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

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