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

was trying to communicate.
“American! Okay! Okay!”
Finally I got it. These guys meant me no harm. They’d just stumbled on to
me. They weren’t chasing me and had no intention of killing me. It was a
situation I was relatively unused to this past couple of days. But the vision of
yesterday’s goatherds was still stark in my mind.
“Taliban?” I asked. “You Taliban?”
“No Taliban!” shouted the man who I assumed was the leader. And he ran
the edge of his hand across his throat, saying once more, “No Taliban!”
From where I was lying, this looked like a signal that meant “Death to the
Taliban.” Certainly he was not indicating that he was one of them or even liked
them. I tried to remember whether the goatherds had said, “No Taliban.” And I
was nearly certain they had not. This was plainly different.
But I was still confused and dizzy, uncertain, and I kept on asking, “Taliban?
Taliban?”
“No! No! No Taliban!”
I guess if I’d been at my peak, I’d have accepted this several minutes ago,
before Marcus’s Last Stand and all that. But I was losing it now. I saw the leader
walk up to me. He smiled and said his name was Sarawa. He was the village
doctor, he somehow communicated in rough English. He was thirtyish, bearded,
tall for an Afghan, with an intellectual’s high forehead. I recall thinking he didn’t
look much like a doctor to me, not wandering around on the edge of this
mountain like a native tracker.
But there was something about him. He didn’t look like a member of al
Qaeda either. By now I’d seen a whole lot of Taliban warriors, and he looked
nothing like any of them. There was no arrogance, no hatred in his eyes. If he
hadn’t been dressed like a leading man from Murder up the Khyber Pass, he
could have been an American college professor on his way to a peace rally.
He lifted up his loose white shirt to show me he had no concealed gun or
knife. Then he spread his arms wide in front of him, I guess the international
sign for “I am here in friendship.”
I had no choice but to trust him. “I need help,” I said, uttering a phrase which
must have shed an especially glaring light on the obvious. “Hospital — water.”
“Hah?” said Sarawa.
“Water,” I repeated. “I must have water.”
“Hah?” said Sarawa.
“Water,” I yelled, pointing back toward the pool.