Lone survivor: the eyewitness account of Operation Redwing and the lost heroes of SEAL team 10 (22 page)

Sometimes we’d run across a group of these guys sitting around a campfire, bearded, sullen, drinking coffee, their AK-47s at the ready. Our first task was to identify them. Were they Pashtuns? Peaceable shepherds, goatherds? Or armed warriors of the Taliban, the ferocious mountain men who’d slit your throat as soon as look at you? It took only a few days to work out that Taliban fighters were nothing like so rough and dirty as Afghan mountain peasants. Many of them had been educated in America, and here they were, carefully cleaning their AK-47s, getting ready to kill us.

And it did not take us much longer to realize how impressive they could be in action up here on their home ground. I always thought they would turn and run for it when we discovered them. But they did nothing of the kind. If they held or could reach the high ground, they would stand and fight. If we came down on them they’d usually either give up or head right back to the border and into Pakistan, where we could not follow them. But close up you could always see the defiance in their eyes, that hatred of America, the fire of the revolutionary that burned in their souls.

It was pretty damn creepy for us, because this was the heartland of terror, the place where the destruction of the World Trade Center was born and nourished, perfected by men such as these. I’ll be honest, it seemed kind of unreal, not possible. But we all knew that it had happened. Right here in this remote dust bowl was the root of it all, the homeland of bin Laden’s fighters, the place where they still plot and scheme to smash the United States. The place where the loathing of Uncle Sam is so ingrained, a brand of evil flourishes that is beyond the understanding of most Westerners. Mostly because it belongs to a different, more barbaric century.

And here stood Mikey, Shane, Axe, me, and the rest, ready for a face-off anytime against these silent, sure-footed warriors, masters of the mountains, deadly with rifle and tribal knife.

To meet these guys in these remote Pashtun villages only made the conundrum more difficult. Because right here we’re talking Primitive with a big
P.
Adobe huts made out of sun-dried clay bricks with dirt floors and an awful smell of urine and mule dung. Downstairs they have goats and chickens living in the house. And yet here, in these caveman conditions, they planned and then carried out the most shocking atrocity on a twenty-first-century city.

Sanitation in the villages is as rudimentary as it gets. They have a communal head, a kind of a pit, out on the edge of the houses. And we are all warned to watch out for them, particularly on night patrols. I misjudged it one night, slipped, and got my foot in there. That caused huge laughter up there in the dead of night, everyone trying not to explode. Wasn’t funny to me, however.

The next week it was much worse. We were all in the pitch dark, creeping through this very rough ground, trying to set up a surveillance point above a very small cluster of huts and goats. We could not see a thing without NVGs (night-vision goggles), and suddenly I slipped into a gaping hole.

I dared not yell. But I knew I was on my way down, and I shuddered to think where I was going to land. I just rammed my right arm rigid straight up, holding on tight to the rifle, and crashed straight into the village head. I went right under, vaguely hearing my teammates hiss, “Look out! Luttrell just found the shitter again!”

Never has there been that much suppressed laughter on an Afghan mission. But it was one of the worst experiences of my life. I could have given typhoid to the entire Bagram base. I was freezing cold but I cheerfully jumped into a river in full combat gear just to get washed off.

Sometimes there was real trouble on those border post checkpoints, and we occasionally had to load up the Humvees and transport about eighteen guys out there and then walk for miles. The problem was, the Pakistani government has obvious sympathy with the Taliban, and as a result leaves the border area in the northeast uncontrolled. Pakistan has decreed its authorities can operate on tarmac roads and then for twenty meters on either side of the road. Beyond that, anything goes, so the Taliban fighters simply swerve off the road and enter Afghanistan over the ancient pathways. They come and go as they please, the way they always have, unless we prevent them. Many of them only want to come in and rustle cattle, which we do not bother with. However, the Taliban know this, and they move around disguised as cattle farmers, and we most certainly do bother with that. And those little camel trains laden with high explosive, they really get our attention.

And every single time, we came under attack. The slightest noise, any betrayal of our position, someone would open fire on us, often from the Pakistan side of the border, where we could not go. So we moved stealthily, gathered our photographs, grabbed the ringleaders, stayed in touch with base, and whistled up reinforcements whenever we needed help.

It was the considered opinion of our commanders that the key to winning was intel, identifying the bombmakers, finding their supplies, and smashing the Taliban arsenal before they could use it. But it was never easy. Our enemy was brutal, implacable, with no discernible concern about time or life. As long as it takes, was their obvious belief. In the end they assume they will rid their holy Muslim soil of the infidel invaders. After all, they always have, right? Sorry,
nyet?

Sometimes, while the head sheds (that’s SEAL vernacular for our senior commanders) were studying a specific target, we were kept on hold. I volunteered my spare time working in the Bagram hospital, mostly in the emergency room, helping with the wounded guys and trying to become a better medic for my team.

And that hospital was a real eye-opener, because we were happy to treat Afghans as well as our own military personnel. And they showed up at the emergency room with every kind of wound, mostly bullets, but occasionally stabbings. That’s one of the real problems in that country — everyone has a gun. There seems to be an AK-47 in every living room. And there were a lot of injuries. Afghan civilians would show up at the main gates so badly shot we had to send out Humvees to bring them into the ER. We treated anyone who came, at the American taxpayer’s expense, and we gave everyone as good care as we could.

Bagram was an excellent place for me to improve my skills, and I hoped I was doing some good at the same time. I was, of course, unpaid for this work. But medicine has always been a vocation for me, and those long hours in that hospital were priceless to the doctor I hoped one day to be.

And while I tended the sick and injured, the never-ending work of the commanders continued, filtering the intel reports, checking the CIA reports, trying to identify the Taliban leaders so we could cut the head off their operation.

There was always a very big list of potential targets, some more advanced than others. By that I mean certain communities where the really dangerous guys had been located, identified, and pinpointed by the satellites or by us. It was work that required immense perseverance and the ability to assess the likelihood of actually finding the guy who mattered.

The teams in Bagram were prepared to go out there and conduct this very dangerous work, but no one likes going on a series of wild-goose chases where the chances of finding a top Taliban terrorist are remote. And of course the intel guys have to be aware at all times that nothing is static up there in the mountains. Those Taliban guys are very mobile and very smart. They know a lot but not all there is to know about American capability. And they surely understand the merit of keeping it moving, from village to village, cave to cave, never remaining in one place long enough to get caught with their stockpiles of high explosive.

Our senior chief, Dan Healy, was outstanding at seeking out and finding the good jobs for us, ones where we had a better than average chance of finding our quarry. He spent hours poring over those lists, checking out a certain known terrorist, where he spent his time, where he was last seen.

Chief Healy would comb through the photographic evidence, checking maps, charts, working out the places we had a real chance of victory, of grabbing the main man without fighting an all-out street battle. He had a personal short list of the prime suspects and where to find them. And by June, he had a lot of records, the various methods used by these kingpin Taliban guys and their approximate access to TNT.

And one man’s name popped right out at him. For security reasons, I’m going to call him Ben Sharmak, and suffice to say he’s a leader of a serious Taliban force, a sinister mountain man known to make forays into the cities and known also to have been directly responsible for several lethal attacks on U.S. Marines, always with bombs. Sharmak was a shadowy figure of around forty. He commanded maybe 140 to 150 armed fighters, but he was an educated man, trained in military tactics and able to speak five languages. He was also known to be one of Osama bin Laden’s closest associates.

He kept his troops mobile, moving into or camping on the outskirts of friendly Pashtun villages, accepting hospitality and then traveling on to the next rendezvous, recruiting all the way. These mountain men were unbelievably difficult to trace, but even they need to rest, eat and drink, and perhaps even wash, and they need village communities to do all of that.

Almost every morning Chief Healy would run the main list of potential targets past Mikey, our team officer, and me. He usually gave us papers with a list of maybe twenty names and possible locations, and we made a short list of the guys we considered we should go after. We thus created a rogues’ gallery, and we made our mission choices depending on the amount of intel we had. The name Ben Sharmak kept on showing up, and the estimates of his force size kept going up just as often.

Finally there was a tentative briefing about a possible Operation Redwing, which involved the capture or killing of this highly dangerous character. But he was always elusive. First he was here, then there, like the freakin’ Scarlet Pimpernel. And the photos available were just head and shoulders, not great quality and very grainy. Still, we knew approximately what the sonofabitch looked like, and on the face of it, this was stacking up to be like any other SR operation — get above the target, stalk him, photograph him, and, if at all possible, grab him.

We had very decent intel on him, which suggested the CIA and probably the FBI were also extremely interested in his capture or death. And as the various briefings went on, Ben Sharmak seemed to get progressively more important. There were now reports of an eighty-troop minimum and a two-hundred-troop maximum in his army, and this constituted a very big operation. And Chief Healy decreed that me and my three buddies in Alfa Platoon were the precise guys to carry it out.

We were not expected to take on this large bunch of wild-eyed killers. Indeed, we were expected to stay quieter than we had ever been in our lives. “Just find this bastard, nail him down, his location and troop strength, then radio in for a direct action force to come in by air and take him down.” Simple, right?

If we thought he might be preparing an immediate evacuation of the village in which he resided, then we would take him out forthwith. That would be me or Axe. The chances were I’d get only one shot at Sharmak, just one time when I could trap him in the crosshairs and squeeze that trigger, probably from hundreds of yards away. I knew only one thing: I better not miss, because the apparitions of Webb and Davis, not to mention every other serving SEAL, would surely rise up and tear my ass off. This was, after all,
precisely
what they had trained me for.

And in case anyone’s wondering, I had absolutely no qualms about putting a bullet straight through this bastard’s head. He was a fanatical sworn enemy of the United States of America who had already murdered many of my colleagues in the U.S. Marines. He was also the kind of terrorist who would like nothing better than to mastermind a new attack on the U.S. mainland. If I got a shot, he’d get no mercy from me. I knew what was expected of me. I knew the team boss wanted this character eliminated, and when I thought about it, I was damned proud they considered me and my buddies the men for the job. As ever, we would do everything possible not to let anyone down.

Every day we checked the intel office to see what further data there was on Sharmak. Chief Healy was right on the case, working with the ops officer and our skipper, Commander Pero. The problem was always the same: where was our target? He was worse than Saddam Hussein, disappearing, evading the prying eye of the satellites, keeping his identity and location secret even from the many CIA informers who were close to him.

There was of course no point in charging into the mountains armed to the teeth with weapons and cameras unless we were absolutely sure of his whereabouts. The Taliban were a serious threat to low-flying military aircraft, and the helo pilots knew they were in constant danger of being fired upon, even on night ops. These mountain men were as handy with missile launchers as they were with AK-47s.

There is a huge amount of backup required for any such operation: transportation, communications, available air support, not to mention ammunition, food, water, medical supplies, hand grenades, and weapons, all of which we would carry with us.

At one point, quite early on, we had a very definite “Redwing is a go.” And preparations were well under way when the entire thing was suddenly called off. “Turn one!” They’d lost him again. They had data, and they had reason to believe they knew where he was. But nothing hard. The guys in intel studied the maps and the terrain, ringed probability areas, made estimates and guesstimates. They thought they had him pinned down but not sufficiently narrowly to place him in an actual village or a camp, never mind with the accuracy required for a sniper to get off a shot.