Lone survivor: the eyewitness account of Operation Redwing and the lost heroes of SEAL team 10 (26 page)

Mikey nodded. “Okay,” he said, “I guess that’s two votes to one, Danny abstains. We gotta let ’em go.”

I remember no one said anything. We could just hear the short staccato sounds of the goats:
ba-aaaa...baaa...baaa.
And the tinkling of the little bells. It provided a fitting background chorus to a decision which had been made in fucking fairyland. Not on the battlefield where we, like it or not, most certainly were.

Axe said again, “We’re not murderers. And we would not have been murderers, whatever we’d done.”

Mikey was sympathetic to his view. He just said, “I know, Axe, I know, buddy. But we just took a vote.”

I motioned for the three goatherds to get up, and I signaled them with my rifle to go on their way. They never gave one nod or smile of gratitude. And they surely knew we might very well have killed them. They turned toward the higher ground behind us.

I can see them now. They put their hands behind their backs in that peculiar Afghan way and broke into a very fast jog, up the steep gradient, the goats around us now trotting along to join them. From somewhere, a skinny, mangy brown dog appeared dolefully and joined the kid. That dog was a gruesome Afghan reminder of my own robust chocolate Labrador, Emma, back home on the ranch, always bursting with health and joy.

I guess that’s when I woke up and stopped worrying about the goddamned American liberals. “This is bad,” I said. “This is real bad. What the fuck are we doing?”

Axe shook his head. Danny shrugged. Mikey, to be fair, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Like me, he was a man who knew a massive mistake had just been made. More chilling than anything we had ever done together. Where were those guys headed? Were we crazy or what?

Thoughts raced through my mind. We’d had no comms, no one we could turn to for advice. Thus far we had no semblance of a target in the village. We were in a very exposed position, and we appeared to have no access to air support. We couldn’t even report in. Worse yet, we had no clue as to where the goatherds were headed. When things go this bad, it’s never one thing. It’s every damn thing.

We watched them go, disappearing up the mountain, still running, still with their hands behind their backs. And the sense that we had done something terrible by letting them go was all-pervading. I could just tell. Not one of us was able to speak. We were like four zombies, hardly knowing whether to crash back into our former surveillance spots or leave right away.

“What now?” asked Danny.

Mikey began to gather his gear. “Move in five,” he said.

We packed up our stuff, and right there in the noonday sun, we watched the goatherds, far on the high horizon, finally disappear from view. By my watch, it was precisely nineteen minutes after their departure, and the mood of sheer gloom enveloped us all.

We set off up the mountain, following in the hoofprints of the goats and their masters. We moved as fast as we could, but it took us between forty minutes and one hour to cover the same steep ground. At the top, we could no longer see them. Mountain goats, mountain herders. They were all the goddamned same, and they could move like rockets up in the passes.

We searched around for the trail we had arrived by, found it, and set off back toward the initial spot, the one we had pulled out of because of the poor angle on the village and then the dense fog bank. We tried the radio and still could not make a connection with home base.

Our offensive policy was in pieces. But we were headed for probably the best defensive position we had found since we got here, on the brink of the mountain wall, maybe forty yards from the summit, with tree cover and decent concealment. Right now we sensed we must remain in strictly defensive mode, lie low for a while and hope the Taliban had not been alerted or if they had that we would be too well hidden for them to locate us. We were excellent practitioners of lying low and hiding.

We walked on along the side of the mountain, and I have to say the place looked kind of different in broad daylight. But its virtues were still there. Even from the top of the escarpment we would be damn near impossible to see.

We climbed down and took up our precise old positions. We were still essentially carrying out our mission, but we remained on the highest possible alert for Taliban fighters. Below me, maybe thirty yards to my right, looking up the hill, Danny slipped neatly into his yoga tree, cross-legged, still looking like a snake charmer. I got myself wedged into the old mulberry tree, where I reapplied my camouflage cream and melted into the landscape.

Below me on the left, same distance as Danny, was Axe with our heaviest rifle. Mikey was right below me, maybe ten yards, jammed into the lee of a boulder. Above us the mountain was nearly sheer, then it went flat for a few yards, then it angled sharply up to the top. I’d tried looking down from there, so had Murph, and we were agreed, you could not really see anything over the small outward ridge which protected us.

For the moment, we were safe. Axe had the glass for twenty minutes, and then I took over for the next twenty minutes. Nothing stirred in the village. It had now been more than an hour and a half since we turned the goatherds loose. And it was still quiet and peaceful, hardly a breath of wind. And by Christ it was hot.

Mikey was closest to me when he suddenly whispered, “Guys, I’ve got an idea.”

“What is it, sir,” I asked, suddenly formal, as if our situation demanded some respect for the man who must ultimately take command.

“I’m going down to the village, see if I can borrow a phone!”

“Beautiful,” said Axe. “See if you can pick me up a sandwich.”

“Sure,” said Mikey. “What’ll it be? Mule dung or goat’s hoof?”

“Hold the mayo,” growled Axe.

The jokes weren’t that great, I know. But perched up there on this Afghan rock face, poised to fend off an attacking army, I thought they were only just shy of grade-one hilarity.

It was, I suppose, a sign of nerves, like cracking a one-liner on your deathbed. But it showed we all felt better now; not absolutely A-OK, but cheerful enough to get to our work and toss out the occasional light remark. More like our old selves, right? Anyhow, I said I was just going to close my eyes for a short while, and I pulled my camouflage hat down over my eyes and tried to nod off, despite my pounding heart, which I could not slow down.

Around ten minutes more passed. Suddenly I heard Mikey make a familiar alert sound...
Sssst! Sssst!
I lifted up my hat and instinctively looked left, over my portside quarter, to the spot where I knew Axe would be covering our flank. And he was right there, rigid, in firing position, his rifle aimed straight up the mountain.

I twisted around to look directly behind me. Mikey was staring wide-eyed up the hill, calling orders, instructing Danny to call in immediate backup from HQ if he could make the radio work. He saw I was on the case, looked hard at me, and pointed straight up the hill, urging me with hand signals to do the same.

I fixed my Mark 12 in firing position, pulled my head back a few inches, and looked up the hill. Lined along the top were between eighty and a hundred heavily armed Taliban warriors, each one of them with an AK-47 pointing downward. Some were carrying rocket-propelled grenades. To the right and to the left they were starting to move down our flanks. I knew they could see past me but not at me. They could not have seen Axe or Danny. I was unsure whether they had seen Mikey.

My heart dropped directly into my stomach. And I cursed those fucking goatherds to hell, and myself for not executing them when every military codebook ever written had taught me otherwise. Not to mention my own raging instincts, which had told me to go with Axe and execute them. And let the liberals go to hell in a mule cart, and take with them all of their fucking know-nothing rules of etiquette in war and human rights and whatever other bullshit makes ’em happy. You want to charge us with murder? Well, fucking do it. But at least we’ll be alive to answer it. This way really sucks.

I pressed back against my tree. I was still sure they had not seen me, but their intention was to outflank us on both wings. I could see that. I scanned the ground directly above me. The hilltop still swarmed with armed men. I thought there were more than before. There was no escape by going straight up, and no possibility of moving left or right. Essentially they had us trapped,
if
they had spotted us. I still was unsure.

And so far not a shot had been fired. I looked up the hill again at one single tree above and to my left, maybe twenty yards away. And I thought I saw a movement. Then it was confirmed, first by a turban, then by an AK-47, its barrel pointed in my general direction though not directly at me.

I tightened my grip on the trusty rifle and moved it slightly in the direction of the tree. Whoever it was still could not see me because I was in a great spot, well hidden. I kept perfectly still, that’s goddamned motionless, like a marble statue.

I checked with Mikey, who also had not moved. Then I checked the tree again, and this time that turban was around it. A hook-nosed Taliban warrior was peering straight at me through black eyes above a thick black beard. The barrel of his AK-47 was pointed right at my head. Had he seen me? Would he open fire? How did the liberals feel about my position? No time, I guess. I fired once, blew his head off.

And at that moment all hell broke loose. The Taliban unleashed an avalanche of gunfire at us, straight down the mountain, from every angle. Axe flanked left, trying to cut off the downward trail, firing nonstop. Mikey was blasting away straight over my head with everything he had. Danny was firing at them, trying to aim with one hand, desperately trying to rev up the radio with the other.

I could hear Mikey shouting, “Danny, Danny, for Christ’s sake, get that fucking thing working...Marcus, no options now, buddy,
kill ’em all!
”

But now the enemy gunfire seemed to center on our two flank men. I could see the dust and rock shards kicking up all around us. The sound of AK-47s absolutely filled the air, deafening. I could see the Taliban guys falling all along the ridge. No one can shoot like us. I stayed right where I was, in my original position, and I still seemed to be taking less fire than the others. But in the next couple of minutes they had identified my position, and the volume of fire directly at me was increasing. This was bad. Very bad.

I could see Axe was acquiring his targets quicker than I was because he had an extra scope. I should have had one too, but for some reason I had not fitted it.

Right now all four of us were really amped up. We knew how to conduct a firefight like this, but we needed to cut down the enemy numbers, nail a few of these bastards real quick, give ourselves a better chance. It was hard for them to get us from directly above, which meant the flanks were our danger. I could see two of them making their way down, right and left.

Axe shot one of them, but it was bad to the right. They were shooting in a kind of frenzy but, thank Christ, missing. I guess we were too. And suddenly I was taking heavy fire myself. Bullets were slamming into the tree trunk, hitting rocks all around me. The bullets were somehow coming in from the sides.

I called down to Mikey, “We’ll take ’em, but we might just need a new spot.”

“Roger that,” he yelled back. Like me, he could see the speed at which they were moving up into the attack. We’d been shooting them for all of five or six minutes, but every time we cleared that ridge high above us, it filled up again. It was as if they had reinforcements somewhere over the ridge, just waiting to come up to the front line. Whichever way we looked at it, they had a ton of guys trying to kill four SEALs.

At this point our options were nonexistent. We still could not charge the top of the mountain, because they’d cut us down like dogs. They had us left, and they had us right. We were boxed in on three sides, and there was never, not even for a couple of seconds, a lull in the gunfire. And we could not even see half of them or tell where the bullets were coming from. They had every angle on us.

All four of us just kept banging away, cutting ’em down, watching them fall, slamming a new magazine into the breech, somehow holding them at bay. But this was impossible. We had to give up this high ground, and I had to get close enough to Mikey to agree on a strategy, hopefully to save our lives.

I started to move, but Mikey, like the brilliant officer he was, had appreciated the situation and already called it.
“Fall back!”

Fall back! More like
fall off
— the freakin’ mountain, that is; a nearly sheer drop, right behind us, God knows how far down. But an order’s an order. I grabbed my gear and took a sideways step, trying to zigzag down the gradient. But gravity made the decision for me, and I fell headlong down the mountain, completing a full forward flip and somehow landing on my back, still going fast, heels flailing for a foothold.

At least I thought I was going fast, but Murphy was right behind me. I could tell it was him because of the bright red New York City fireman’s patch he’d worn since 9/11. That was actually all I saw.

“See you at the bottom!” I yelled. But right then I hit a tree, and Mikey went past me like a bullet. I was going slower now, and I tried to take a step, but I fell again, and on I went, catching up to Mikey now, crashing, tumbling over the ground like we were both bouncing through a pinball machine.

Ahead of us was a copse of trees on a slightly less steep gradient, and I knew this was our last hope before we plunged into the void. I had to grab something, anything. So did Mikey, and I could see him up ahead, grabbing at tree limbs, snapping them off, and still plummeting downward.