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

2
Baby Seals...
and Big Ole Gators
I wrestled with one once and was pretty glad when that sucker
decided he’d had enough and took off for calmer waters. But to
this day my brother loves to wrestle alligators, just for fun.
We flew on, high over the southern reaches of the Gulf of Oman. We headed
east-northeast for four hundred miles, forty-five thousand feet above the Arabian
Sea. We crossed the sixty-first line of longitude in the small hours of the
morning. That put us due south of the Iranian border seaport of Gavater, where
the Pakistan frontier runs down to the ocean.
Chief Healy snored quietly. Axe did a New York Times crossword. And the
miracle was that Shane’s headset didn’t explode, as loud as his rock-and-roll
music was playing.
“Do you really need to play that shit at that volume, kiddo?”
“It’s cool, man...dude, chill.”
“Jesus Christ.”
The C-130 roared on, heading slightly more northerly now, up toward the
coast of Baluchistan, which stretches 470 miles along the northern shoreline of
the Arabian Sea and commands, strategically, the inward and outward oil lanes
to the Persian Gulf. Despite a lot of very angry tribal chiefs, Baluchistan is part
of Pakistan and has been since the partition with India in 1947. But that doesn’t
make the chiefs any happier with the arrangement.
And it’s probably worth remembering that no nation, not the Turks, the
Tatars, the Persians, the Arabs, the Hindus, or the Brits has ever completely
conquered Baluchistan. Those tribesmen even held off Genghis Khan, and his
guys were the Navy SEALs of the thirteenth century.