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Goo-larb
), and his position in the
community was very strong. He made it clear the Taliban were not going to take me while he
had anything to do with it.
He was an extremely nice guy, and we became good friends, or as close to good friends as it’s
possible to be when the language barrier is almost insurmountable. Mostly we tried to
communicate about families, and I understood he had a wife and six children and God knows
how many cousins and uncles. Conveying news about my identical twin brother was a tough one,
so we just settled for brother, mainly because Gulab unfailingly thought Morgan was me. Like a
lot of other folk have done down the years.
Gulab had a friend with him who was also a solid man, plainly an appointed relief guard.
Between them they never left me alone. By this time I knew why. The village was entirely
embarrassed when the Taliban had crept in here armed to the teeth and conducted an
interrogation regardless of the wishes of the people. Those warriors had been on the verge of
causing the ultimate retribution under the laws of
lokhay,
which would have obliged the village
to go to war to the last man on my behalf.
I did not yet comprehend the full implications of
lokhay
but I knew it was important and that I
would not be surrendered. And now I had a full-time guard detail in my room. This did not
prevent other visitors from coming in, and my first on that morning in my new house was a little
boy, maybe eight or nine years old.
He sat on the edge of my cot and tried to teach me a Muslim prayer:
La La e La La —
Muhammad del la su La La.
I pretty soon got the hang of it and repeated it with him. He was
thrilled, clapped his hands and laughed, and charged out through the door to round up a posse of
other kids. Gulab tried to inform me that the repetition of that prayer meant that I was now a
Muslim. And almost immediately the first little boy came racing back into the room with all his
buddies, about twenty of them, all eager to pray with the new Texan convert.
I tried to explain I was a doctor, and they understood this pretty quickly, started saying over and
over, “Hello, Dr. Marcus,” laughing like hell and falling about like kids do. I could tell they
really liked me, and I borrowed a marker pen one of them had and wrote each of their names in
English on their arms. Then I let them write their names on mine.
We exchanged words for ears, nose, and mouth. Then for water
(uba)
and for walk
(ducari),
both
of which I found useful. In the end they left, but other local tribesmen came in to speak to Gulab,
and I began, with his encouragement, to converse with the guys who walked the goats, the men
who would understand distance. Slowly, during the course of the day, we established there was a
small American base two miles away.
They pointed out the window directly at a mountain which looked like a spare part from the
Rockies. It towered above us, a great wall of granite that would have caused a mountain goat to
back off. “Over there, Dr. Marcus, far side,” one of them managed to say. And since I probably
could not have reached the window, never mind the mountain, I put that plan on the back burner
for the moment.
They had been referring to the village of Monagee, in the district of Manrogai, where I knew the
U.S. military had some kind of an outpost. But it was out of the question right now. I couldn’t
get there or anywhere else until my leg improved. Nonetheless, the goatherds had some good
information about the terrain and the distances to various villages and U.S. bases. These guys
walk around the mountains for a living. Local knowledge. That’s key to every serving SEAL,
especially one who was planning a kind of soft jailbreak, like me.
With the goatherds, I was able to work out that from the scene of the original battlefield where
the others died, on that terrible night of June 28 I had traveled around seven miles, four walking,
three crawling. Seven miles!
Wow!
I couldn’t believe that. But these herders knew their land.
And they, like everyone else, knew all about the Battle for Murphy’s Ridge, where it had been
fought and the very bad losses sustained by the Taliban...“You shoot, Dr. Marcus? You shoot?”
Me? Shoot? Never. I’m just a wandering doctor trying to look after my patients. But I was real
proud of traveling seven miles over the mountain in my beat-up condition after the battle.
I took my ballpoint pen and marked distances, drew maps, made diagrams of the mountains on
my right thigh. When that got a little crowded, I had to use my left. (Shit! That hurt. That really
hurt!)
At noon the kids came back for prayers, bringing with them several adults, clearly eager to meet
the new American convert, no longer an infidel. We prayed together to Allah, kneeling —
painfully, in my case — on the floor. After which we all shook hands, and I think they welcomed
me to their prayers. Never told ’em, of course, I slipped in a quick one to my own God while I
was at it, respectfully wondering, if it was all right with Him, whether I could get my rifle back
anytime soon.
They all came back for afternoon prayers at 1700, and again at sunset. The little kids, my first
friends, had to leave for bed right after that, but I remember they all came and hugged me before
they left, and, not having mastered “Good-bye” or “Good night” yet, they repeated their first
American phrase again and again as they left the room: “Hello, Dr. Marcus.”
The older kids, the young teenagers, were allowed to stay and talk with me for a while. Gulab
helped them to communicate and we parted as friends. The trouble was, I was getting sick now,
and I was beginning to feel pretty ropy, not just the pain of my wounds but kind of like flu, only
a bit worse.
When the kids had finally left, I received a visit from the village elder himself. He brought me
bread, gave me fresh water, then sat down for maybe three hours while we discussed, as best we
could, how I could get to an American base. It was clear I was a major problem to the village.
Threats were already being received from the Taliban, informing the villagers how urgent it was
for their cause that I be surrendered to them immediately.
The old man imparted this to me but took the view I was in no shape to travel and that it would
simplify matters for a member of his Pashtun tribe to make the journey, on foot, to the big U.S.
base at Asadabad and inform them of my whereabouts. I had no clue at the time he was
preparing to make the journey himself, some thirty to forty miles alone in the mountains.
He asked me to write out a letter for him to take to Asadabad. I wrote,
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