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

by Marcus Luttrell

  I knew I had to climb back up there or die. So I grabbed my rifle and began the long crawl to the drink that should restore my life. I scrambled and slipped over the loose ground, and I am certain by now you have comprehended what a truly horrible mountaineer I am. I can only plead the gradient. It was unbelievably steep, not quite sheer but almost. A great rock climber would probably have taken full gear in order to scale it.

  Personally I’m not sure which I was worse at, going up or falling down. But it was two hundred feet to that water. It took me two more hours. I blacked out twice, and when I reached it, I plunged my head in, just to free up my tongue and throat. Then I washed my burning face, cleaned the gash just below my hairline, and tried to get the blood to wash off the back of my leg. I couldn’t tell whether the sniper’s bullet was still lodged in there or not.

  All I knew was I needed to drink a lot of water and then try to attract attention and get to a hospital. Otherwise I did not think I would survive. I decided to move up a few yards to where the water was lapping off a rock and splashing into a small pool. I lowered my head and drank. It was the sweetest water I had ever tasted.

  And I was just getting into this real luxury when I noticed there were three guys standing right above me, two of them with AKs. For a moment I thought I was hallucinating. I stopped drinking. And I remember I was talking to myself, just mumbling really, flicking between reality and dream.

  Then I realized one of them was yelling at me, shouting something I was supposed to understand, but in my befuddled state I just couldn’t get it. I was like a badly wounded animal, ready to fight to the end. I understood nothing, not the hand of friendship, not the possibility of human decency. The only sensation I could react to was threat. And everything was a threat. Cornered. Scared. Suddenly afraid of dying. Ready to lash out at anything. That was me.

  The only thought I had was I’ll kill these guys…just give me my chance. I rolled away from the pool and held my rifle in my get-ready position. Then I began to crawl away over the rocks, braced all the time for a volley of AK bullets to rip into me and finally finish me off.

  But I “reasoned” I had no choice. I would have to risk getting killed by these guys before I could hit back. Dimly I recall that first character was still yelling his head off, literally screaming at me. Whatever the hell he was saying seemed irrelevant. But he sounded like the outraged father of one of the many Afghani tribesmen who’d been removed from the battlefield by the men seconded to SEAL Team 10. Probably by me.

  As I made my way, slowly, painfully, almost blindly to the bigger rocks up ahead, it did cross my mind that if these guys really wanted to shoot me they could have done it by now. In fact, they could have done it any time they wanted. But the Taliban had been hunting me down for too long. All I wanted was cover and a fair position from which to strike back.

  I flicked off the safety catch on my rifle and kept crawling, straight into a dead end surrounded by huge boulders on all sides. This was it. Marcus’s last stand. And, slowly, I half rolled, half turned around to face my enemy once again. The problem was, right here my enemy had kind of fanned out. The three guys somehow had gotten above me and yet surrounded me, one to the left, one to the right, and one dead ahead. Christ, I thought. I’ve only one hand grenade left. This is trouble. Big trouble.

  Then I noticed there was even bigger trouble out in the clearing. There were three more guys moving up on me, all armed with AKs slung over their backs. And they too fanned out and somehow climbed higher, but they positioned themselves behind me. No one fired. I raised my rifle and drew down on the one who was doing the screaming. I tried to draw a bead on him, but he just moved swiftly behind a huge tree, which meant I was aiming at nothing.

  I swung around and tried to locate the others, but the blood from my forehead was still trickling down my face, obscuring my vision. My leg was turning the shale beneath me to a dark red. I no longer knew what the hell was happening except that I was in some kind of a fight, which I was very obviously about to lose. The second three guys were moving down the rocks in rear of me, quickly, easily, right on top of me.

  The guy behind the tree was now back out in the open and still yelling at me, standing there with his rifle lowered, I guessed demanding my surrender. But I couldn’t even do that. I just knew that I desperately needed help or I was going to bleed to death. Then I did what I never thought I would do in the whole of my career. I lowered my rifle. Defeated. My whole world was spinning out of control in more ways than one. I was fighting to avoid blacking out again.

  I just lay there in the dirt, blood seeping out, still clutching my rifle, still, in a sense, defiant, but unable to fight. I had no more strength, I was on the edge of consciousness, and I was struggling to understand what the screaming tribesman was trying to communicate.

  “American! Okay! Okay!”

  Finally I got it. These guys meant me no harm. They’d just stumbled on to me. They weren’t chasing me and had no intention of killing me. It was a situation I was relatively unused to this past couple of days. But the vision of yesterday’s goatherds was still stark in my mind.

  “Taliban?” I asked. “You Taliban?”

  “No Taliban!” shouted the man who I assumed was the leader. And he ran the edge of his hand across his throat, saying once more, “No Taliban!”

  From where I was lying, this looked like a signal that meant “Death to the Taliban.” Certainly he was not indicating that he was one of them or even liked them. I tried to remember whether the goatherds had said, “No Taliban.” And I was nearly certain they had not. This was plainly different.

  But I was still confused and dizzy, uncertain, and I kept on asking, “Taliban? Taliban?”

  “No! No! No Taliban!”

  I guess if I’d been at my peak, I’d have accepted this several minutes ago, before Marcus’s Last Stand and all that. But I was losing it now. I saw the leader walk up to me. He smiled and said his name was Sarawa. He was the village doctor, he somehow communicated in rough English. He was thirtyish, bearded, tall for an Afghan, with an intellectual’s high forehead. I recall thinking he didn’t look much like a doctor to me, not wandering around on the edge of this mountain like a native tracker.

  But there was something about him. He didn’t look like a member of al Qaeda either. By now I’d seen a whole lot of Taliban warriors, and he looked nothing like any of them. There was no arrogance, no hatred in his eyes. If he hadn’t been dressed like a leading man from Murder up the Khyber Pass, he could have been an American college professor on his way to a peace rally.

  He lifted up his loose white shirt to show me he had no concealed gun or knife. Then he spread his arms wide in front of him, I guess the international sign for “I am here in friendship.”

  I had no choice but to trust him. “I need help,” I said, uttering a phrase which must have shed an especially glaring light on the obvious. “Hospital — water.”

  “Hah?” said Sarawa.

  “Water,” I repeated. “I must have water.”

  “Hah?” said Sarawa.

  “Water,” I yelled, pointing back toward the pool.

  “Ah!” he exclaimed. “Hydrate!”

  I could not help laughing, weakly. Hydrate! Who the hell was this crazy-assed tribesman who knew only long words?

  He called over a kid who had a bottle. I think he went and filled it with fresh water from the stream. He brought it back to me and I kept chugging away, glugging down the water, two good-sized bottles of it.

  “Hydrate,” said Sarawa.

  “You got that right, pal,” I confirmed.

  At which point we began to converse in that no-man’s-land of language, the one where no one knows hardly a word of the other’s native tongue.

  “I’ve been shot,” I told him and showed him my wound, which had never really stopped bleeding.

  He examined it and nodded sternly, as if he understood the clear truth that I badly needed medical attention. Heaven knows how severely my
left leg would be infected. All the dirt, mud, and shale I’d inflicted on it couldn’t have done it much good.

  I told him I was a doctor too, thinking it might help somehow. I knew there would likely be savage retribution for a non-Taliban village sheltering an American fugitive, and I was praying they would not just leave me here.

  I wished to hell I still had some of my medical gear with me, but that was lost a lifetime ago on the mountain with Mikey, Axe, and Danny. Anyway, Sarawa seemed to believe I was a doctor, although he seemed equally certain he knew where I’d come from. With a succession of signals and a very few words, he conveyed to me he knew all about the firefight on the mountain. And he kept pointing directly at me, as if to confirm he absolutely knew I had been one of the combatants.

  The tribal bush telegraph up here must be fantastic. They have no means of fast communications, no phones, cars, nothing. Just one another, goatherds wandering the mountainside, passing on the necessary information. And here was this Sarawa, who had presumably been miles away from the action, informing me about the battle which I had helped fight the previous day.

  He patted me reassuringly on the shoulder and then retreated into a kind of conference with his fellow villagers while I talked to the kid.

  He had only one question, and he had a lot of trouble asking it, trying to make an American understand. In the end I got his drift: Were you really the lunatic who fell down the mountain? Very far. Very fast. Very funny. All my village saw you do it. Very big joke. Ha! Ha! Ha!

  Jesus Christ! I mean, Muhammad! Or Allah! Whoever’s in charge around here. This kid really was from a gingerbread village.

  Sarawa returned. They gave me some more water. And again he checked over my wound. Didn’t look one bit happy. But there were more important things to discuss than the state of my backside.

  I did not, of course, realize this. But the decision Sarawa and his friends were making carried huge responsibilities and, possibly, momentous consequences: They had to decide whether to take me in. Whether to help me, shelter me, and feed me. Most important, whether to defend me.

  These people were Pashtuns. And the majority of the warriors who fought under the banner of the former rulers of Afghanistan, plus a vast number of bin Laden’s al Qaeda fighters, were members of this strict and ancient tribe, almost thirteen million of whom live right here in Afghanistan.

  That steel core of the Taliban sect, that iron resolve and deadly hatred of the infidel, is unwaveringly Pashtun. The backbone of that vicious little tribal army is Pashtun. The Taliban moves around these mountains only by the unspoken approval and tacit permission of the Pashtuns, who grant them food and shelter. The two communities, the warriors and the general mountain populace, are irrevocably bound together. The mujahideen fighting the Russians were principally Pashtun.

  Never mind “No Taliban.” I knew the background. These guys might be peace-loving villagers on the surface, but the tribal blood ties were wrought in iron. Faced with an angry Taliban army demanding the head of an armed American serviceman, you would essentially not give a secondhand billy goat for the American’s chances.

  And yet there was something I did not know. We’re talking lokhay warkawal — an unbending section of historic Pashtunwalai tribal law as laid out in the hospitality section. The literal translation of lokhay warkawal is “giving of a pot.”

  I did mention this briefly when I outlined the Pashtun tribal background much earlier. But this is the part where it really counts. This is where the ole lokhay warkawal gets shoved into context. Right here, while I’m lying on the ground bleeding to death, and the tribesmen are discussing my fate.

  To an American, especially one in such terrible shape as I was, the concept of helping out a wounded, possibly dying man is pretty routine. You do what you can. For these guys, the concept carried many onerous responsibilities. Lokhay means not only providing care and shelter, it means an unbreakable commitment to defend that wounded man to the death. And not just the death of the principal tribesman or family who made the original commitment for the giving of a pot. It means the whole damned village.

  Lokhay means the population of that village will fight to the last man, honor-bound to protect the individual they have invited in to share their hospitality. And this is not something to have a chitchat about when things get rough. It’s not a point of renegotiation. This is strictly nonnegotiable.

  So while I was lying there thinking these cruel heartless bastards were just going to leave me out here and let me die, they were in fact discussing a much bigger, life-or-death issue. And the lives they were concerned with had nothing to do with mine. This was Lokhay, boy, spelled with a big L. No bullshit.

  For all I knew, they were deciding whether to put a bullet through my head and save everyone a lot of trouble. But by now I was drifting off, half asleep, half alert, and the distinction was minimal. Sarawa was still talking. Of course it occurred to me that these men might be just like the goatherds, loyal spies for the Taliban. They could easily take me in and then send their fastest messengers to inform the local commanders they had me, and I could be picked up and executed anytime they wanted.

  I wished fervently this was not the case. And though I thought I understood Sarawa was a nice guy, I couldn’t know the truth about him; no one could, not under those circumstances. Anyway, there was nothing much I could do about it, except maybe shoot them all, and a fat chance I would have had of getting away. I could hardly move.

  So I just waited for the verdict. I kept thinking, What would Morgan do? Is there any way out of this? What’s the correct military decision? Do I have any options? Not so you’d notice. My best chance of living was to try and befriend Sarawa, try somehow to ingratiate myself with his friends.

  Disjointed thoughts were blundering through my mind. What about all the death there had been in these mountains? What if these guys had lost sons, brothers, fathers, or cousins in the battle against the SEALs? How would they feel about me, an armed, uniformed member of the U.S. military, staging various gun battles, blowing Afghanis up on their very own tribal lands?

  I obviously didn’t have any answers, nor could I know what they were thinking. But it couldn’t be good. I knew that.

  Sarawa came back. He sharply ordered two men to raise me up, one of them under each of my arms to give me support, and lift me off the ground. He ordered another to lift my legs.

  As they approached me, I took out my last grenade and carefully pulled the pin, which placed that little bastard right in firing mode. I held it in one hand, clasped across my chest. The tribesmen did not seem to notice. All I knew was, if they tried to execute me or tie me up or invite their murderous Taliban colleagues in, I would drop that thing right on the floor and take the whole fucking lot of them with me.

  They lifted me up. And slowly we began to head down to the village. I did not understand, not then, but this was the biggest break I’d had since the Battle for Murphy’s Ridge first started. These friendly Pashtun tribesmen had decided to grant me lokhay. They were committed to defend me against the Taliban until there was no one left alive.

  10

  An American Fugitive Cornered by the Taliban

  Then I found a piece of flinty rock on the floor of the cave, and, lying painfully on my left side, I spent two hours carving the words of the Count of Monte Cristo onto the wall of my prison: God will give me justice.

  Sarawa and his friends did not attempt to take away my rifle. Yet. I carried it with me in one hand while they slowly lifted me down the steep track to the village of Sabray, a distance of around two hundred yards and home to perhaps three hundred households. In my other hand I clutched my last grenade, no pin, ready to take us all to eternity. It was a little after 1600, and the sun was still high.

  We passed a couple of local groups, and both of them reacted with obvious astonishment at the sight of an armed, wounded American holding his rifle but being given help. They stopped and they stared, and both times I locked eyes with one of
them. Each time he stared back, that hard glare of pure hatred with which I was so familiar. It was always the same, a gaze of undisguised loathing for the infidel.

  They were, of course, confused. Which was not altogether surprising. Hell, I was confused. Why was Sarawa helping me? The worrying part was Sarawa seemed to be swimming against the tide. This was a village full of Islamic fanatics who wanted only to see dead Americans. Up here in these lawless mountains, the plan to smash New York’s Twin Towers had been born.

  At least, those were my thoughts. But I underestimated the essential human decency of the senior members of this Pashtun tribe. Sarawa and many others were good guys who wished me no harm, and neither would they permit anyone else to do me harm. Nor would they kowtow to the bloodlust of some of their fellow mountain men. They wanted only to help me. I would grow to understand that.

  The hostile, wary looks of the goatherds on the trail were typical, but they did not reflect the views of the majority. We continued on down to the top house in Sabray. I say top house because the houses were set one above the other right into the almost sheer face of the mountain. I mean, you could step off the trail and walk straight onto the flat roof of a house.

  You had to descend farther to reach the front door. Once inside, you were more or less underground in a kind of man-made cave of mud and rocks with a plain dirt floor, obviously built by craftsmen. There were rock stairs going down to another level, where there was another room. This, however, was an area best avoided, since the villagers were likely to keep goats in there. And where there are goats, there is goat dung. All over the place. The smell is fiendish, and it pervades the entire dwelling.

  We arrived outside this house, and I tried to let them know I was still dying of thirst. I remember Sarawa handed me a garden hose with a great flourish, as if it had been a crystal goblet, and turned on a tap somewhere. I replaced the pin in my hand grenade, a process deeply frowned upon by the U.S. military, and stuck it safely in the battle harness I still wore.