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

They are born trackers, able to pick up a trail across the roughest ground, and
they can walk right up on you.
Of course, that assumes they are only after one of their own. Trying to follow
a great 230-pound hulk like myself, slipping and sliding, crashing and breaking
branches, causing minor avalanches on the loose ground — I must have been an
Afghan tracker’s dream. Even I realized my chance of actually losing them was
close to zero.
Maybe those calls I heard among them were not really commands. Maybe
they were outbursts of suppressed laughter at my truly horrible rock-climbing
abilities. Wait until it gets light, I thought. This playing field would even out real
quick. That’s if they didn’t shoot me first, in the dark.
I kept skirting around the mountain. Way below I could see the lights from a
couple of lanterns, and I thought I could see the flickering flame of a fire. That
must have been the valley floor, and it gave me my first guidance as to the
terrain, but not much. In fact, it gave me the impression the ground where I was
standing was flat, which it really was not. I stopped for a minute to see if there
was anything else down in that valley, any further sign of my enemy, but I could
still see just about nothing except for the lanterns and the fire, all of them about a
mile down.
I gathered myself and took a step forward. And in that split second I realized
I had stepped into the void. I just fell clean off that mountain, straight down,
falling through the air, not over the ground. I hit the side of the mountain with a
terrific bang, knocked the breath right out of me. Then I rolled, crashing through
a copse of trees, trying to grab something to slow me down.
But I was moving too fast, and gathering speed. I fell helplessly down a steep
bit, which leveled out for a few yards and allowed me to slow down. Finally I
stopped on the edge of yet another precipice, which I sensed rather than saw.
And I just lay there gasping for breath for a good twenty minutes, scared to death
I’d find myself paralyzed.
But I wasn’t. I could stand. I still had my rifle, although my strobe light had
gone. And somehow I had to get back up to my highest point. The lower I was
positioned down this mountain, the less my chance of getting rescued. I must go
upward, and so I set off again.
I climbed, slipped, and scrambled for two more hours, until I thought I was
more or less back to the point where I’d fallen off the mountain. It was 0200
now, and I’d been going for a long time, maybe six or seven hours. The pain was
becoming diabolical, but in a way I was relieved I still had feeling in that left