Lone Survivor_ The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 ( PDFDrive )

might expect you to be. My only solace on that rueful occasion was that the
instructors walked on every single one of us that day.
In the final test, I faced that thousand-yard barren desert once again and
began my journey, wriggling and scuffling through the dusty ground, my head
well down, camouflage branches firm in my hat, groveling my way between the
boulders. It took me hours to make the halfway point and even longer to ease my
way over the last three hundred yards to my chosen spot for the shot. I was not
seen, and I moved dead slowly through the rocks, from gully to gully, staying
low, pressing into the ground. When I arrived at my final point, I scuffled
together a little hide of dirt and sticks, and tucked down behind it, my rifle
carefully aimed. I squeezed the trigger slowly and deliberately, and my shot
pinged into the metal target, right in the middle. If that had been a man’s head,
he’d have been history.
I saw the instructors swing around and start looking for the place my shot
had come from. But they were obviously guessing. I pressed my face into the
dirt and never moved an inch for a half hour. Then I made my slow and careful
retreat, still lying flat, disturbing not a twig nor a rock. An unknown marksman,
just the way we like it.
It had taken three months, and I passed Sniper School with excellent marks.
SEALs don’t look for personal credit, and thus I cannot say who the class voted
their Honor Man.
The last major school I attended was joint tactical air control. It lasted one
month, out in the Fallon Naval Airbase, Nevada. They taught us the basics of
airborne ordnance, five-hundred-pound bombs and missiles, what they can hit
and what they can’t. We also learned to communicate directly with aircraft from
the ground — getting them to see what we can see, relaying information through
the satellites to the controllers.
I realize it has taken me some time to explain precisely what a Navy SEAL is
and what it takes to be one. But as we are always told, you have to earn that
Trident every day. We never stop learning, never stop training. To state that a
man is a Navy SEAL communicates about a ten thousandth of what it really
means. It would be as if General Dwight D. Eisenhower mentioned he’d once
served in the army.
But now you know: what it took, what it meant to all of us, and, perhaps,
why we did it. Okay, okay, we do have our own little brand of arrogance. But we
paid for every last drop of that sin in sweat, blood, and brutally hard work.
Because above all, we’re patriots. We will willingly carry the fight to