Lone survivor: the eyewitness account of Operation Redwing and the lost heroes of SEAL team 10 (38 page)

The SEALs also would not even consider the possibility that I was dead. He’s missing in action, MIA. That was their belief. And until someone told them different, that’s all they would accept. Unlike the stupid television station, right? They thought they could say any damn thing they felt like, true or not, and cause my family emotional trauma on a scale only a community as close as we are could possibly understand.

Meanwhile back in the cave, Norzamund came back with two other guys, again frightening the life out of me. It was about 0400 on Friday, July 1, and they had no lantern. They communicated with whispers and hissing signals for silence. Once more they lifted me up and carried me down the hill to the river. I tried to throw the foul-smelling water bottle away, but they found it and brought it right back. Guess there was a heavy shortage of water bottles in the Hindu Kush. Anyway, they looked after that bottle like it was a rare diamond.

We crossed the river and turned up the escarpment, back to the village. It seemed to take a real long time, and at one point I flicked on the light on my watch, and they almost went wild with fury:
No! No! No! Dr. Marcus. Taliban! Taliban!

Of course I didn’t know what they were talking about. The light was tiny, but they kept pointing at it. I soon realized that light was an acute danger to all of us, that the village of Sabray was surrounded by the Taliban, waiting for their chance to capture or kill me. My armed bearers had the same Pashtun upbringing and knew the slightest flicker of a light, no matter how small, was unusual out here on the mountain and could easily attract the attention of an alert watchman.

I switched that sucker off, real quick. And one of my guys, walking out in front with his AK, had some English. He came back to me and whispered: “Taliban see light, they shoot you, Dr. Marcus.”

Finally we reached high ground, and I picked up the word
helicopter.
And right here I thought someone might be coming to rescue me. But it was just a false alarm. Nothing came. I stretched out on the concrete, and some time before dawn, Sarawa showed up with his medical bag and attended to my leg. He removed the blood-soaked dressings, washed out the wounds, and applied antiseptic cream and fresh bandages. Then, to my astonishment, he produced some insulin for the diabetes I didn’t have.

Guess I was a better liar than I thought. And I obviously had to take it. The stuff I do for my country. Unbelievable, right?

They moved me into a house up there near the top of the village, and soon after I arrived I met my first real friend, Mohammad Gulab, the thirty-three-year-old son of the village elder, and the resident police chief. Everyone called him Gulab (pronounced
Goo-larb
), and his position in the community was very strong. He made it clear the Taliban were not going to take me while he had anything to do with it.

He was an extremely nice guy, and we became good friends, or as close to good friends as it’s possible to be when the language barrier is almost insurmountable. Mostly we tried to communicate about families, and I understood he had a wife and six children and God knows how many cousins and uncles. Conveying news about my identical twin brother was a tough one, so we just settled for brother, mainly because Gulab unfailingly thought Morgan was me. Like a lot of other folk have done down the years.

Gulab had a friend with him who was also a solid man, plainly an appointed relief guard. Between them they never left me alone. By this time I knew why. The village was entirely embarrassed when the Taliban had crept in here armed to the teeth and conducted an interrogation regardless of the wishes of the people. Those warriors had been on the verge of causing the ultimate retribution under the laws of
lokhay,
which would have obliged the village to go to war to the last man on my behalf.

I did not yet comprehend the full implications of
lokhay
but I knew it was important and that I would not be surrendered. And now I had a full-time guard detail in my room. This did not prevent other visitors from coming in, and my first on that morning in my new house was a little boy, maybe eight or nine years old.

He sat on the edge of my cot and tried to teach me a Muslim prayer:
La La e La La — Muhammad del la su La La.
I pretty soon got the hang of it and repeated it with him. He was thrilled, clapped his hands and laughed, and charged out through the door to round up a posse of other kids. Gulab tried to inform me that the repetition of that prayer meant that I was now a Muslim. And almost immediately the first little boy came racing back into the room with all his buddies, about twenty of them, all eager to pray with the new Texan convert.

I tried to explain I was a doctor, and they understood this pretty quickly, started saying over and over, “Hello, Dr. Marcus,” laughing like hell and falling about like kids do. I could tell they really liked me, and I borrowed a marker pen one of them had and wrote each of their names in English on their arms. Then I let them write their names on mine.

We exchanged words for ears, nose, and mouth. Then for water
(uba)
and for walk
(ducari),
both of which I found useful. In the end they left, but other local tribesmen came in to speak to Gulab, and I began, with his encouragement, to converse with the guys who walked the goats, the men who would understand distance. Slowly, during the course of the day, we established there was a small American base two miles away.

They pointed out the window directly at a mountain which looked like a spare part from the Rockies. It towered above us, a great wall of granite that would have caused a mountain goat to back off. “Over there, Dr. Marcus, far side,” one of them managed to say. And since I probably could not have reached the window, never mind the mountain, I put that plan on the back burner for the moment.

They had been referring to the village of Monagee, in the district of Manrogai, where I knew the U.S. military had some kind of an outpost. But it was out of the question right now. I couldn’t get there or anywhere else until my leg improved. Nonetheless, the goatherds had some good information about the terrain and the distances to various villages and U.S. bases. These guys walk around the mountains for a living. Local knowledge. That’s key to every serving SEAL, especially one who was planning a kind of soft jailbreak, like me.

With the goatherds, I was able to work out that from the scene of the original battlefield where the others died, on that terrible night of June 28 I had traveled around seven miles, four walking, three crawling. Seven miles!
Wow!
I couldn’t believe that. But these herders knew their land. And they, like everyone else, knew all about the Battle for Murphy’s Ridge, where it had been fought and the very bad losses sustained by the Taliban...“You shoot, Dr. Marcus? You shoot?”

Me? Shoot? Never. I’m just a wandering doctor trying to look after my patients. But I was real proud of traveling seven miles over the mountain in my beat-up condition after the battle.

I took my ballpoint pen and marked distances, drew maps, made diagrams of the mountains on my right thigh. When that got a little crowded, I had to use my left. (Shit! That hurt. That really hurt!)

At noon the kids came back for prayers, bringing with them several adults, clearly eager to meet the new American convert, no longer an infidel. We prayed together to Allah, kneeling — painfully, in my case — on the floor. After which we all shook hands, and I think they welcomed me to their prayers. Never told ’em, of course, I slipped in a quick one to my own God while I was at it, respectfully wondering, if it was all right with Him, whether I could get my rifle back anytime soon.

They all came back for afternoon prayers at 1700, and again at sunset. The little kids, my first friends, had to leave for bed right after that, but I remember they all came and hugged me before they left, and, not having mastered “Good-bye” or “Good night” yet, they repeated their first American phrase again and again as they left the room: “Hello, Dr. Marcus.”

The older kids, the young teenagers, were allowed to stay and talk with me for a while. Gulab helped them to communicate and we parted as friends. The trouble was, I was getting sick now, and I was beginning to feel pretty ropy, not just the pain of my wounds but kind of like flu, only a bit worse.

When the kids had finally left, I received a visit from the village elder himself. He brought me bread, gave me fresh water, then sat down for maybe three hours while we discussed, as best we could, how I could get to an American base. It was clear I was a major problem to the village. Threats were already being received from the Taliban, informing the villagers how urgent it was for their cause that I be surrendered to them immediately.

The old man imparted this to me but took the view I was in no shape to travel and that it would simplify matters for a member of his Pashtun tribe to make the journey, on foot, to the big U.S. base at Asadabad and inform them of my whereabouts. I had no clue at the time he was preparing to make the journey himself, some thirty to forty miles alone in the mountains.

He asked me to write out a letter for him to take to Asadabad. I wrote,
This man gave me shelter and food, and must be helped at all costs.
At the time I was under the distinct impression that he and I were going to make the journey together, possibly with an escort and a few guys to help carry me. Departure time was set for 1930, right after evening prayers.

But I had misunderstood. The old man had no intention of traveling with me, correctly reasoning I’d be a far greater nuisance on such a trek over the mountains than I would be lying here. Also, if the Taliban found out we’d gone, we would be highly susceptible to ambush. I never saw him again, to thank him for his kindness.

I waited all afternoon and half the night for him to come and have me collected. But of course he never did. I remember being hugely disappointed, not for the first time, that more definite plans were not being formulated for my evacuation.

At one point during the evening, the tribal leaders came and had a meeting in my room. They just sat on the floor and talked, but they brought me back the little silver cup I’d had in the first house. And they poured me several cups of that chai tea they drink and, I think, grow on a small scale up here. The ceremony included sweet candy, which you eat while you drink your tea. And that tasted great after my enforced diet of very, very dry baked flat bread.

Gulab stayed with me and was cheerful as ever, but he either could not or would not answer questions about his father and his immediate plans. I think the tribal leaders felt it was better for me not to know — classified, Pashtun-style, FYO and all that. The work of the elder was information provided on a need-to-know basis only. I was getting used to operating outside the loop, everyone’s freakin’ loop, that is.

Gulab spent much of the evening trying to explain to me the complex threads that hold together the Pashtun tribes and al Qaeda, still working in conjunction with the Taliban army. The United States had been busy trying to clear all of them the hell out of Afghanistan for four years but with only limited success.

The jihadists seem to have some kind of hammerlock on tribal loyalties, using a whole spectrum of Mafia-style tactics, sometimes with gifts, sometimes with money, sometimes promising protection, sometimes with outright threats. The truth is, however, neither al Qaeda nor the Taliban could function without the cooperation of the Pashtun villages.

And often, deep within the communities, there are old family ties and young men who sympathize with the warlike mentality of the Taliban and al Qaeda chiefs. Kids barely out of grade school — joke, they don’t have grade schools up here — are drawn toward the romantic cutthroats who have declared they’ll fight the American army until there is no one left.

I guess there’s something very alluring about that to some kids. You can see these potential Taliban recruits in any of the villages. I’ve seen dozens of them, too young to have that much hate and murder in their eyes and hearts. Christ, one of the little bastards had sat on my bed urging eight armed men to torture me. Nice. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen.

But there is another side to this. Sabray was obviously governed wisely by Gulab’s father. And there was a sense of law and order and discipline in an essentially lawless land. Al Qaeda effectively owns great swaths of land in Kunar Province, which had now been my home for the better part of three months. And this is mostly because of the terrain.

I mean, how the hell do you impose national government on a place like this? With no roads, no electricity, no mail, little communication, where the principal industry is goats’ milk and opium, the main water company is a mountain stream, and all freight is moved by mule cart, including the opium. You’re whistling Dixie. It’s never going to happen.

Al Qaeda are running around in broad daylight, mostly doing what the heck they want, until we show up and chase the little pricks back over the border to Pakistan. Where they stay. For about ten minutes, before launching their next foray into these tribal mountains, which their ancestors have ruled for centuries.

These days there are less gifts and a lot more fear. The Taliban is a ruthless outfit, with instincts about killing their enemies which have barely changed in two thousand years. They should somehow by now have frightened the bejesus out of my buddy Gulab and his father, but they had not succeeded, so far as I could see. There’s just something unbreakable about them all, a grim determination to follow the ancient laws of the Pashtuns — laws which may yet prove too strong even for the Taliban and al Qaeda.