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

high explosive.
Our senior chief, Dan Healy, was outstanding at seeking out and finding the
good jobs for us, ones where we had a better than average chance of finding our
quarry. He spent hours poring over those lists, checking out a certain known
terrorist, where he spent his time, where he was last seen.
Chief Healy would comb through the photographic evidence, checking maps,
charts, working out the places we had a real chance of victory, of grabbing the
main man without fighting an all-out street battle. He had a personal short list of
the prime suspects and where to find them. And by June, he had a lot of records,
the various methods used by these kingpin Taliban guys and their approximate
access to TNT.
And one man’s name popped right out at him. For security reasons, I’m
going to call him Ben Sharmak, and suffice to say he’s a leader of a serious
Taliban force, a sinister mountain man known to make forays into the cities and
known also to have been directly responsible for several lethal attacks on U.S.
Marines, always with bombs. Sharmak was a shadowy figure of around forty. He
commanded maybe 140 to 150 armed fighters, but he was an educated man,
trained in military tactics and able to speak five languages. He was also known
to be one of Osama bin Laden’s closest associates.
He kept his troops mobile, moving into or camping on the outskirts of
friendly Pashtun villages, accepting hospitality and then traveling on to the next
rendezvous, recruiting all the way. These mountain men were unbelievably
difficult to trace, but even they need to rest, eat and drink, and perhaps even
wash, and they need village communities to do all of that.
Almost every morning Chief Healy would run the main list of potential
targets past Mikey, our team officer, and me. He usually gave us papers with a
list of maybe twenty names and possible locations, and we made a short list of
the guys we considered we should go after. We thus created a rogues’ gallery,
and we made our mission choices depending on the amount of intel we had. The
name Ben Sharmak kept on showing up, and the estimates of his force size kept
going up just as often.
Finally there was a tentative briefing about a possible Operation Redwing,
which involved the capture or killing of this highly dangerous character. But he
was always elusive. First he was here, then there, like the freakin’ Scarlet
Pimpernel. And the photos available were just head and shoulders, not great
quality and very grainy. Still, we knew approximately what the sonofabitch
looked like, and on the face of it, this was stacking up to be like any other SR