Andrew Klavan explains why the Americans in Afghanistan call their bathroom tissue John Wayne Toilet Paper:
Corruption’s the problem here. It’s endemic. Money — a lot of it our money — gets passed from contractor to contractor, with each one taking a taste until there’s little left for the actual work. Witness the police compound where we stayed, a three-sided rectangle of one-story barracks made of corrugated tin and concrete. Two hundred fifty grand was allocated for this dump — a quarter mil! By the time that money was passed from cousin to brother to friend and handed down to the contractor who finally slapped the structure up, there was only $40,000 left. The compound was built so shoddily that one side of it had collapsed under last winter’s snows and now lay in a tangle of lumber and tin. There was no running water, no electricity but what a portable generator provided. The toilets were Turkish-style — position your feet and squat over the hole — and equipped with what they call “John Wayne toilet paper” because it’s rough and tough and don’t take shit off nobody.