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

It was really slow going, clambering and slipping, stumbling and looking for
footholds, handholds, anything. All of us fell down the mountain in the first half
hour. But it was worse for me, because the other three were all expert mountain
climbers and much smaller and lighter than I was. I was slower over the ground
because of my size, and I kept falling behind. They had a rest while I was
catching up, and then when I got there, Mikey signaled to go straight on. No rest
for Marcus. “Fuck you, Murphy,” I said without even a pretense of good nature.
In fact, conditions were so bad it was a lousy idea to rest up. You could
freeze up here, soaked to the skin as we were, in about five minutes. So we kept
going, always upward, keeping our body heat as high as possible. But it was still
miserable. We never stopped ducking down under the trees and hanging limbs,
holding on if we could, trying not to fall off the mountain again.
In the end we reached the top of the cliff face and found a freshly used trail.
It was obvious the Taliban had been through here recently in substantial
numbers, and this was good news for us. It meant Sharmak and his men could
not be far away, and right now we were hunting them.
At the top, we suddenly walked out into an enormous flat field of very high
grass, and the moon came out briefly. The pasture stretched away in front of us
like some kind of paradise lit up in the pale light. We all stopped in our tracks
because it looked amazingly beautiful.
But an enemy could easily have been lurking in that grass, and an instant
later we ducked down, staying silent. Axe tried to find a path through it, then
tried to make his own path. But he simply could not. The pasture was too thick,
and it nearly covered him. Before long he returned and told us, poetically, there
in the southeast Asian moonlight, in these ancient storied lands right up near the
roof of the world, “Guys, that was totally fucking hopeless.”
To our right was the deep valley, somewhere down which our target village
was located. We’d already hit waypoint 1, and our only option was to find
another trail and keep moving along the flank of the escarpment. And then, very
suddenly, a great fog bank rolled in and drifted off the mountaintop beneath us
and across the valley.
I remember looking down at it, moonlit clouds, so white, so pure, it looked
as if we could have walked right across it to another mountain. Through the
NODS (night optic device) it was a spectacular sight, a vision perhaps of heaven,
set in a land of hellish undercurrents and flaming hatreds.
While we stood up there, transfixed by our surroundings, Mikey worked out
that we were just beyond waypoint 1, and we still somehow had to proceed on