatants, cruelty, how pleasurable they
perceive killing and so on and so forth. Ideology and reward system have to do
a lot with how army or specific unit behaves.

~~~
StavrosK
Sure, I just don't really subscribe to the notion that "they're brown so they
must be evil". The data I have right now is "these soldiers were taking
killing lightly" and, if I'm going to generalize from the data point, I'll
generalize to "all soldiers take killing lightly" rather than "the Taliban
specifically take killing lightly", since that makes an additional assumption
that the Taliban are special.

~~~
watwut
Both nazi and communists took killing lightly or as manly honorable duty. They
were German and Russians respectively. They believed they are doing right
thing with no ambiguity. They had fun with it. They were more violent as
western armies toward non combatants.

The original claim was about this particular unit. Assumption that they are
representative of all brown people is wrong. Plenty of brown don't subscribe
to this ideology.

Armies indoctrinate and socialize people differently. Implying racism on part
of people who don't extrapolate one unit of one army behavior to all of them
is not great tactic.

------
kakarot
It's insane to me that a sniper opened fire on Vasileiou without any
confirmation that he was a target. If he had been killed and word had gotten
out, it would have been horrible PR.

It's also insane that Vasileiou went from being in immediate danger of burning
alive to immediate danger of hypothermia. What a roller coaster. And his
training was broad enough to cover the entire spectrum.

~~~
gammateam
Thats why the sniper missed

Somebody or training made the sniper question the action

------
ddoran
I strongly recommend "The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes -
and Why" by Amanda Ripley [1]. It is a terrific look of the character traits
and behavior of people who survive life-threatening circumstances and those
who don't.

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2706211-the-
unthinkable](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2706211-the-unthinkable)

~~~
toufiqbarhamov
One thing that struck me about this story was that he made some good decisions
and some bad ones, but as he points out he got _really_ lucky a bunch of
times. None of his habits would have mattered if he’d been in the restaurant,
if he’d have been in the wrong room, picked the wrong bed to hide under, or
hadn’t moved just out of the way of a sniper’s bullet, and if a tank had fired
on his room.

It’s easy to assume that a given set of habits correlate with survival, and
even easier to write a book effectively engaging in survivorship bias. It’s a
lot harder to get lucky many times in a row, to have the opportunity to not
die. So read the book, keep your back to a wall and an eye on exists, but
recognize that none of that would have helped this guy. The two big tings that
seemed to have saved this guy is temperament (look at his job for indication
she that job followed temperament and and not the other way around) which
allowed him to remain calm, and sheer dumb luck.

~~~
dennisgorelik
> It’s easy to assume that a given set of habits correlate with survival

It is a correct assumption.

I survived this attack ... by not going to Afghanistan.

------
mhb
I think a good tactic might have been to deploy the bedsheet rope in order to
make it look as if he had climbed down to the floor below.

~~~
Insanity
Reading it, I actually had the same idea.

But still, the possible would exist that there's someone in the room who
didn't dare climb down in the end.

~~~
mhb
Yes. But then it seems like a mistake to have put the mattress against the
door since that strongly suggests that someone is in the room.

~~~
runjake
He did this to physically shield himself from random shrapnel. His purpose in
opening the balcony door was to give the impression that somebody may have
egressed.

This is taught in tradecraft courses, and this mention along with others in
the article suggests to me that he's been through some tradecraft and/or SERE-
type trainings -- probably oriented towards journalists.

~~~
ip26
Maybe journalists, or maybe pilots. Planes & airports have long been a high
profile target.

~~~
runjake
Err pilots, I meant. I got some wires cross in my head when typing that out.

I attended one such tradecraft class and was remembering that virtually all my
classmates were journalists headed into theater (Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan).

------
bflesch
Great article.

But one detail seems to be wrong:

It says "I had to do something, so I went out on to the balcony. I could see
the fire on __my left hand side__, it was heavy and I realised that if it
reached my room I wasn't going to survive."

The provided image circles the balcony on the right hand side of the fire, so
it would have been either his right hand side where he saw the fire, the image
has been mirrored, or BBC just circled the wrong balcony:
[https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/720x405/p06ynx4y.jpg](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/720x405/p06ynx4y.jpg)

~~~
ericboehs
I saw that too but later in the article it gets explained.

> early in the morning the international forces began to fire from a tank into
> the rooms. They concentrated on room 521, the one next door to me

The blackened rooms to his right aren't the fire he was talking about. There
must have been another fire out of view of this picture.

------
jackschultz
Wow that was very well written. In an intense situation where after the fact
people want to write dramatically, this was the opposite in a great way. We
all still feel attached and with a great sense of what happened, the pace it
was written, and the events that stood out to him and were told. It's so nice
to have something like that rather than an over the top description. Granted,
I'm not sure if he wrote that himself or was helped / ghostwritten as is the
extremely annoying case in tons of articles, but either way, well done.

------
wiradikusuma
"Parts of the hotel were able to re-open two months after the attack" — what?

Curious, what would be the logical explanation for that? I mean, for starters
nobody would want to work there, and nobody would want to _stay_ there. Right?

~~~
probably_wrong
There's an old story (that I can't find right now) about a bank employee that
falls for a scam that costs the company hundreds of thousands. He goes to his
boss and says "I guess you will be expecting my resignation", to which the
boss replies "Resign? I just spent thousands of dollars training you!".

I would apply the same line of thought here: I don't think this hotel is any
more insecure that any other. In fact, I would expect it to have _more_
security than the others from now on.

I understand the emotional point - it's pretty much the same point that Chris
Rock made about renaming the new Twin Towers the "Never going in there tower".
But I can totally see the hotel making a comeback - if Charlie Hebdo is still
in business, I don't see why the hotel can't follow the same steps.

~~~
jaclaz
I think (but maybe it is only a duplicate) that you may be thinking at this
story about Tom Watson (IBM):

[http://www.mbiconcepts.com/watson-sr-and-thoughtful-
mistakes...](http://www.mbiconcepts.com/watson-sr-and-thoughtful-
mistakes.html)

~~~
probably_wrong
The one I remember was definitely about a scam, but I have no doubt that it
was a rehash of similar stories in the past. Yours is probably the original,
which is even better.

------
nebulous1
At first I missed the fact that this was a year ago at the very start of the
article and just read that it was January 20th. So I briefly thought that it
happened yesterday and this badass was already writing articles and posing for
photos with the bed. Still pretty badass though.

------
jnbiche
It's well worth reading. Read to the end; he includes his perspectives on life
in the summary.

------
arbuge
If you really do not have the time to read the whole article, it's worth
reading at least the last 4 paragraphs.

~~~
Cthulhu_
It didn't feel like that long of a story, I read through it in one go. It
reads so matter-of-factly. The guy was really lucky.

~~~
StavrosK
He was both extremely lucky and very clever and thinking quickly. The odds
that he'd survive were one in a million, what an amazing story.

------
karussell
Amazing read.

(IMO there is a small mistake. They write "I could see the fire on my left
hand side" but the fire from the tagged window is on "the right" from
inside...)

~~~
brohee
Or once on the balcony, he turned back to face the facade in order to better
watch it...

------
gerbilly
> >Don't concentrate only on work, stressful and bad things in your life.
> Concentrate instead on creating good moments and being around good people,
> because life is so beautiful.

I feel this sentence could also save a lot of lives, in a slightly different
way.

------
rags2riches
I wonder if his ability to focus on analysis and solutions made the whole
experience less traumatic.

------
archon810
I was really hoping to see that last photo he's talking about taken by one of
his saviors.

~~~
thecrazyone
Me too, I assumed its the electric blanket one which is right after that
paragraph.

------
Simulacra
Wow what an amazing story of survival.

------
simplecomplex
Turns out 4-5 guys with AK's and some grenades took over an international
hotel in central Kabul and killed 40+ people.

What's the excuse for the hotel not having any security?

~~~
runjake
It's a hotel in Afghanistan, a country presently immersed in turmoil.

~~~
simplecomplex
It had already been attacked and was full of international guests. In the
capital city. 4-5 guys should not be able to take complete control of the
hotel with no heavy weaponry. That means security is deficient or non-
existent.

~~~
ricardobeat
What kind of daily security setup can protect against 5 gunmen with AK47s?

~~~
ip26
You don't necessarily need to meet them head-on & emerge victorious, just
delay them long enough for backup to arrive and/or deter them, again by
showing that you will delay them.

------
baybal2
A good read.

To people from better off part of the world, luxury hotels in third-world
countries are, almost as a rule, a magnet for trouble: petty crimes,
robberies, encounters with mafia, and, as was in that case, an armed assault.

~~~
yesplorer
This isn't true at all. Luxury hotels, most especially managed or chain brands
are some of the safest places in third-world countries.

The odds of buglary, petty crimes and those vices you listed happening is
close to zero. This is the reason why they are attractive to expats and high-
end clients.

They have the best security and are usually located in prime areas making them
less susceptible to some of those claims you made.

And they also have a brand to protect. Except they are very expensive relative
to the cost of living of those countries but their target market is
foreigners, short-stay expats and government delegations so they still get
patronized.

~~~
baybal2
This is what most Westerner think, but the reality is the opposite.

I'll explain.

Luxury hotels in 3rd world countries are very different from normal hotels.
They are "hotels" in name only.

Here, luxury hotels function pretty much like castles and keeps for local
"feudal elites." What they do is not so much about providing lodging and
comfort, but providing physical security and security from sights of common
people to local rich and powerful.

You are totally right that such places are well secured, some even with
security walls, barbed wire, and armed guards. But the very fact that such
establishments tend to host "walking money bags," or people justly hated by
local populace is the reason why troubles haunt them.

That infamous Ritz Carlton in Moscow near Kremlin certainly saw over 20
murders, and god knows how many other violent crimes. A Marriott nearby fared
not much better.

> The odds of buglary, petty crimes and those vices you listed happening is
> close to zero. This is the reason why they are attractive to expats and
> high-end clients.

Such things happen near weekly, no matter how much security is posted on
premises. This is really counterintuitive to a person from the West. How to
say that... if hotel you are staying in is the only place in the city where
burglars and pickpockets can steal anything of value, it will be targeted
invariably of the amount of deterrent
[https://www.google.com/search?q=%22presidential+suite%22+bur...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22presidential+suite%22+burglary)

