Earlier on Monday, a grenade was lobbed from a passing car into a street close to the symbolic Independence Square in central Bujumbura.
They both left home years ago in search of a better life, and they were both walking through their scrappy, scarred neighborhood one afternoon in July when a grenade, apparently aimed at a passing car, exploded at their feet.
Unit after armed unit -- Kurds in baggy pants, Baath Party officials in smart green jumpsuits, young men with launchers for rocket-propelled grenades -- passed by the reviewing stand not far from the ruins of an ancient Assyrian wall.
He figured that more bullets and rocket-propelled grenades had passed by his helicopters than he knew about; in the chaos and darkness, they had gone unseen.
Writing in the Observer, Anthony Cummins called it 'an eerie melodrama in which the bloodshed seems more mimed than motivated – and which tosses, almost in passing, a grenade into debates over self-determination, luridly staging the supremacy of biological fact'.
The day before, the village had teetered on the edge of combat after an ELN guerrilla had hurled a grenade at a navy patrol passing by the town.
Oklahoma City's airport was shut down earlier this month because Wayne Coyne tried to pass through security with a grenade in his suitcase.
One of the troops threatened to detonate a grenade unless the crowd withdrew and let the vehicles pass, which they did, at least temporarily.
A rocket-propelled grenade hissed through the air from an opposite ridge, passed the patrol and flew by the castle.
The Hussein insurgents are a more significant threat, he said, in part because they are supported by an outer ring of "less hard-core" supporters, including teenagers and others paid to shoot rocket-propelled grenades at passing American troops.
For one thing, projects of this kind create jobs: poor villages such as Arij offer a pool of desperate men ready to make a few hundred dollars from well-funded Baathists and Islamists by launching rocket-propelled grenades at passing American convoys.
