Marcus luttrell

God 
will give me justice.
I wasn’t sure I quite believed it anymore. He’d been out of touch for some time now. But I was 
still alive. Just. And maybe there was help on the way. He works in awful mysterious ways. Still, 
even my rifle was gone now, like most of my hope. 
I was just beginning to drift off again, maybe a little before 0800, when the place seemed to 
come alive. I could hear the little bells around the necks of the goddamned goats, and they 
seemed to be above me. When sand and rocks started raining down on me, I realized there was 
no roof to my cave. I was open to the sky, I could hear those goat hooves pounding away up 
there somewhere, and the sand kept pouring down on me. 
The good news was it buried the ants, but I was trying to stop it getting in my eyes, and so I 
turned facedown, shielding my eyes with my hands, my right wrist aching like hell from that 
Taliban gun butt. Suddenly, to my complete horror, I saw the barrel of an AK-47 easing round 
the corner of the rock which guarded my left side. I couldn’t hide, I couldn’t even take cover, 
and I sure as hell couldn’t fight back. 
The barrel kept coming, then the rest of the rifle, the hands, and the face — the face of one of my 
buddies from Sabray, grinning cheerfully. I was in such shock I could not even bring myself to 
call him a crazy prick, which he plainly was. But he brought me bread and that appalling goat’s 
milk and filled my water bottle. The one from the sewer. 
Half an hour later Sarawa came, five hours after he said he would. He looked at my bullet wound 
and gave me more water. Then he posted a guard at the entrance to my roofless cave. The guard 
was thirtyish and, like the rest of them, whip-thin and bearded. He sat on a rock a little way 
above my entrance, his AK-47 slung over his shoulder. 
I kept drifting off, lying there on the floor, and every time I came awake I leaned out to see if the 
guard was still there. His name was Norzamund, and he always smiled real friendly and gave me 
a wave. But we could not speak, no common words. He came down once to fill my water bottle 
and I tried to get him to share his with me. No dice. 
So I lifted the evil Pepsi bottle and splashed the water directly into my mouth. Then I chucked it 
to the back of the cave. Next time Norzamund brought water, he went back and found the 
goddamned thing and filled it yet again. 

---

I was alone in the late afternoon, and I saw the goatherds come by a couple of times. They never 
waved or made contact, but neither did they betray my position. If they had I do not believe I 
would be here. Even now I’m not sure whether 
lokhay
works for a guy who’s left the village. 
Norzamund had left me some fresh bread, for which I was grateful. He went home shortly after 
dark, and for several hours I saw no one. I tried to stay calm and rational because it seemed 
Sarawa and his men were intent on saving me. Even the village elder was plainly on my side. 
That’s nothing to do with my charm, by the way. That’s strictly 
lokhay.
I sat there by myself all through that long evening and into the night. June 30 became July 1; I 
checked my watch around midnight so I knew when that happened. I tried not to think of home 
and my mom and dad, tried not to give in to self-pity, but I knew it was around 3:00 p.m. back 
home in Texas, and I wondered if anyone had the slightest clue about how much trouble I was in 
and whether they realized how badly I needed help. 
What I definitely did not know was that there were now well over two hundred people gathered 
at the ranch. No one went home. It was as if they were willing a hopeless situation to become 
hopeful, as if their prayers for me could somehow be answered, as if their presence could 
somehow protect me from death, as if they believed that if they just stayed in place, no one 
would announce I had been killed in action. 
Mom says she was witnessing a miracle. She and Dad were serving three meals a day to every 
person on that ranch, and she never knew where the food came from. But it kept coming, big 
trucks from a couple of food distributors were arriving with steaks and chicken for everyone, 
maybe two hundred meals at a time. No charge. Local restaurants were trucking stuff in, seafood, 
pasta, hamburgers. There was Chinese food for fifty, then for sixty. Eggs came, sausage, ham, 
and bacon. Dad says the barbecues never went out. 
Everyone was there to help, including the Herzogg family, big local cattle ranchers, churchgoers, 
patriots, ready to step up for a friend in need. Mrs. Herzogg showed up with her daughters and 
without asking just went to work cleaning the place up. And they did it every day. 
The navy chaplains made everyone recite the Twenty-third Psalm, just like I was doing. During 
the open-air services, everyone would stand up and solemnly sing the navy hymn: