Marcus luttrell

 
“No! No! No Taliban!”
I guess if I’d been at my peak, I’d have accepted this several minutes ago, before Marcus’s Last 
Stand and all that. But I was losing it now. I saw the leader walk up to me. He smiled and said 
his name was Sarawa. He was the village doctor, he somehow communicated in rough English. 
He was thirtyish, bearded, tall for an Afghan, with an intellectual’s high forehead. I recall 
thinking he didn’t look much like a doctor to me, not wandering around on the edge of this 
mountain like a native tracker. 

---

But there was something about him. He didn’t look like a member of al Qaeda either. By now I’d 
seen a whole lot of Taliban warriors, and he looked nothing like any of them. There was no 
arrogance, no hatred in his eyes. If he hadn’t been dressed like a leading man from 
Murder up 
the Khyber Pass,
he could have been an American college professor on his way to a peace rally. 
He lifted up his loose white shirt to show me he had no concealed gun or knife. Then he spread 
his arms wide in front of him, I guess the international sign for “I am here in friendship.” 
I had no choice but to trust him. “I need help,” I said, uttering a phrase which must have shed an 
especially glaring light on the obvious. “Hospital — water.” 
“Hah?” said Sarawa. 
“Water,” I repeated. “I must have water.” 
“Hah?” said Sarawa. 
“Water,” I yelled, pointing back toward the pool. 
“Ah!”
he exclaimed. 
“Hydrate!”
I could not help laughing, weakly. Hydrate! Who the hell was this crazy-assed tribesman who 
knew only long words? 
He called over a kid who had a bottle. I think he went and filled it with fresh water from the 
stream. He brought it back to me and I kept chugging away, glugging down the water, two good-
sized bottles of it. 
“Hydrate,” said Sarawa. 
“You got that right, pal,” I confirmed. 
At which point we began to converse in that no-man’s-land of language, the one where no one 
knows hardly a word of the other’s native tongue. 
“I’ve been shot,” I told him and showed him my wound, which had never really stopped 
bleeding. 
He examined it and nodded sternly, as if he understood the clear truth that I badly needed 
medical attention. Heaven knows how severely my left leg would be infected. All the dirt, mud, 
and shale I’d inflicted on it couldn’t have done it much good. 
I told him I was a doctor too, thinking it might help somehow. I knew there would likely be 
savage retribution for a non-Taliban village sheltering an American fugitive, and I was praying 
they would not just leave me here. 
I wished to hell I still had some of my medical gear with me, but that was lost a lifetime ago on 
the mountain with Mikey, Axe, and Danny. Anyway, Sarawa seemed to believe I was a doctor, 
although he seemed equally certain he knew where I’d come from. With a succession of signals 
and a very few words, he conveyed to me he knew all about the firefight on the mountain. And 

---

he kept pointing directly at me, as if to confirm he absolutely knew I had been one of the 
combatants. 
The tribal bush telegraph up here must be fantastic. They have no means of fast communications, 
no phones, cars, nothing. Just one another, goatherds wandering the mountainside, passing on the 
necessary information. And here was this Sarawa, who had presumably been miles away from 
the action, informing me about the battle which I had helped fight the previous day. 
He patted me reassuringly on the shoulder and then retreated into a kind of conference with his 
fellow villagers while I talked to the kid. 
He had only one question, and he had a lot of trouble asking it, trying to make an American 
understand. In the end I got his drift: