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

water, comms, phone. I’d even lost my helmet with the flag of Texas painted on
it. I was damned if I wanted some fucking terrorist wearing that.
I’d seen Mikey’s radio aerial ripped off as we crashed downward. And that
was not good. My gun strap had been ripped off me and my rifle whipped away.
The trouble was, the terrain beyond the tree copse was completely unknown to
us, because we could not see it from above. If we had, we might never have
jumped; the ground just swept upward and then ducked away downward,
inverted, like a goddamned ski jump.
I rocketed up the lip of that back slope making about eighty knots, on my
back, feetfirst. In the air I made two complete backflips and I landed again feet
first, on my back, still coming down the cliff face like a howitzer shell. And at
that moment I knew there was a God.
First of all, I appeared not to be dead, which was right up there with Jesus
walking on the water. But even more amazing was I could see my rifle not two
feet from my right hand, as if God Himself had reached down to me and given
me hope. Marcus, I heard Him say, you’re gonna need this. At least, I think I
heard Him. In fact, I swear to God I heard Him. Because this was a miracle, no
doubt in my mind. And I had not even had time to say my prayers.
I didn’t know how far down we’d fallen, but it must have been two or three
hundred yards. And we were both still going very fast. I could see Mikey up
ahead, and I honestly did not know whether he was dead or alive. It was just a
person crashing through the dirt and boulders. If he had not broken every bone in
his body, that too was a miracle.
Me? I was too battered to hurt, and I could still see my rifle tumbling down
beside me. That rifle never strayed more than two feet from my hand throughout
this death-defying fall. And I’ll always know it was guided by the hand of God.
Because there is no other explanation.
We hit the bottom, both of us landing with terrific impact, like we’d jumped
off a goddamned skyscraper. It shook the wind out of me, and I gasped for
breath, trying to work out how badly injured I was. My right shoulder hurt, my
back hurt, and on one side of my face, the skin had been more or less scoured
away. I was covered in blood and bruised to hell.
But I could stand, which was actually a really bad idea, because then the
RPGs began to arrive, landing close, and I went down again. They exploded
more or less harmlessly but sent up clouds of dust, shale, and wood shards from
the trees. Mikey was next to me, maybe fifteen feet away, and we picked
ourselves up from the ground.