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

not together, not on this earth. Axe did not have long. If he’d been in the finest
hospital in North America, Axe would still not have had long. The life was
ebbing out of him, and I could see this powerful super-athlete growing weaker
by the second.
“Hey, man,” I said, “you’re all fucked up!” And I tried, pitifully, to fix the
bandage.
“Marcus, they got us good, man.” He spoke with difficulty, as if trying to
concentrate. And then he said, “You stay alive, Marcus. And tell Cindy I love
her.”
Those were his last words. I just sat there, and that was where I planned to
stay, right there with Axe so he wouldn’t be alone when the end came. I didn’t
give a flying fuck what happened to me anymore. Quietly, I made my peace with
God, and I thanked Him for protecting me and saving my rifle. Which,
somehow, I still had. I never took my eyes off Axe, who was semiconscious but
still breathing.
Along with the other two, Axe will always be a hero to me. Throughout this
brief but brutal conflict, he’d fought like a wounded tiger. Like Audie Murphy,
like Sergeant York. They shot away his body, crippled his brain but not his spirit.
They never got that.
Matthew Gene Axelson, husband of Cindy, fired at the enemy until he could
no longer hold his rifle. He was just past his twenty-ninth birthday. And in his
dying moments, I never took my eyes off him. I don’t think he could hear me
any longer. But his eyes were open, and we were still together, and I refused to
allow him to die alone.
Right then, they must have seen us. Because one of those superpowerful
Russian grenades came in, landed close, and blew me sideways, right out of the
hollow, across the rough ground, and over the edge of the goddamned ravine. I
lost consciousness before I hit the bottom, and when I came to, I was in a
different hollow, and my first thought was I’d been blinded by the explosion,
because I couldn’t see a thing.
However, after a few seconds, I gathered my wits and realized I was upside
down in the freakin’ hole. I still had my eyesight and a few other working parts,
but my left leg seemed paralyzed and, to a lesser degree, so was my right. It took
me God knows how long to wriggle out onto flat ground and claw my way into
the cover of a rock.
My ears were zinging, I guess from the blast of the grenade. I looked up and
saw I had fallen a pretty good way down, but I was too disoriented to put a