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

watch. You simply cannot do effective reconnaissance if you can’t get into good
position. And if those mountain cliffs that surrounded the village were as rough
and stony as I suspected, we’d stick out on those heights like a diamond in a
goat’s ass.
And there were likely to be between eighty and two hundred armed warriors
keeping a very careful lookout on all the land around their boss. I was worried,
not about the numbers of our enemy but about the problems of staying concealed
in order to complete the mission. If there was a very limited selection of hiding
places, we might have to compromise our angle on the village, not to mention
our distance from it.
I met Mikey back at the bee hut. I told him we were going in, showed him
the maps and what photographs we had, and I remember his reply. “Beautiful.
Just another three days of fun and sun.” But I saw his expression change as he
looked at the pictures, at the obviously very steep gradients, truly horrible
terrain, a mountain we would have to clomp up and down in order to find cover.
By this time Axe and Danny had appeared. We briefed them and wandered, a
bit apprehensively, over to the chow hall for lunch. I had a large bowl of
spaghetti. Right afterward we went back to dress and get organized. I wore my
desert bottoms and woodland top, mostly because intel had said the landing zone
was fairly green and we would drop into an area of trees. I also had a sniper
hood.
Mikey and Danny had their M4 rifles plus grenades; Axe had the Mark 12
.556-caliber rifle, and I had one as well. We all carried the SIG-Sauer 9mm
pistol. We elected not to take a heavy weapon, the big twenty-one-pound
machine gun M60, plus its ammunition. We were already loaded down with
gear, and we thought it would be too heavy to haul up those cliffs.
I also took a couple of claymores, which are a kind of high-explosive device
with a trip wire, to keep any intruder from walking up on us. I’d learned a hard
lesson about that on my first day, when two Afghans got a lot closer than they
should have and might easily have finished me.
We took a big roll of detonator cord to blow the trees for the incoming
landing zone when the mission was complete or for the insert of a direct action
force. At the last moment, still worried about this entire venture, I grabbed three
extra magazines, which gave me a total of eleven, each holding thirty rounds.
Eight was standard, but there was something about Operation Redwing. It turned
out everyone felt the same. We all took three extra magazines.
I also carried an ISLiD (an acronym for image stabilization and light