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

his head off, literally screaming at me. Whatever the hell he was saying seemed
irrelevant. But he sounded like the outraged father of one of the many Afghani
tribesmen who’d been removed from the battlefield by the men seconded to
SEAL Team 10. Probably by me.
As I made my way, slowly, painfully, almost blindly to the bigger rocks up
ahead, it did cross my mind that if these guys really wanted to shoot me they
could have done it by now. In fact, they could have done it any time they wanted.
But the Taliban had been hunting me down for too long. All I wanted was cover
and a fair position from which to strike back.
I flicked off the safety catch on my rifle and kept crawling, straight into a
dead end surrounded by huge boulders on all sides. This was it. Marcus’s last
stand. And, slowly, I half rolled, half turned around to face my enemy once
again. The problem was, right here my enemy had kind of fanned out. The three
guys somehow had gotten above me and yet surrounded me, one to the left, one
to the right, and one dead ahead. Christ, I thought. I’ve only one hand grenade
left. This is trouble. Big trouble.
Then I noticed there was even bigger trouble out in the clearing. There were
three more guys moving up on me, all armed with AKs slung over their backs.
And they too fanned out and somehow climbed higher, but they positioned
themselves behind me. No one fired. I raised my rifle and drew down on the one
who was doing the screaming. I tried to draw a bead on him, but he just moved
swiftly behind a huge tree, which meant I was aiming at nothing.
I swung around and tried to locate the others, but the blood from my
forehead was still trickling down my face, obscuring my vision. My leg was
turning the shale beneath me to a dark red. I no longer knew what the hell was
happening except that I was in some kind of a fight, which I was very obviously
about to lose. The second three guys were moving down the rocks in rear of me,
quickly, easily, right on top of me.
The guy behind the tree was now back out in the open and still yelling at me,
standing there with his rifle lowered, I guessed demanding my surrender. But I
couldn’t even do that. I just knew that I desperately needed help or I was going
to bleed to death. Then I did what I never thought I would do in the whole of my
career. I lowered my rifle. Defeated. My whole world was spinning out of
control in more ways than one. I was fighting to avoid blacking out again.
I just lay there in the dirt, blood seeping out, still clutching my rifle, still, in a
sense, defiant, but unable to fight. I had no more strength, I was on the edge of
consciousness, and I was struggling to understand what the screaming tribesman