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

his face as he lay dying, just as they had done to Mikey. But Axe was in a
different place from where I thought. I know we were both blown out of the hole
by the RPG, because I went over the precipice. But Axe was a few hundred
yards even farther away. No one quite knows how he got there.
Axe still had three magazines left for his pistol when the grenade hit us. But
when they found him, he was on the last one. And that could mean only one
thing: Axe must have fought on, recovering consciousness after the blast and
going for those bastards again, firing maybe thirty more rounds at them; must
have driven them mad. I guess that’s why, when he inevitably succumbed to his
most shocking injuries, they had accorded him that barbaric tribal finale.
I used to think Audie Murphy was the ultimate American warrior. I’m not so
sure about that. Not now. Not anymore. And it upsets me more than I can say,
thinking what they did, in the end, to Mikey and Axe. It upsets Morgan so bad,
no one can even mention Axe’s name without him having to leave the room. I
guess you had to know him to understand that. There were not many like
Matthew Axelson.
Well, by the time they brought Axe down, I was gone. They flew me out on
the night of July 8, in a big military Boeing, the C-141, on a long journey to
Germany. Jeff Delapenta accompanied me, never left my side once. And there I
checked in to the regional medical center at the U.S. Air Force base at
Landstuhl, up near the western border with France, about fifty-five miles
southwest of Frankfurt.
I was there for about nine days, recovering and receiving treatment for my
wounds and therapy for the healing bones in my back, shoulder, and wrist. But
that Pepsi bottle bug wouldn’t budge from my stomach. It showed major
resistance for long months and made it hard to regain my lost weight.
But I came through it and finally left Germany for the four-thousand-mile
ride back to the U.S.A. This time Lieutenant Clint Burk, my swim buddy in
BUD/S, accompanied me, along with Dr. Dickens. Clint and I have been closest
friends forever, and the journey passed pretty quickly. We traveled in a C-17
cargo plane, upstairs in first class...well, nearly. But in seats. It was great. And
we touched down nine hours later in Maryland. Then the navy hitched a ride for
us in a Gulfstream private jet owned by a senator.
And I guess I arrived back in some style to San Antonio Airport, Texas,
which stands almost two hundred miles west of Houston, right along Route 10
and over the Colorado River. Back home I guess there had been some talk that I
might be taken on to San Diego, but apparently Morgan just said, “You can