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

He still had his rifle strapped on. Mine was resting at my feet. I grabbed it,
and I heard Murphy shout through the din of explosions, “You good?”
I turned to him, and his entire face was black with dust. Even his goddamned
teeth were black. “You look like shit, man,” I told him. “Fix yourself up!”
Despite everything, Mikey laughed, and then I noticed he’d been shot during
the fall. There was blood pumping out of his stomach. But just then there was a
thunderous explosion from one of the grenades, too close, much too close. We
both wheeled around in the swirling dust and smoke, and there behind us were
two large logs, actually felled trees.
They were crossed over at the ends, like a pair of giant chopsticks, facing up
the mountain, and we turned simultaneously and sprinted for cover. We cleared
the logs and crashed down behind them, safe from gunfire attack for the
moment. We were both still armed and ready to fight. I took the right-hand side,
Mikey center left, guarding both the head-on approach and the flank.
We could see them plainly now, swarming down the flanks of the cliff we
had just crashed down. They were moving very fast, though not nearly as fast as
we had. Mikey had a pretty good line on them, and mine wasn’t bad. We opened
fire straight at them, picking them off one by one as they moved in on us.
Trouble was, there were so many, and it didn’t seem to matter how many we
killed, they just kept coming. I remember thinking that the two hundred estimate
was a lot closer than the eighty minimum we had been advised.
And this must have been Sharmak’s work. Because these guys were not
really marksmen, were using marginal rifles pretty recklessly, but nonetheless
followed the military rules for this type of assault. They advanced down the side
of the battlefield, trying to outflank their enemy, always attempting to get a 360-
degree cover on their target. We were surely slowing their progress down, but we
weren’t stopping them.
The fire never slackened for five minutes. They had sustained, nonstop, that
opening volley, the one fired way back up the mountain when they could not see
their target. They had blasted away at us all the way down to these logs, and they
had augmented their fire with aimed rocket-propelled grenades. These guys were
not being led by some mad-eyed hysteric, they were being led by someone who
understood the rudiments of what he was doing. Understood them well. Too
well. The fucker. And now they had us pinned down behind the logs, and, as
ever, the bullets were flying, but we were somehow getting the better of the
exchanges.
Mikey was ignoring his wound and fighting like a SEAL officer should,