Marcus luttrell

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?”