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

I marched them back into the house and carefully drew two parachutes on
the page. I drew a man swinging down from the first one. On the second one, I
drew a box. I showed both pictures to the kids and asked them, Which one? And
about twenty little fingers shot forward, all aimed directly at the parachute with
the box.
Beautiful. I had intel. There had been some kind of a supply drop. And since
the local tribesmen do not use either aircraft or parachutes, those supplies had to
be American. They also had to be aimed at the remnants of my team. Everyone
else was dead. I was that remnant.
I asked the kids exactly where the chutes had dropped, and they just pointed
to the mountain. Then they got into gear and raced out there, I guess to try and
show me. I stood outside and watched them go, still a bit baffled. Had my
buddies somehow found me? Had the old man reached Asadabad? Either way, it
was one hell of a coincidence the Americans had made a supply drop a few
hundred yards from where I was taking cover. The mountains were endless, and
I could have been anywhere.
I went back into the house to rest my leg and talk for a while with Gulab. He
had not seen the parachute drop, and he had no idea how far along the road his
father had journeyed. In my mind, I knew what every active combat soldier
knows, that Napoleon’s army advanced on Moscow at one mile every fifteen
minutes, with full packs and muskets. That’s four miles an hour, right? That way,
the village elder should have made it in maybe eleven hours.
Except for two mitigating factors: (1) he was about two hundred years old,
and (2) from where I stood, the mountain he was crossing had a gradient slightly
steeper than the Washington Monument. If the VE made it by Ramadan 2008,
I’d be kinda lucky.
One hour later, there it goes again. Bang! That goddamned door went off like
a bomb. Even Gulab jumped. But not as high as I did. In came the kids,
accompanied by a group of adults. They carried with them a white document,
which must have looked like a snowball in a coal mine up here where the word
litter simply does not exist.
I took it from them and realized it was an instruction pamphlet for a cell
phone. “Where the hell did you get this?” I asked them.
“Right out there, Dr. Marcus. Right out there.” Everyone was pointing at the
mountainside, and I had no trouble with the translation.
“Parachute?” I said.
“Yes, Dr. Marcus. Yes. Parachute.”