I stared up at the escarpment and there in the darkness
I could see white lights, moving quickly,
across the face of the mountain.
“Taliban, Marcus! Taliban!”
I could tell Gulab was really
uneasy, and I called over the army captain and pointed out the danger.
We all reacted instantly. Gulab, who was unarmed, grabbed my rifle, and he and two of his
buddies helped me climb the wall and jump down the much deeper drop on the other side.
Several of the villagers ran like hell up the hill to their rocky homes. Not Gulab. He took up
position behind that wall, aiming my sniper rifle straight at the enemy on the hillside.
The army comms guys moved into action, calling in the United States air armada we knew was
out there — fighter bombers and helicopters, ready to attack that mountain if there was even a
suggestion the Taliban might try to hit the incoming rescue helo.
I considered it was obvious that they were
planning one last offensive, one last-ditch attempt to
kill me. I grabbed a pair of NVGs and took up my position as spotter behind the wall, trying to
locate the mountain men, trying to nail them once and for all.
We could still see the rescue helo way out in the distance when the U.S. Armed Forces, who’d
plainly had it up to their eyeballs with this fucking Ben Sharmak, finally let it rip. They came
howling across those pitch-black crevasses and blasted the living hell out of those slopes: bombs,
rockets, everything they had. It was a storm of murderous explosive. No one could have lived out
there.
The lights went out for the Taliban that night. All those little white beams, their fires and lanterns
— everything went out.
And I just crouched there, calling out the information to the comms guy
next to me, identifying Taliban locations, the stuff I’m trained to do. I was standing up now with
a smile on my face, watching my guys pulverize those little bastards who beat up my kids and
killed my teammates. Fuck ’em, right?
It was a grim smile, I admit, but these guys had chased me, tortured me, pursued me, tried to kill
me about
four hundred times, blown me up, nearly kidnapped me, threatened to execute me. And
now my guys were sticking it right to ’em. Beautiful. I saw a report confirming thirty-two
Taliban and al Qaeda died out there that night. Not enough.
The shattering din high in the Hindu Kush died away. The U.S. air offensive was done. The
landing zone was cleared and made safe, and the rescue helo came rocketing in from the south.
The Green Berets were still in communication, and they talked the pilot down, into the newly
harvested village opium field. I remember the rotors of the helo made a green bioluminescent
static in the night air.
And I could hear it dropping down toward us, an apparition of howling U.S. airpower in the
night.
It was an all-encompassing, shattering, deafening din, thundering rather than echoing,
between the high peaks of the Hindu Kush. No helicopter ever smashed the local sound barriers
with more brutality. The eerie silence of those mountains retreated before the second decibel
onslaught of the night. The ground shuddered. The dust whipped up into a sandstorm. The rotors
screamed into the pure mountain air. It was the most beautiful sound I ever heard.
The helo came in slowly and put down a few yards from us. The loadmaster leaped to the ground
and opened the main door. The guys helped me into the cabin, and Gulab joined me. Instantly we
took off, and neither of us looked out at the blackness of the unlit village of Sabray. Me, because
I knew we could not see a thing; Gulab, because he was uncertain
when he would pass this way
again. The Taliban threats to both himself and his family were very much more serious than he
had ever admitted.
He was afraid of the helicopter and clung to my arm throughout the short journey to Asadabad.
And there we both disembarked. I was going on to Bagram, but for the moment Gulab was to
stay on this base, out there in his own country, and assist the U.S. military in any way he could. I
hugged him good-bye, this rather inscrutable tribesman who had risked his life for me. He
seemed to expect nothing in return, and I had one more shot at giving him my watch. But he
refused, as he had done four times in the past.
Our good-bye was painful for me, because I had no words in his language to express my thanks.
I’ll never know, but perhaps he too would have said something to me, if he’d only had the words.
It might even
have been warm or affectionate, like...well...“Noisy bastard, footsteps like an
elephant, ungrateful son of a gun.” Or “What’s the matter with our best goat’s milk, asshole?”
But there was nothing that could be said. I was going home. And he may never be able to go
home. Our paths, which had crossed so suddenly and so powerfully in a life-changing encounter
for both of us, were about to diverge.
I boarded the big C-130 for Bagram, back to my base. We touched down on the main runway at
2300, exactly six days and four hours since Mikey, Axe, Danny, and I had occupied this very
same spot, lying here on this ground, staring up at
the distant snowcapped peaks, laughing,
joking, always optimistic, unaware of the trial by fire which awaited us high in those mountains.
Less than a week. It might have been a thousand years.
I was greeted by four doctors and all the help I could possibly need. There was also a small
group of nurses, at least one of whom knew me from my volunteer work in the hospital. The
others were stunned at the sight of me, but this one nurse took one look at me standing at the top
of the ramp and burst into tears.
That’s how terrible I looked. I’d lost thirty-seven pounds, my face was scoured from the crash
down mountain one, my broken nose needed proper setting, I was
racked with pain from my leg,
my smashed wrist hurt like hell and so did my back, as it will when you’ve cracked three
vertebrae. I’d lost God knows how many pints of blood. I was white as a ghost, and I could
hardly walk.
The nurse just cried out, “Oh, Marcus!” and turned away, sobbing. I declined a stretcher and
leaned on the doctor, ignoring the pain. But he knew. “Come on, buddy,” he said. “Let’s get you
on the stretcher.”
But again I shook my head. I’d had a shot of morphine, and I tried to stand unassisted.
I turned to
the doc and looked him in the eye, and I told him, “I walked on here, and I’m walking off, by
myself. I’m hurt, but I’m still a SEAL, and they haven’t finished me. I’m walking.”
The doctor just shook his head. He’d met a lot of guys like me before, and he knew it wouldn’t
do a damn bit of good arguing. I guess he understood the only thought I had in my mind was
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