Lone survivor: the eyewitness account of Operation Redwing and the lost heroes of SEAL team 10

by Marcus Luttrell

  I could hear Mikey shouting, “Danny, Danny, for Christ’s sake, get that fucking thing working…Marcus, no options now, buddy, kill ’em all!”

  But now the enemy gunfire seemed to center on our two flank men. I could see the dust and rock shards kicking up all around us. The sound of AK-47s absolutely filled the air, deafening. I could see the Taliban guys falling all along the ridge. No one can shoot like us. I stayed right where I was, in my original position, and I still seemed to be taking less fire than the others. But in the next couple of minutes they had identified my position, and the volume of fire directly at me was increasing. This was bad. Very bad.

  I could see Axe was acquiring his targets quicker than I was because he had an extra scope. I should have had one too, but for some reason I had not fitted it.

  Right now all four of us were really amped up. We knew how to conduct a firefight like this, but we needed to cut down the enemy numbers, nail a few of these bastards real quick, give ourselves a better chance. It was hard for them to get us from directly above, which meant the flanks were our danger. I could see two of them making their way down, right and left.

  Axe shot one of them, but it was bad to the right. They were shooting in a kind of frenzy but, thank Christ, missing. I guess we were too. And suddenly I was taking heavy fire myself. Bullets were slamming into the tree trunk, hitting rocks all around me. The bullets were somehow coming in from the sides.

  I called down to Mikey, “We’ll take ’em, but we might just need a new spot.”

  “Roger that,” he yelled back. Like me, he could see the speed at which they were moving up into the attack. We’d been shooting them for all of five or six minutes, but every time we cleared that ridge high above us, it filled up again. It was as if they had reinforcements somewhere over the ridge, just waiting to come up to the front line. Whichever way we looked at it, they had a ton of guys trying to kill four SEALs.

  At this point our options were nonexistent. We still could not charge the top of the mountain, because they’d cut us down like dogs. They had us left, and they had us right. We were boxed in on three sides, and there was never, not even for a couple of seconds, a lull in the gunfire. And we could not even see half of them or tell where the bullets were coming from. They had every angle on us.

  All four of us just kept banging away, cutting ’em down, watching them fall, slamming a new magazine into the breech, somehow holding them at bay. But this was impossible. We had to give up this high ground, and I had to get close enough to Mikey to agree on a strategy, hopefully to save our lives.

  I started to move, but Mikey, like the brilliant officer he was, had appreciated the situation and already called it. “Fall back!”

  Fall back! More like fall off — the freakin’ mountain, that is; a nearly sheer drop, right behind us, God knows how far down. But an order’s an order. I grabbed my gear and took a sideways step, trying to zigzag down the gradient. But gravity made the decision for me, and I fell headlong down the mountain, completing a full forward flip and somehow landing on my back, still going fast, heels flailing for a foothold.

  At least I thought I was going fast, but Murphy was right behind me. I could tell it was him because of the bright red New York City fireman’s patch he’d worn since 9/11. That was actually all I saw.

  “See you at the bottom!” I yelled. But right then I hit a tree, and Mikey went past me like a bullet. I was going slower now, and I tried to take a step, but I fell again, and on I went, catching up to Mikey now, crashing, tumbling over the ground like we were both bouncing through a pinball machine.

  Ahead of us was a copse of trees on a slightly less steep gradient, and I knew this was our last hope before we plunged into the void. I had to grab something, anything. So did Mikey, and I could see him up ahead, grabbing at tree limbs, snapping them off, and still plummeting downward.

  In a split second I knew that nothing could save either of us, we’d surely break our backs or necks and then the Taliban would shoot us without mercy, as we would expect. But right now, entering the copse of trees at what felt like seventy miles an hour, my mind was in overdrive.

  Almost everything had been ripped away from me in the fall, everything except my ammunition and grenades — all my packs, the medical stuff, food, water, comms, phone. I’d even lost my helmet with the flag of Texas painted on it. I was damned if I wanted some fucking terrorist wearing that.

  I’d seen Mikey’s radio aerial ripped off as we crashed downward. And that was not good. My gun strap had been ripped off me and my rifle whipped away. The trouble was, the terrain beyond the tree copse was completely unknown to us, because we could not see it from above. If we had, we might never have jumped; the ground just swept upward and then ducked away downward, inverted, like a goddamned ski jump.

  I rocketed up the lip of that back slope making about eighty knots, on my back, feetfirst. In the air I made two complete backflips and I landed again feet first, on my back, still coming down the cliff face like a howitzer shell. And at that moment I knew there was a God.

  First of all, I appeared not to be dead, which was right up there with Jesus walking on the water. But even more amazing was I could see my rifle not two feet from my right hand, as if God Himself had reached down to me and given me hope. Marcus, I heard Him say, you’re gonna need this. At least, I think I heard Him. In fact, I swear to God I heard Him. Because this was a miracle, no doubt in my mind. And I had not even had time to say my prayers.

  I didn’t know how far down we’d fallen, but it must have been two or three hundred yards. And we were both still going very fast. I could see Mikey up ahead, and I honestly did not know whether he was dead or alive. It was just a person crashing through the dirt and boulders. If he had not broken every bone in his body, that too was a miracle.

  Me? I was too battered to hurt, and I could still see my rifle tumbling down beside me. That rifle never strayed more than two feet from my hand throughout this death-defying fall. And I’ll always know it was guided by the hand of God. Because there is no other explanation.

  We hit the bottom, both of us landing with terrific impact, like we’d jumped off a goddamned skyscraper. It shook the wind out of me, and I gasped for breath, trying to work out how badly injured I was. My right shoulder hurt, my back hurt, and on one side of my face, the skin had been more or less scoured away. I was covered in blood and bruised to hell.

  But I could stand, which was actually a really bad idea, because then the RPGs began to arrive, landing close, and I went down again. They exploded more or less harmlessly but sent up clouds of dust, shale, and wood shards from the trees. Mikey was next to me, maybe fifteen feet away, and we picked ourselves up from the ground.

  He still had his rifle strapped on. Mine was resting at my feet. I grabbed it, and I heard Murphy shout through the din of explosions, “You good?”

  I turned to him, and his entire face was black with dust. Even his goddamned teeth were black. “You look like shit, man,” I told him. “Fix yourself up!”

  Despite everything, Mikey laughed, and then I noticed he’d been shot during the fall. There was blood pumping out of his stomach. But just then there was a thunderous explosion from one of the grenades, too close, much too close. We both wheeled around in the swirling dust and smoke, and there behind us were two large logs, actually felled trees.

  They were crossed over at the ends, like a pair of giant chopsticks, facing up the mountain, and we turned simultaneously and sprinted for cover. We cleared the logs and crashed down behind them, safe from gunfire attack for the moment. We were both still armed and ready to fight. I took the right-hand side, Mikey center left, guarding both the head-on approach and the flank.

  We could see them plainly now, swarming down the flanks of the cliff we had just crashed down. They were moving very fast, though not nearly as fast as we had. Mikey had a pretty good line on them, and mine wasn’t bad. We opened fire straight at them, picking them off one by one as they moved in on us. T
rouble was, there were so many, and it didn’t seem to matter how many we killed, they just kept coming. I remember thinking that the two hundred estimate was a lot closer than the eighty minimum we had been advised.

  And this must have been Sharmak’s work. Because these guys were not really marksmen, were using marginal rifles pretty recklessly, but nonetheless followed the military rules for this type of assault. They advanced down the side of the battlefield, trying to outflank their enemy, always attempting to get a 360-degree cover on their target. We were surely slowing their progress down, but we weren’t stopping them.

  The fire never slackened for five minutes. They had sustained, nonstop, that opening volley, the one fired way back up the mountain when they could not see their target. They had blasted away at us all the way down to these logs, and they had augmented their fire with aimed rocket-propelled grenades. These guys were not being led by some mad-eyed hysteric, they were being led by someone who understood the rudiments of what he was doing. Understood them well. Too well. The fucker. And now they had us pinned down behind the logs, and, as ever, the bullets were flying, but we were somehow getting the better of the exchanges.

  Mikey was ignoring his wound and fighting like a SEAL officer should, uncompromising, steady, hard-eyed, and professional. I could see the guys on that left flank dropping down in their tracks as they raced toward us. On my side, over on the right, the ground was just a little flatter, with trees, and there did not seem to be so many of them. Every time they moved, I shot ’em.

  It was probably clear to them that Mikey and I could not be dislodged as long as the big logs covered us. And that’s when they went to their biggest barrage of RPGs yet. These damn things, trailing that familiar white smoke, were unleashed at us from farther up the mountain. They landed to the front and the side but not behind, and they caused a tidal wave of dirt, rocks, and smoke, showering us with the stuff, robbing us of our vision.

  Our heads went down, and I asked Mikey where the hell were Axe and Danny, and of course neither of us knew. All we knew was they were up the mountain, not yet having jumped, as we had.

  “Guess Axe must have dug in and kept fighting out on the left,” he said. “Danny’s got a better chance of radio contact high up than he would down here.”

  We risked a look up through the gloom, and we saw a figure plummeting down the mountain, just to the left of where we had fallen. Axe, no doubt, but could he survive that fall? He was on the first slope before the trees, and a second later he hurtled over the ski jump, flipped, and crashed on down the almost sheer cliff face. The gradient saved him, as it had saved Mikey and me, the way the steep mountain saves a ski jumper, enabling him to continue down at high speed without a terminal collision with flat ground.

  Axe arrived in one piece, stunned and disoriented. But the Taliban could see him now, and they opened fire on him as he lay on the ground. “Run, Axe…right here, buddy, run!” yelled Murph, top of his lungs.

  And Axe recovered his senses real quick, bullets flying around him, and he cleared those logs and crashed into our hide, landing on his back. It’s unbelievable what you can do when the threat to your own life is that bad.

  He took the far left, slammed a new magazine into the breech, and started fighting, never missed a beat, hammering away at our most vulnerable point of enemy attack. The three of us just kept going, shooting them down, hoping and praying their numbers would lessen, that we had punched a hole in their assault. But it sure as hell never seemed like it. Those guys were still swarming, still firing. And the noise was still deafening.

  The question was, Where was Danny? Was that little mountain lion still fighting, still trying to make contact, as he pounded away at Sharmak’s troops? Was he still trying to get through to HQ? None of us knew, but the answer was not long in arriving. From high up on the right on the main cliff face there was a sudden, unusual movement. Someone was falling, and it had to be Danny.

  The flailing body crashed through the high woods and flipped at the ski jump, tumbling, tumbling, all the way to the bottom, where it landed with a sickening thump. Just as we all had. But Danny never moved, just lay there, either stunned or dead. And the folklore of the brotherhood stood starkly before both Mikey and me: No SEAL was ever left alone to die on the battlefield. No SEAL.

  I dropped my rifle and cleared the log in one bound. Mikey came right after me. Axe kept firing, trying to give us cover, as we ducked down and ran fast across the flat ground to the base of the cliff. Mikey was still pouring blood from his stomach, and I felt like I had a broken back, low down, base of my spine.

  We reached Danny together, hoisted him up, and manhandled him back to the logs, dragging him into what passed for safety around here. They fired at us from the heights all the way across that lethal ground, but no one got hit, and somehow, against truly staggering odds, we were all still going, all in one piece, except for the shot Mikey took.

  As the resident medic, I should have been able to help, but all my stuff had been ripped away in the fall, and there was no time to do anything except shoot these bastards who carried AK-47s and hope to Christ they’d give up. Or at least run out of those RPGs. They could hurt someone if they weren’t careful. Fuckers.

  Right then, I was confident we were going to make it. The ground fell away quite sharply behind us, but way below was our target village, and it was on flat ground, with sturdy-looking houses. Cover, that was all we needed, with our enemy caught flat-footed on flat ground. We’d be all right. We’d get ’em.

  Danny fought back, cleared his head, and tried to get up. But his face was rigid. He was in terrible pain. And then I saw the blood pouring out of his hand.

  “I’ve been shot, Marcus, can you help me?” he said.

  “We’ve all been shot,” replied Mikey. “Can you fight?”

  I stared at Danny’s right hand. His thumb had been blown right off. And I saw him grit his teeth and nod, sweat streaming down his blackened face. He adjusted his rifle, banged in a new magazine with the butt of his hand, and took his place in the center of our little gun line. Then he turned to face the enemy once more. He was a bullmastiff, glaring up the mountain, and he opened fire with everything he had.

  Danny, Mikey, and Axe blasted that left flank while I held the right. The fire was still fierce on all sides, but we sensed there were more dead Afghans to the left than there were to the right. Murph shouted, “We’re going for the higher ground, this side.” And with all four barrels blazing, we tried to storm that left flank, get a foothold on the steep slope, maybe even fight our way back to the top if we could kill enough of them.

  But they also wanted the higher ground, and they reinforced their right flank, driving down from the top, anything to stop us getting that upper hand. We must have killed fifty or more of them, and all four of us were still fighting. I guess they probably noticed that, because they were prepared to fight to the last man to hold our left, their right.

  There were so many of them, and we found ourselves slipping inexorably back down the hill as the turbaned warriors closed in on us, driving us back by sheer weight of numbers, sheer volume of fire. When they loosed off another battery of RPGs, we had no other option but to retreat and dive back behind the crossed logs before they blew our heads off.

  God only knew the size of whatever arms cache they were drawing ordnance from. But we were just finding out what a force Sharmak and his guys really were: trained, heavily armed, fearless, and strategically on the ball. Not quite what we expected when we first landed at Bagram.

  Back behind the logs, we kept going, mowing them down on the flanks whenever we could get a clear shot. But again, the inflexible, unswerving progress of Sharmak’s forces coming down the escarpment after us was simply too overwhelming. Not so much due to the volume of fire but because of their irresistible drive down the left and right of our position.

  The logs gave us good cover from the front and not bad to ninety degrees. But once they got past that, firing from slightly be
hind us, on both sides — well, that was the reason we jumped from the heights in the first place, risking our necks, not knowing when or even if we would land on reasonable ground.

  There were not enough of us to protect our flanks. We were too occupied defending our position against a head-on attack. I suppose the goatherds had told them we were only four, and Sharmak swiftly guessed we would be vulnerable on the wings.

  I’m guessing a dozen SEALs could have held and then destroyed them, but that would have been odds of around ten or eleven to one. We were only four, and that was probably thirty-five to one. Which is known, in military vernacular, as a balls-to-the-wall situation. Especially as we now seemed incapable of calling up the cavalry from HQ.

  Right here was a twenty-first-century version of General Custer’s last stand, Little Bighorn with turbans. But they hadn’t gotten us yet. And if I had my way, they were never going to. I know all four of us thought exactly that. Our only option, however, was to get to flatter ground. And there wasn’t any of that up here. There was only one way for us to go, backward and down, straight down.

  Mike Murphy called it. “They’ll kill us all if we stay here! Jump, guys, for fuck’s sake, jump!”

  And once more all four of us clutched our rifles, stood up, braved the flying bullets, and headed for the precipice. We leaped into the void, Mikey first, me next, then Axe, then Danny. The drop must have been about thirty or forty feet, down into a thicket of shrubs alongside a little stream.

  We were by no means at the base of this little escarpment, but at least we were once more on a flat bit and not clinging to some cliff face. I landed directly on top of Mikey, then Axe and Danny landed on both of us. There wasn’t even time to let rip with a few curses.