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

our northerly course, though not through the high grass. We fanned out and
Danny found a trail that led around the mountain, more or less where we wanted
to go. But it was not easy, because by now the moon had disappeared and it was
again raining like hell.
We must have gone about another half mile across terrain that was just as
bad as anything we had encountered all night. Then, unexpectedly, I could smell
a house and goat manure, even through the rain; an Afghan farmhouse. We had
nearly walked straight into the front yard. And now we had to be very careful.
We ducked down, crawling on our hands and knees through thick undergrowth,
staying out of sight, right on the escarpment.
Miserable as all this was, conditions were really perfect for a SEAL
operation behind enemy lines. Without night-vision goggles like ours, people
couldn’t possibly see us. The rain and wind had certainly driven everyone else
under cover, and anyone still awake probably thought only a raving lunatic could
be out there in such weather. And they were right. All four of us had taken quite
heavy falls, probably one in every five hundred yards we traveled. We were
covered in mud and as wet as BUD/S phase two trainees. It was true. Only a
lunatic, or a SEAL, could willingly walk around like this.
We could not see that much ourselves. Nothing except that farmhouse, really.
And then, quite suddenly, the moon came out again, very bright, and we had to
move swiftly into the shadows, our cover stolen by that pale, luminous light in
the sky.
We kept going, moving away from the farm, still moving upward on the
mountainside, through quite reasonable vegetation. But then all of my own
personal dreads came out and whacked us. We walked straight out of the trees
into a barren, harsh, sloping hillside, the main escarpment set steeply on a
northern rise.
There was not a tree. Not a bush. Just wet shale, mud, small rocks, and
boulders. The moon was directly in front of us, casting our long shadows onto
the slope.
This was my nightmare, ever since I first stared at those plans back in the
briefing room: the four of us starkly silhouetted against a treeless mountain
above a Taliban-occupied village. We were an Afghan lookout’s finest moment,
unmissable. We were Webb and Davis’s worst dream, snipers uncovered, out in
the open, trapped in nature’s spotlight with nowhere to hide.
“Holy shit,” said Mikey.