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

the slope, which was not very deep, and landed on my head right in the fucking
stream. Like any good frogman, I was seriously pissed off because my boots got
wet. I really hate that.
Finally I caught up with them. Axe was out of ammunition and I gave him a
new magazine. Mikey wanted to know where Danny was, and I had to tell him
that Danny had died. He was appalled, completely shocked, and so was Axe.
Although Mikey would not say it, I knew he wanted to go back for the body. But
we both knew there was no time and no reason. We had nowhere to take the
remains of a fallen teammate, and we could not continue this firefight while
carrying around a body.
Danny was dead. And strangely, I was the first to pull myself together. I said
suddenly, “I’ll tell you what. We have to get down this goddamned mountain or
we’ll all be dead.”
And as if to make up our minds for us, the Taliban were again closing in,
trying to make that 360-degree movement around us. And they were doing it.
Gunfire was coming in from underneath us now. We could see the tribesmen still
swarming, and I tried to count them as I had been trying to do for almost an
hour.
I thought there were now only about fifty, maybe sixty, but the bullets were
still flying. The grenades were still coming in, blasting close, sending up dust
clouds of smoke and dirt with flying bits of rock. There had never been a lull in
the amount of ordnance the enemy was piling down on us.
Right now, again tucked low behind rocks, the three of us could look down
and see the village one and a half miles distant, and it remained our objective.
Again I told Mikey, “If we can just make it down there and get some cover,
we’ll take ’em all out on the flat ground.”
I knew we were not in great shape. But we were still SEALs. Nothing can
ever take that away. We were still confident. And we were never going to
surrender. If it came down to it, we would fight to the death with our knives
against their guns.
“Fuck surrender,” said Mikey. And he had no need to explain further, either
to Axe or me. Surrender would have been a disgrace to our community, like
ringing the bell at the edge of the grinder and putting your helmet in the line. No
one who had made it through this far, to this no-man’s-land in the Afghan
mountains, would have dreamed of giving up.
Remember the philosophy of the U.S. Navy SEALs: “I will never quit...My
Nation expects me to be physically harder and mentally stronger than my