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

teeth with weapons and cameras unless we were absolutely sure of his
whereabouts. The Taliban were a serious threat to low-flying military aircraft,
and the helo pilots knew they were in constant danger of being fired upon, even
on night ops. These mountain men were as handy with missile launchers as they
were with AK-47s.
There is a huge amount of backup required for any such operation:
transportation, communications, available air support, not to mention
ammunition, food, water, medical supplies, hand grenades, and weapons, all of
which we would carry with us.
At one point, quite early on, we had a very definite “Redwing is a go.” And
preparations were well under way when the entire thing was suddenly called off.
“Turn one!” They’d lost him again. They had data, and they had reason to
believe they knew where he was. But nothing hard. The guys in intel studied the
maps and the terrain, ringed probability areas, made estimates and guesstimates.
They thought they had him pinned down but not sufficiently narrowly to place
him in an actual village or a camp, never mind with the accuracy required for a
sniper to get off a shot.
Intel was just waiting for a break, and meanwhile, me and the guys were out
on other SR missions, probably Operation Goat Rope or something. We’d just
come back from one of these when we heard there’d been a break in the hunt for
Ben Sharmak. It was very sudden, and we guessed one of our sources had come
up with something. Chief Healy had maps and studies of the terrain under way,
and it looked like we were going straight out again.
We were called into a briefing: Lieutenant Mike Murphy, Petty Officer
Matthew Axelson, Petty Officer Shane Patton, and I. We listened to the data and
the requirements and still regarded it as just another op. But at the last minute
there was a big change. They decided that Shane should be replaced by Petty
Officer Danny Dietz, a thirty-four-year-old I had known well for years.
Danny was a short (well, compared with me), very muscular guy from
Colorado, but he lived with his spectacularly beautiful wife, Maria, known to all
of us as Patsy, just outside the base in Virginia Beach. They had no children but
two dogs, both of them damn near as tough as he was, an English bulldog and a
bullmastiff.
Danny was with me at the SDV school in Panama City, Florida. We were
both there on 9/11. He was heavily into yoga and martial arts and was a very
close friend of Shane’s. Guess those beach gods and the mystic iron men have
stuff in common. I was glad to have Danny on the team. He was a little reserved,