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“Run, Axe...right here, buddy, run!”
yelled Murph,
top of his lungs.
And Axe recovered his senses real quick, bullets flying around him, and he cleared those logs
and crashed into our hide, landing on his back. It’s unbelievable what you can do when the threat
to your own life is that bad.
He took the far left, slammed a new magazine into the breech, and started fighting, never missed
a beat, hammering away at our most vulnerable point of enemy attack. The three of us just kept
going, shooting them down, hoping and praying their numbers would lessen, that we had
punched a hole in their assault. But it sure as hell never seemed like it. Those guys were still
swarming, still firing. And the noise was still deafening.
The question was, Where was Danny? Was that little mountain lion still fighting, still trying to
make contact, as he pounded away at Sharmak’s troops? Was he still trying to get through to
HQ? None of us knew, but the answer was not long in arriving. From high up on the right on the
main cliff face there was a sudden, unusual movement. Someone was falling, and it had to be
Danny.
The flailing body crashed through the high woods and flipped at the ski jump, tumbling,
tumbling, all the way to the bottom, where it landed with a sickening thump. Just as we all had.
But Danny never moved, just lay there, either stunned or dead. And the folklore of the
brotherhood stood starkly before both Mikey and me:
No SEAL was ever left alone to die on the
battlefield. No SEAL.
I dropped my rifle and cleared the log in one bound. Mikey came right after me. Axe kept firing,
trying to give us cover, as we ducked down and ran fast across the flat ground to the base of the
cliff. Mikey was still pouring blood from his stomach, and I felt like I had a broken back, low
down, base of my spine.
We reached Danny together, hoisted him up, and manhandled him back to the logs, dragging him
into what passed for safety around here. They fired at us from the heights all the way across that
lethal ground, but no one got hit, and somehow, against truly staggering odds, we were all still
going, all in one piece, except for the shot Mikey took.
As the resident medic, I should have been able to help, but all my stuff had been ripped away in
the fall, and there was no time to do anything except shoot these bastards who carried AK-47s
and hope to Christ they’d give up. Or at least run out of those RPGs. They could hurt someone if
they weren’t careful. Fuckers.
Right then, I was confident we were going to make it. The ground fell away quite sharply behind
us, but way below was our target village, and it was on flat ground, with sturdy-looking houses.
Cover, that was all we needed, with our enemy caught flat-footed on flat ground. We’d be all
right. We’d get ’em.
Danny fought back, cleared his head, and tried to get up. But his face was rigid. He was in
terrible pain. And then I saw the blood pouring out of his hand.
“I’ve been shot, Marcus, can you help me?” he said.
“We’ve all been shot,” replied Mikey. “Can you fight?”
I stared at Danny’s right hand. His thumb had been blown right off. And I saw him grit his teeth
and nod, sweat streaming down his blackened face. He adjusted his rifle, banged in a new
magazine with the butt of his hand, and took his place in the center of our little gun line. Then he
turned to face the enemy once more. He was a bullmastiff, glaring up the mountain, and he
opened fire with everything he had.
Danny, Mikey, and Axe blasted that left flank while I held the right. The fire was still fierce on
all sides, but we sensed there were more dead Afghans to the left than there were to the right.
Murph shouted, “We’re going for the higher ground, this side.” And with all four barrels blazing,
we tried to storm that left flank, get a foothold on the steep slope, maybe even fight our way back
to the top if we could kill enough of them.
But they also wanted the higher ground, and they reinforced their right flank, driving down from
the top, anything to stop us getting that upper hand. We must have killed fifty or more of them,
and all four of us were still fighting. I guess they probably noticed that, because they were
prepared to fight to the last man to hold our left, their right.
There were so many of them, and we found ourselves slipping inexorably back down the hill as
the turbaned warriors closed in on us, driving us back by sheer weight of numbers, sheer volume
of fire. When they loosed off another battery of RPGs, we had no other option but to retreat and
dive back behind the crossed logs before they blew our heads off.
God only knew the size of whatever arms cache they were drawing ordnance from. But we were
just finding out what a force Sharmak and his guys really were: trained, heavily armed, fearless,
and strategically on the ball. Not quite what we expected when we first landed at Bagram.
Back behind the logs, we kept going, mowing them down on the flanks whenever we could get a
clear shot. But again, the inflexible, unswerving progress of Sharmak’s forces coming down the
escarpment after us was simply too overwhelming. Not so much due to the volume of fire but
because of their irresistible drive down the left and right of our position.
The logs gave us good cover from the front and not bad to ninety degrees. But once they got past
that, firing from slightly behind us, on both sides — well, that was the reason we jumped from
the heights in the first place, risking our necks, not knowing when or even if we would land on
reasonable ground.
There were not enough of us to protect our flanks. We were too occupied defending our position
against a head-on attack. I suppose the goatherds had told them we were only four, and Sharmak
swiftly guessed we would be vulnerable on the wings.
I’m guessing a dozen SEALs could have held and then destroyed them, but that would have been
odds of around ten or eleven to one. We were only four, and that was probably thirty-five to one.
Which is known, in military vernacular, as a balls-to-the-wall situation. Especially as we now
seemed incapable of calling up the cavalry from HQ.
Right here was a twenty-first-century version of General Custer’s last stand, Little Bighorn with
turbans. But they hadn’t gotten us yet. And if I had my way, they were never going to. I know all
four of us thought exactly that. Our only option, however, was to get to flatter ground. And there
wasn’t any of that up here. There was only one way for us to go, backward and down, straight
down.
Mike Murphy called it.
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