I THINK ABOUT bin Laden a lot; I'm not sure why. The habit may be a sign of mental instability. On the other hand, it's possible that most people don't think about him enough. One reason for my interest is that I can't get over how someone who drinks snowmelt has shaken up the entire world.

Another reason, of less geopolitical import, is that bin Laden is six years younger than I am. I was born in 1951, he in 1957. When I was a senior in high school, he was a seventh-grader. It still gravels me that a little seventh-grader could get away with all he's done.

As near as I can figure, bin Laden became "bin Laden" by going outdoors. That's his secret. I believe the outdoor part of his personality is also deeply connected to Islam, which strikes me as a more "outdoor" kind of religion, but here I'm speculating with less knowledge than usual. It's enough to say that Osama is one of about 50 bin Laden siblings and half siblings. He was the 17th son. I don't think theories of birth order as a determinant of personality go up into the double digits, but I doubt there's much good about being number 17. It's a prime number, for what that's worth.

In any event, there were and are a heck of a lot of bin Ladens. His father, Mohammed, the patriarch, had many wives, was one of the richest men in Saudi Arabia, owned a construction company, etc. His children could travel wherever, attend Harvard and USC and other Western universities, live in Europe or the United States. The number-one son, Salem, took over the construction company after Mohammed's death, and some years later died himself in a plane crash in or near San Antonio. Recently Osama's own son, Omar, who is a scrap-metal dealer in Jedda, was in the gossip columns for marrying an Englishwoman 24 years his senior.

How to stand out from all these other bin Ladens? As a boy, Osama loved the camping trips in the desert that his father took the family on regularly in order to get back to the basics. Most kids hate to go camping with their dads, and as a dad myself I can see how Mohammed might have appreciated Osama's enthusiasm. Osama rode around the desert on camels and pursued the local wildlife. Once, with the sons of Prince Fahd, a Saudi royal and friend of his father who sometimes joined in the outings, Osama caught a dhub. The dhub, a lizard with a spiky tail, can grow to three feet long. As a prank, Osama and friends then brought the dhub back to camp and surprised their fathers with it. Anyone who has ever camped out can imagine the hilarity. The important thing, it seems to me, was that Osama's father (not to mention Prince Fahd) noticed him. If the other bin Ladens enjoyed luxury and traveling to the West, Osama preferred more extreme terrain, and would go east. In 1979 the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Bin Laden was 22, at loose ends. He had gone to college in Jedda but hadn't graduated. At the news of the Soviet invasion, he took off to help in the fight of the Afghan mujahedeen against the Communist occupiers. This was the single crucial moment in his life. A video clip I've watched a lot shows the young bin Laden walking near a hillside during the Soviet-Afghan War. He is just a kid. He has a cool, easy stride. He carries a radio and appears to be planning something; in the war he acted mostly as a financier and logistics person. If you were his parent, the quiet happiness on his face would gladden your heart. You would tell your friends, "He's in Afghanistan, he's getting a lot of fresh air waging jihad against the Russians, and he loves it!"

Fast-forward to bin Laden the rising international star of jihad—the year is 1996. He has been kicked out of Saudi Arabia and Sudan and is back in Afghanistan. Nothing works for him like being in the middle of nowhere. If his first stint in the wilds of Afghanistan formed him, this later one would make him a mega-personality. The mountains there remain an ungoverned, troublesome place that no empire yet has been able to hammer straight. In his aerie, bin Laden wrote a poem berating and threatening then–U.S. secretary of defense William Perry, and he signed it, "From the Peaks of the Hindu Kush, Afghanistan." In 1996 he went all the way and formally declared war on America. Nobody paid him much mind, which must have irritated him. How often does a lone person declare war on a superpower? During this second major Afghan phase, perhaps with more time on his hands, he issued the video and audio statements that are his best known. Books of his statements translated into English are hard to find, and this is too bad, because he has said some goofy things. I've read many of the statements and highlighted some excerpts, such as:

We fight the governments that are bent on attacking our religion and on stealing our wealth and on hurting our feelings.

When an armed person enters a chicken's home, it attacks, and it is only a chicken.

Death is truth and ultimate destiny, and life will end anyway. If I don't fight you, my mother must be insane!

On Clinton's adultery: Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and be remembered by nations?

It is far better for anyone to kill a single American soldier than to squander his efforts on other activities.

He says that when he dies, he wants to die in battle, and he hopes his grave will be "an eagle's belly, its resting place in the sky's atmosphere …" After he engineered the bombing of two American embassies in Africa in 1998, the Clinton administration fired cruise missiles at a training camp where he was supposed to be; when the missiles hit he was not there. Even with the smartest missiles, finding one person hidden in almost trackless mountains is a challenge. From some further remoteness in Afghanistan he issued a "Missed me!" statement. People all over the Islamic world cheered him. The failed cruise-missile strike won him international fame.