Lone survivor: the eyewitness account of Operation Redwing and the lost heroes of SEAL team 10 (35 page)

I flicked off the safety catch on my rifle and kept crawling, straight into a dead end surrounded by huge boulders on all sides. This was it. Marcus’s last stand. And, slowly, I half rolled, half turned around to face my enemy once again. The problem was, right here my enemy had kind of fanned out. The three guys somehow had gotten above me and yet surrounded me, one to the left, one to the right, and one dead ahead. Christ, I thought. I’ve only one hand grenade left. This is trouble. Big trouble.

Then I noticed there was even bigger trouble out in the clearing. There were three more guys moving up on me, all armed with AKs slung over their backs. And they too fanned out and somehow climbed higher, but they positioned themselves behind me. No one fired. I raised my rifle and drew down on the one who was doing the screaming. I tried to draw a bead on him, but he just moved swiftly behind a huge tree, which meant I was aiming at nothing.

I swung around and tried to locate the others, but the blood from my forehead was still trickling down my face, obscuring my vision. My leg was turning the shale beneath me to a dark red. I no longer knew what the hell was happening except that I was in some kind of a fight, which I was very obviously about to lose. The second three guys were moving down the rocks in rear of me, quickly, easily, right on top of me.

The guy behind the tree was now back out in the open and still yelling at me, standing there with his rifle lowered, I guessed demanding my surrender. But I couldn’t even do that. I just knew that I desperately needed help or I was going to bleed to death. Then I did what I never thought I would do in the whole of my career. I lowered my rifle. Defeated. My whole world was spinning out of control in more ways than one. I was fighting to avoid blacking out again.

I just lay there in the dirt, blood seeping out, still clutching my rifle, still, in a sense, defiant, but unable to fight. I had no more strength, I was on the edge of consciousness, and I was struggling to understand what the screaming tribesman was trying to communicate.

“American! Okay! Okay!”

Finally I got it. These guys meant me no harm. They’d just stumbled on to me. They weren’t chasing me and had no intention of killing me. It was a situation I was relatively unused to this past couple of days. But the vision of yesterday’s goatherds was still stark in my mind.

“Taliban?” I asked. “You Taliban?”

“No Taliban!”
shouted the man who I assumed was the leader. And he ran the edge of his hand across his throat, saying once more,
“No Taliban!”

From where I was lying, this looked like a signal that meant “Death to the Taliban.” Certainly he was not indicating that he was one of them or even liked them. I tried to remember whether the goatherds had said, “No Taliban.” And I was nearly certain they had not. This was plainly different.

But I was still confused and dizzy, uncertain, and I kept on asking, “Taliban? Taliban?”

“No! No! No Taliban!”

I guess if I’d been at my peak, I’d have accepted this several minutes ago, before Marcus’s Last Stand and all that. But I was losing it now. I saw the leader walk up to me. He smiled and said his name was Sarawa. He was the village doctor, he somehow communicated in rough English. He was thirtyish, bearded, tall for an Afghan, with an intellectual’s high forehead. I recall thinking he didn’t look much like a doctor to me, not wandering around on the edge of this mountain like a native tracker.

But there was something about him. He didn’t look like a member of al Qaeda either. By now I’d seen a whole lot of Taliban warriors, and he looked nothing like any of them. There was no arrogance, no hatred in his eyes. If he hadn’t been dressed like a leading man from
Murder up the Khyber Pass,
he could have been an American college professor on his way to a peace rally.

He lifted up his loose white shirt to show me he had no concealed gun or knife. Then he spread his arms wide in front of him, I guess the international sign for “I am here in friendship.”

I had no choice but to trust him. “I need help,” I said, uttering a phrase which must have shed an especially glaring light on the obvious. “Hospital — water.”

“Hah?” said Sarawa.

“Water,” I repeated. “I must have water.”

“Hah?” said Sarawa.

“Water,” I yelled, pointing back toward the pool.

“Ah!”
he exclaimed.
“Hydrate!”

I could not help laughing, weakly. Hydrate! Who the hell was this crazy-assed tribesman who knew only long words?

He called over a kid who had a bottle. I think he went and filled it with fresh water from the stream. He brought it back to me and I kept chugging away, glugging down the water, two good-sized bottles of it.

“Hydrate,” said Sarawa.

“You got that right, pal,” I confirmed.

At which point we began to converse in that no-man’s-land of language, the one where no one knows hardly a word of the other’s native tongue.

“I’ve been shot,” I told him and showed him my wound, which had never really stopped bleeding.

He examined it and nodded sternly, as if he understood the clear truth that I badly needed medical attention. Heaven knows how severely my left leg would be infected. All the dirt, mud, and shale I’d inflicted on it couldn’t have done it much good.

I told him I was a doctor too, thinking it might help somehow. I knew there would likely be savage retribution for a non-Taliban village sheltering an American fugitive, and I was praying they would not just leave me here.

I wished to hell I still had some of my medical gear with me, but that was lost a lifetime ago on the mountain with Mikey, Axe, and Danny. Anyway, Sarawa seemed to believe I was a doctor, although he seemed equally certain he knew where I’d come from. With a succession of signals and a very few words, he conveyed to me he knew all about the firefight on the mountain. And he kept pointing directly at me, as if to confirm he absolutely knew I had been one of the combatants.

The tribal bush telegraph up here must be fantastic. They have no means of fast communications, no phones, cars, nothing. Just one another, goatherds wandering the mountainside, passing on the necessary information. And here was this Sarawa, who had presumably been miles away from the action, informing me about the battle which I had helped fight the previous day.

He patted me reassuringly on the shoulder and then retreated into a kind of conference with his fellow villagers while I talked to the kid.

He had only one question, and he had a lot of trouble asking it, trying to make an American understand. In the end I got his drift:
Were you really the lunatic who fell down the mountain? Very far. Very fast. Very funny. All my village saw you do it. Very big joke. Ha! Ha! Ha!

Jesus Christ! I mean, Muhammad! Or Allah! Whoever’s in charge around here. This kid really was from a gingerbread village.

Sarawa returned. They gave me some more water. And again he checked over my wound. Didn’t look one bit happy. But there were more important things to discuss than the state of my backside.

I did not, of course, realize this. But the decision Sarawa and his friends were making carried huge responsibilities and, possibly, momentous consequences: They had to decide whether to take me in. Whether to help me, shelter me, and feed me. Most important, whether to defend me.

These people were Pashtuns. And the majority of the warriors who fought under the banner of the former rulers of Afghanistan, plus a vast number of bin Laden’s al Qaeda fighters, were members of this strict and ancient tribe, almost thirteen million of whom live right here in Afghanistan.

That steel core of the Taliban sect, that iron resolve and deadly hatred of the infidel, is unwaveringly Pashtun. The backbone of that vicious little tribal army is Pashtun. The Taliban moves around these mountains only by the unspoken approval and tacit permission of the Pashtuns, who grant them food and shelter. The two communities, the warriors and the general mountain populace, are irrevocably bound together. The mujahideen fighting the Russians were principally Pashtun.

Never mind “No Taliban.” I knew the background. These guys might be peace-loving villagers on the surface, but the tribal blood ties were wrought in iron. Faced with an angry Taliban army demanding the head of an armed American serviceman, you would essentially not give a secondhand billy goat for the American’s chances.

And yet there was something I did not know. We’re talking
lokhay warkawal
— an unbending section of historic
Pashtun-walai
tribal law as laid out in the hospitality section. The literal translation of
lokhay warkawal
is “giving of a pot.”

I did mention this briefly when I outlined the Pashtun tribal background much earlier. But this is the part where it really counts. This is where the ole
lokhay warkawal
gets shoved into context. Right here, while I’m lying on the ground bleeding to death, and the tribesmen are discussing my fate.

To an American, especially one in such terrible shape as I was, the concept of helping out a wounded, possibly dying man is pretty routine. You do what you can. For these guys, the concept carried many onerous responsibilities.
Lokhay
means not only providing care and shelter, it means an unbreakable commitment to defend that wounded man to the death. And not just the death of the principal tribesman or family who made the original commitment for the giving of a pot. It means the whole damned village.

Lokhay
means the population of that village will fight to the last man, honor-bound to protect the individual they have invited in to share their hospitality. And this is not something to have a chitchat about when things get rough. It’s not a point of renegotiation. This is strictly nonnegotiable.

So while I was lying there thinking these cruel heartless bastards were just going to leave me out here and let me die, they were in fact discussing a much bigger, life-or-death issue. And the lives they were concerned with had nothing to do with mine. This was
Lokhay,
boy, spelled with a big
L.
No bullshit.

For all I knew, they were deciding whether to put a bullet through my head and save everyone a lot of trouble. But by now I was drifting off, half asleep, half alert, and the distinction was minimal. Sarawa was still talking. Of course it occurred to me that these men might be just like the goatherds, loyal spies for the Taliban. They could easily take me in and then send their fastest messengers to inform the local commanders they had me, and I could be picked up and executed anytime they wanted.

I wished fervently this was not the case. And though I thought I understood Sarawa was a nice guy, I couldn’t know the truth about him; no one could, not under those circumstances. Anyway, there was nothing much I could do about it, except maybe shoot them all, and a fat chance I would have had of getting away. I could hardly move.

So I just waited for the verdict. I kept thinking,
What would Morgan do? Is there any way out of this? What’s the correct military decision? Do I have any options?
Not so you’d notice. My best chance of living was to try and befriend Sarawa, try somehow to ingratiate myself with his friends.

Disjointed thoughts were blundering through my mind. What about all the death there had been in these mountains? What if these guys had lost sons, brothers, fathers, or cousins in the battle against the SEALs? How would they feel about me, an armed, uniformed member of the U.S. military, staging various gun battles, blowing Afghanis up on their very own tribal lands?

I obviously didn’t have any answers, nor could I know what they were thinking. But it couldn’t be good. I knew that.

Sarawa came back. He sharply ordered two men to raise me up, one of them under each of my arms to give me support, and lift me off the ground. He ordered another to lift my legs.

As they approached me, I took out my last grenade and carefully pulled the pin, which placed that little bastard right in firing mode. I held it in one hand, clasped across my chest. The tribesmen did not seem to notice. All I knew was, if they tried to execute me or tie me up or invite their murderous Taliban colleagues in, I would drop that thing right on the floor and take the whole fucking lot of them with me.

They lifted me up. And slowly we began to head down to the village. I did not understand, not then, but this was the biggest break I’d had since the Battle for Murphy’s Ridge first started. These friendly Pashtun tribesmen had decided to grant me
lokhay.
They were committed to defend me against the Taliban until there was no one left alive.

10

An American Fugitive Cornered by the Taliban

Then I found a piece of flinty rock on the floor of the cave, and, lying painfully on my left side, I spent two hours carving the words of the Count of Monte Cristo onto the wall of my prison:
God will give me justice.

S
arawa and his friends did not attempt to take away my rifle. Yet. I carried it with me in one hand while they slowly lifted me down the steep track to the village of Sabray, a distance of around two hundred yards and home to perhaps three hundred households. In my other hand I clutched my last grenade, no pin, ready to take us all to eternity. It was a little after 1600, and the sun was still high.

We passed a couple of local groups, and both of them reacted with obvious astonishment at the sight of an armed, wounded American holding his rifle but being given help. They stopped and they stared, and both times I locked eyes with one of them. Each time he stared back, that hard glare of pure hatred with which I was so familiar. It was always the same, a gaze of undisguised loathing for the infidel.