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

seats that were also made of netting. Business class this wasn’t. But frogs don’t
travel light, and they don’t expect comfort. That’s frogmen, by the way, which
we all were.
Stuck here in this flying warehouse, this utterly primitive form of passenger
transportation, there was a certain amount of cheerful griping and moaning. But
if the six of us were inserted into some hellhole of a battleground, soaking wet,
freezing cold, wounded, trapped, outnumbered, fighting for our lives, you would
not hear one solitary word of complaint. That’s the way of our brotherhood. It’s a
strictly American brotherhood, mostly forged in blood. Hard-won, unbreakable.
Built on a shared patriotism, shared courage, and shared trust in one another.
There is no fighting force in the world quite like us.
The flight crew checked we were all strapped in, and then those thunderous
Boeing engines roared. Jesus, the noise was unbelievable. I might just as well
have been sitting in the gearbox. The whole aircraft shook and rumbled as we
charged down the runway, taking off to the southwest, directly into the desert
wind which gusted out of the mainland Arabian peninsula. There were no other
passengers on board, just the flight crew and, in the rear, us, headed out to do
God’s work on behalf of the U.S. government and our commander in chief,
President George W. Bush. In a sense, we were all alone. As usual.
We banked out over the Gulf of Bahrain and made a long, left-hand swing
onto our easterly course. It would have been a whole hell of a lot quicker to head
directly northeast across the gulf. But that would have taken us over the dubious
southern uplands of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and we do not do that.
Instead we stayed south, flying high over the friendly coastal deserts of the
United Arab Emirates, north of the burning sands of the Rub al Khali, the Empty
Quarter. Astern of us lay the fevered cauldrons of loathing in Iraq and nearby
Kuwait, places where I had previously served. Below us were the more friendly,
enlightened desert kingdoms of the world’s coming natural-gas capital, Qatar;
the oil-sodden emirate of Abu Dhabi; the gleaming modern high-rises of Dubai;
and then, farther east, the craggy coastline of Oman.
None of us were especially sad to leave Bahrain, which was the first place in
the Middle East where oil was discovered. It had its history, and we often had
fun in the local markets bargaining with local merchants for everything. But we
never felt at home there, and somehow as we climbed into the dark skies, we felt
we were leaving behind all that was god-awful in the northern reaches of the gulf
and embarking on a brand-new mission, one that we understood.
In Baghdad we were up against an enemy we often could not see and were