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

American liberals. “This is bad,” I said. “This is real bad. What the fuck are we
doing?”
Axe shook his head. Danny shrugged. Mikey, to be fair, looked as if he had
seen a ghost. Like me, he was a man who knew a massive mistake had just been
made. More chilling than anything we had ever done together. Where were those
guys headed? Were we crazy or what?
Thoughts raced through my mind. We’d had no comms, no one we could
turn to for advice. Thus far we had no semblance of a target in the village. We
were in a very exposed position, and we appeared to have no access to air
support. We couldn’t even report in. Worse yet, we had no clue as to where the
goatherds were headed. When things go this bad, it’s never one thing. It’s every
damn thing.
We watched them go, disappearing up the mountain, still running, still with
their hands behind their backs. And the sense that we had done something
terrible by letting them go was all-pervading. I could just tell. Not one of us was
able to speak. We were like four zombies, hardly knowing whether to crash back
into our former surveillance spots or leave right away.
“What now?” asked Danny.
Mikey began to gather his gear. “Move in five,” he said.
We packed up our stuff, and right there in the noonday sun, we watched the
goatherds, far on the high horizon, finally disappear from view. By my watch, it
was precisely nineteen minutes after their departure, and the mood of sheer
gloom enveloped us all.
We set off up the mountain, following in the hoofprints of the goats and their
masters. We moved as fast as we could, but it took us between forty minutes and
one hour to cover the same steep ground. At the top, we could no longer see
them. Mountain goats, mountain herders. They were all the goddamned same,
and they could move like rockets up in the passes.
We searched around for the trail we had arrived by, found it, and set off back
toward the initial spot, the one we had pulled out of because of the poor angle on
the village and then the dense fog bank. We tried the radio and still could not
make a connection with home base.
Our offensive policy was in pieces. But we were headed for probably the
best defensive position we had found since we got here, on the brink of the
mountain wall, maybe forty yards from the summit, with tree cover and decent
concealment. Right now we sensed we must remain in strictly defensive mode,
lie low for a while and hope the Taliban had not been alerted or if they had that