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

the house, racked by yet another disappointment; after the helicopters that never
came, Sarawa’s sudden vanishing while I was in the cave, the village elder
taking off without me. And now the trip to Monagee in ruins. Christ. Could I
ever believe a goddamned word these people said?
I’d been asleep for so long, I decided to indulge myself in a luxurious and
prolonged pee. I walked outside wearing my harness and a very sour expression,
temporarily forgetting entirely that I owed my life to the people of this village. I
left my rifle behind and walked slowly down the steep hill, which was now as
slippery as all hell because of the rain.
At the conclusion of this operation, I took myself up the hill a little way and
sat down on the drying grass, mainly because I did not wish to be any ruder to
Gulab than I already had been, but also because I just wanted to sit alone for a
while and nurse my thoughts.
I still considered my best bet would be to find a way to get to the nearest
American military base. And that was still Monagee. I stared up at the towering
mountain I would have to cross, the rain and dew now glinting off it in the early
morning sun, and I think I visibly flinched.
It really would be one heck of a climb, and my leg was aching already, not at
the thought of it but because I’d walked a hundred yards; bullet wounds tend to
take a while to heal up. Also, despite Sarawa’s bold efforts, that leg was, I knew,
still full of shrapnel, which would not be much of a help toward a pain-free stroll
over the peak.
Anyway, I just sat there on the side of the mountain and tried to clear my
mind, to decide whether there was anything else I could do except sit around and
wait for a new night when Gulab and the guys could assist me to Monagee. And
all the time, I was weighing the possibility of the Taliban coming in on some
vengeful attack in retribution for yesterday’s bombardment.
The fact was, I was a living, breathing target as well as a distress signal.
There sat the mighty Sharmak, with his second in command, “Commodore
Abdul,” and a large, trained army, all of them with essentially nothing else to do
except kill me. And if they managed to make it into the village and hit the house
I was staying in, I’d be lucky to fend them off and avoid a short trip to Pakistan
for publicity and execution.
Christ, those guys would have loved nothing more in all the world than to
grab me and announce to the Arab television stations they had defeated one of
the top U.S. Navy SEAL teams. Not just defeated, wiped them out in battle,
smashed the rescue squad, blown up the helicopter, executed all survivors, and