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He literally dragged me into a standing position, and then...He was running and trying to make me keep up with him, and he kept shouting, signaling, again and again: Taliban! Taliban are here! In the village! Run, Dr. Marcus, for God’s sake, run!
Gulab had now become the principal figure in my life. He called the security shots, made sure I had food and water, and was, in my mind, the link between us and his father as the old man toiled through the mountains to Asadabad.
The Afghani policeman betrayed no sign of stress, but he did reveal to me that a letter had been received earlier from the commander of the Taliban forces. It was a written demand that the villagers of Sabray hand over the American immediately.
The demand came from the rising officer of the Taliban army in the northeast, the firebrand “Commodore Abdul,” right-hand man to Sharmak and a character who plainly saw himself as some kind of Eastern Che Guevara. His reputation was apparently growing as an ambush leader and as an officer who was expert at bringing in new recruits through the passes.
I never knew, but it would not have surprised me to learn he had been in the front line of the army that confronted the team on the ridge, though I have no doubt the strategy was planned by the senior man, Sharmak, who had done so much damage already.
They did not, however, faze Gulab. He and his father had replied that it made no difference how bad the Taliban wanted the American, they were not going to get him. When Gulab told me, he made a very distinct, brave, dismissive gesture. And he spent some time trying to convey his personal position: They can’t frighten me. My village is well armed, and we have our own laws and rights. The Taliban need our support a lot more than we need theirs.
He was a gallant and confident man, at least on the surface. But I noticed he took no chances when there was any kind of suggestion the Taliban were coming in. I guess that’s why we ended up sleeping on the roof.
Also, he had not the slightest interest in a reward. I offered to give him my watch in return for his unending decency to me. I implored him to take my watch, because it was all I had to offer. But he always refused to accept it. As for money, what use could that have been to him? There was nothing to spend it on. No shops, the nearest town miles and miles away, a journey that had to be made on foot.
A couple of the sneering kids did ask for money, teenagers, maybe sixteen- or seventeen-year-olds. But they were planning to join the Taliban and leave Sabray, to fight for “freedom.” Gulab told me he had no intention of leaving here. And I understood that. He was part of the fabric of the village. One day he would be the village elder. His family would grow up here. It was all he had ever known, all he had ever wanted. This very beautiful corner of the Hindu Kush was where he belonged. What use was money to Mohammad Gulab of Sabray?
The last of the kids had left my room, and I was lying there contemplating the world, when there was a kick on the door that nearly took it off its hinges. No one kicks a door in quite like that except a Taliban raiding party. That was all I could imagine. But around here, where doors don’t fit, a good bang with your sandal is about the only way to get the sonofabitch open, short of a full-blooded shoulder charge.
But the sudden shock of a door being kicked in about five feet from your head is a nerve-racking experience. And I’m neurotic about it to this day. Because the sound of the crash on the door is the sound I heard before I was tortured. It sometimes dominates my dreams. I wake up sweating, a tremendous crash echoing in my mind. And no matter where I am, I need to check the door lock before I can sleep again. It’s pretty goddamned inconvenient at times.
Anyway, this was not the Taliban. It was just my own guys opening the door, which must have been shut firmly by the kids. I restarted my heart, and my room stayed kind of quiet until midmorning, when the door catapulted open with a violent bang! that shook the goddamned mountain, never mind the room. And once more I almost jumped out of my Afghan jumpsuit. And this time they were shouting at me. I could not understand what, but something had broken out, things were on the move. Jesus Christ! I had to steady this group down. There were adults and kids, all mixed up, and they were all yelling the same thing — “Parachute! Parachute! Parachute! Dr. Marcus, come quick!”
I made my way outside, aching to high heaven all the way. I resolved to have another shot of that opium soon as I returned, but for now it was all eyes upward, straight at the clear blue, cloudless skies. What could we see? Nothing. Whatever had landed was down, and I stood there trying to make them understand I needed to know if there had been a man on the end of that parachute, and if so, how many parachutes there had been. Was this a drop zone for my buddies to come right in and get me?
The upshot of this was also nothing. The tribesmen simply could not understand me. The kids, who I detected were the ones who had actually spotted the parachute, or parachutes, were just as mystified. All the hours of study we had done together had come to nothing.
There was a sudden conference, and most of the adults upped and left. I went back in. They returned maybe fifteen minutes later and brought with them all my gear, which they had hidden away from the eyes of the Taliban. They gave me back my rifle and ammunition, my H-gear (that’s my harness), and in its pocket, my PRC-148 intersquad radio, the one for which I’d lost the little microphone earpiece. It still had its weakish battery and its still-operational emergency beacon.
I was aware that if I grabbed the bull by the horns and went right outside and let rip with this communications gear, I would once more be a living, breathing distress signal, which the Amer-icans might catch from a cruising helo. On the other hand, the Taliban, hidden all around in the hills, could scarcely miss me. I found this a bit of a dilemma.
But the rearmament guys of Sabray also brought me my laser and the disposable camera. I grabbed my rifle and held it like you might caress a returning lover. This was the weapon God had granted me. And, so far as I could tell, still wanted me to have. We’d traveled a long way together, and I probably deserved some kind of an award for mountain climbing, maybe the Grand Prix Hindu Kush presented to Sherpa Marcus. Sorry, forget all that, I meant mountain falling, the Grand Prix Hindu Crash, awarded unanimously to Sherpa Marcus the Unsteady.
Outside, I put on my harnesss, locked and loaded the rifle, and prepared for whatever the hell might await us. But with my harness back, I was not yet done with the kids. That harness contained my notebook, and we had access to the village ballpoint pen.
I marched them back into the house and carefully drew two parachutes on the page. I drew a man swinging down from the first one. On the second one, I drew a box. I showed both pictures to the kids and asked them, Which one? And about twenty little fingers shot forward, all aimed directly at the parachute with the box.
Beautiful. I had intel. There had been some kind of a supply drop. And since the local tribesmen do not use either aircraft or parachutes, those supplies had to be American. They also had to be aimed at the remnants of my team. Everyone else was dead. I was that remnant.
I asked the kids exactly where the chutes had dropped, and they just pointed to the mountain. Then they got into gear and raced out there, I guess to try and show me. I stood outside and watched them go, still a bit baffled. Had my buddies somehow found me? Had the old man reached Asadabad? Either way, it was one hell of a coincidence the Americans had made a supply drop a few hundred yards from where I was taking cover. The mountains were endless, and I could have been anywhere.
I went back into the house to rest my leg and talk for a while with Gulab. He had not seen the parachute drop, and he had no idea how far along the road his father had journeyed. In my mind, I knew what every active combat soldier knows, that Napoleon’s army advanced on Moscow at one mile every fifteen minutes, with full packs and muskets. That’s four miles an hour, right? That way, the village elder should have made it in maybe eleven hours.
Except for two mitigating factors: (1) he was about two hundred years old, and (2) from where I stood, the mountain he was crossing had a gradient slightly steeper than the Washington Monument. If the VE made it by Ramadan 2008, I’d be kinda lucky.
One hour later, there it goes again. Bang! That goddamned door went off like a bomb. Even Gulab jumped. But not as high as I did. In came the kids, accompanied by a group of adults. They carried with them a white document, which must have looked like a snowball in a coal mine up here where the word litter simply does not exist.
I took it from them and realized it was an instruction pamphlet for a cell phone. “Where the hell did you get this?” I asked them.
“Right out there, Dr. Marcus. Right out there.” Everyone was pointing at the mountainside, and I had no trouble with the translation.
“Parachute?” I said.
“Yes, Dr. Marcus. Yes. Parachute.”
I sent them right out there again, trying to make it clear that I needed the mountainside searched for anything like this, anything that might have come in on the parachutes.
My guys don’t drop cell phone pamphlets, but they might have been trying to drop me a cell phone and the pamphlet just came with it. Either way, I could not find out for myself, so I had to get the guys to do it for me. Gulab stayed, but the others went with the kids, like a golf crowd fanned out to look for Tiger’s ball in deep rough.
Gulab and I settled down. We had a cup of tea and some of those delicious little candies, then lounged back on our big cushions. Suddenly, bang! The door nearly cannoned off its hinges. I shot tea all over the rug, and in came everyone again.
This time they had found a 55-90 radio battery and an MRE (meal ready to eat). The guys must have thought I was starving. Correct. But the battery did not fit my PRC-148 radio, which sucked, because if it had, I could have fired up a permanent distress signal straight into the sky above the village. As things were, I had no idea if my present weak radio beacon would reach much higher than the rooftops.
I had no need to interrogate the kids further. If there had been anything else out there on the mountain, they’d have found it. There obviously wasn’t. Whatever the drop had contained, the Taliban had beaten the kids to it. The one bit of reverse good news was they clearly had the cell phone or phones, and they would probably try to use them. And the entire U.S. electronic surveillance system in the province of Kunar would be listening, ready to locate the caller.
But then I noticed something which made my blood boil. Almost every one of the kids had been battered. They had bruises on their faces, cut lips, and bloody noses. Those little pricks out there had beaten up my kids, punched them in their faces, to stop them getting the stuff from the drop. There is no end to the lengths these people will go to to win this war.
And I’ll never forget what they did to the kids of Sabray. I spent the rest of the day patching them up, all those brave little guys trying not to cry. I nearly wiped out the entire contents of Sarawa’s medical bag. Whenever I hear the word Taliban, I think of that day first.
More strategically, it did seem the American military believed there was at least one SEAL still alive down here. The question was, What now? No one wanted to risk sending in another MH-47 helicopter, since the Taliban seemed to have become very adroit at knocking them down. Mind you, they have had a lot of practice, right back from when they were using those old Stinger missiles to knock the Russians out of the sky.
And we all knew the danger point was landing, when the ramp was down, ready for an insert. That’s when the mountain men aimed the RPGs straight in the back, to explode right in the fuel-tank area. And I guess the U.S. flight crews could never be sure of any Afghan village, who might be in it, what weapons they had, and how skilled they might be at using them.
I knew they’d need a pretty good aerial group to soften the place up before they could come in and get me. And I was desperate to give them some kind of a guide. I rigged up my radio emergency beacon to transmit through the open window. I had no idea how much battery I had left, so I just turned it on, aimed it high, and left it there on the window ledge, hopefully pinpointing my whereabouts to any overhead flights by the air force or the Night Stalkers.
To my surprise, U.S. reaction happened a whole lot quicker than I thought it would. That afternoon. The U.S. Air Force came thundering in, dropping twelve-hundred-pound bombs on the mountainside beyond the village, right where the Taliban had picked up the stuff from the parachute drop.
The blasts were incredible. In my house, well, I thought the whole building was coming down. Rocks and dust cascaded into the room. One of the walls sustained a major structural fault as blast after blast shook the mountain from top to bottom. Outside, people were screaming as the bombs hit and exploded; thatched roofs were blown off; there was a dust storm outside. Mothers and kids were rushing for cover, the tribesmen were at a complete loss. Everyone had heard of American airpower, but they had not seen it firsthand, like this.
In fact none of the bombs, I guess by design, hit Sabray. But they came close. Damned close. All around the perimeter. There must have been a big lesson right here, and a very simple one. If you allow the Taliban and al Qaeda to make camp in and around your village, no good can possibly come of it.
However, that wasn’t much comfort to my villagers as they tried to clean up the mess, rebuild walls and roofs, and calm down frightened kids, most of whom had had a very bad day. And all because of me. I looked out at the havoc around me and felt the most terrible sadness. And Gulab understood what I was feeling. He came over and put his arm around me and said, “Ah, Dr. Marcus, Taliban very bad. We know. We fight.”
Jesus. Just what I need. A brand-new battle. We both retreated into the house and sat down for a while, trying to plot a course for me which would cause the least possible trouble to the farmers of Sabray.
It seemed apparent that my presence here was causing a more and more threatening attitude from the Taliban, and the last thing I wanted was to cause pain and unhappiness among these people who had sheltered me. But my options were narrow, despite the Americans being, it seemed, hot on my trail. One of the main problems was that Gulab’s father had not made contact with us, because there was no way he could. And we had no way of knowing whether he had made it to a military base.
The Taliban were probably not overwhelmingly thrilled at being bombed by the U.S. Air Force and had probably sustained many casualties out there on the mountain. It occurred to both Gulab and me that the word revenge might not be far from the curled lips of these hate-filled Muslim fanatics and that I might be the most convenient target.
That meant a major problem and probably loss of life for the people of Sabray. Gulab himself was under pressure since he’d received that threat from the Taliban. He had a wife, children, and many relatives to think about. In the end, the decision made itself. Clearly, I had to leave, just to keep the village from becoming a battleground. Lokhay had worked well, but we both wondered if its mystical tribal folklore could hold out indefinitely in the face of the wounded and somewhat embarrassed Taliban and al Qaeda fighters.
The U.S. bombardment of the mountainside had for a while raised my hopes and expectations. After all, here were my own guys, swooping over these tribesmen from the Middle Ages, hitting them hard with high-tech modern ordnance. That’s got to be good, right?
But not everything’s good. Retribution, against me and my protectors, was now uppermost in my mind. I think it was the tight-fisted old oil baron John Paul Getty who once observed that for every plus that takes place in this world, there is, somewhere, somehow, a minus. He got that right.
The question was, Where should I go? And here, my options were very limited. I could never make the long walk to the base at Asadabad, and anyhow that would seem inane since the village elder was either in there or very nearly. And the only place of refuge close by was the U.S. outpost at Monagee, two miles away over a steep mountain.
I did not relish the plan, and neither would the guys who would need to assist me on the journey. But so far as Gulab and I could tell, there was nothing else we could do except hunker down and prepare for a Taliban attack, and I really did not want to put anyone through that. Especially the kids.
We thus resolved that I should walk with him and two others over the mountain to the village of Monagee, which sounds Irish but is strictly Pashtun and is cooperative with the U.S. military. The plan was to wait until long after dark and then slip out into the high pastures around eleven o’clock, stealthily passing right under the noses of the probably sleeping Taliban watchmen.
I could only hope my left leg would stand up to the journey. I’d lost a ton of weight, but I was still a very big guy to be half carried by a couple of slender Afghan tribesmen, most of whom were five foot eight and 110 pounds soaked to the skin. But Gulab did not seem too worried, and we settled down to wait out the long dark hours before eleven, when we would make our break.
Night fell, quite abruptly, as it does up here in the peaks when the sun finally slips behind them. We lit no lanterns, offering no clue to the Taliban. We just sat there in the dark, sipping tea and waiting for the right moment to leave.
Suddenly, from right out of the blue, there was the most colossal thunderstorm. The rain came swiftly, lashing rain, driving sideways over the mountain. It was rain like you rarely see, the kind of stuff usually identified with those hurricanes they keep replaying on the Weather Channel.
It belted down on the village of Sabray. All windows and doors were slammed tight shut, because this was monsoon rain, driving in, right across the country from the southwest. No one would have set foot outside home because that wind and rain would have swept anyone away, straight off the mountain.
Outside, great gushes of water cascaded down the steep main trail through the village. It sounded like we were in the middle of a river, the water racing past the front door. An area like this cannot, of course, flood, not up here, because the gradient is far too steep to hold water. But it can sure as hell get wet.
We had a rock-and-mud roof that was sound, but I did wonder how some of the households down below us were getting along. Everything here is communal, including the cooking, so I guess everyone was just crowded in together in the undamaged houses, out of the rain.
Up above us, the mountaintops were lit up by great bolts of forked lightning, ice blue in color, jagged, electric neon in the sky. Thunder rolled across the Hindu Kush. Gulab and I got down close to the thick rock wall at the back of the room because our own house was by no means watertight. But the rain was not driving through the gaps in the rocks and mud. Our spot was dry, but we were still deafened and dazzled by this atrocity of nature raging outside.
That level of storm can be unnerving, but when it goes on for as long as this one, you become accustomed to its fury. Every time I looked out the window, the lightning flashed and crackled above the highest peaks. But occasionally it illuminated the sky beyond our immediate range of hills, and that was just about the creepiest sight you’ve ever seen, like the wicked witch of the Kush was about to come hurtling through the sky on a broomstick.
Lightning out in front, naked and violent, is one thing. But similar bolts hidden from view, turning the heavens into a weird, electric blue, made a landscape like this look unearthly, enormous black summits, stark against the universe. It was a forbidding sight for a wounded warrior more used to the great flat plains of Texas.
But slowly I became used to it and finally fell into a deep sleep flat out on the floor. Our departure time of 2300 came and went and still the rain lashed down. Midnight came, and with it, a new calendar date, Sunday, July 3, which this year would be the midpoint of the Fourth of July weekend, a time for celebration all over the U.S.A., at least in most parts, except for those in profound mourning for the lost special forces.
While I was sitting out the storm, the mood back home on the ranch, according to Mom, was very depressed. I had been missing in action for five days. The throng gathered in our front yard now numbered almost three hundred. They had never left, but the crowd was growing very solemn.
There was still a police cordon around the property. The local sheriffs had been joined by the judges, and the state police were busy providing personal escorts in the form of cruisers to accompany the SEALs on their twice-daily training runs, front and rear.
Attending the daily prayers were local firemen, construction men, ranchers, bookstore owners, engineers, mechanics, teachers, two charter-boat fishing captains. There were salesmen, mortgage brokers, lawyers from Houston, and local attorneys. All of them fighting off my demise in the best way they knew how.
Mom says the whole place was lit up all night by the lights from the automobiles. Someone had brought in portacabins, and there seemed little point in people going anywhere. Not until they knew whether I was still alive. According to Mom, they separated into groups, one offering prayers every hour, others singing hymns, others drinking beers. Local ladies who had known Morgan and me all our lives were unable to hold back their tears. All of them were in attendance for only one reason, to comfort my parents if the worst should be announced.
I don’t know that much about other states, because my experience in California has been strictly sheltered in the SPECWARCOM compound. But in my opinion, that nearly weeklong vigil carried out in an entirely impromptu manner by the people of Texas says a huge amount about them, their compassion, their generosity, and their love for their stricken neighbors.
Mom and Dad did not know all of them by any means, but no one will ever forget the single-minded purpose of their visits. They just wanted to help in any way they could, just wanted to be there, because one of their own was lost on the battlefield far, far away.
And as the weekend wore on, no Stars and Stripes were flying. I guess they were not sure whether to raise them to half-mast or not. My dad says it was obvious people were becoming disheartened — the sheer regularity of the signal by phone from Coronado: “No news.” The grimness of the media announcing stuff like: “Hope is fading for the missing Navy SEALs...seems like those early reports of the death of all four will be proved accurate...Texas family mourns their loss...Navy still refusing to confirm SEALs deaths . . .”
It beats the hell out of me. In the military, if we don’t know something, we say we don’t know and proceed to shut up until we do. Some highly paid charlatans in the media think it’s absolutely fine to take a wild guess at the truth and then tell a couple of million people it’s cast-iron fact, just in case they might be right.
Well, I hope they’re proud of themselves, because they nearly broke my mom’s heart, and if it had not been for the stern authority of Senior Chief Petty Officer Chris Gothro, I think she might have had a nervous breakdown.
That morning he found her in the house, privately crying, and right then Senior Chief Gothro stepped in. He stood her up, turned her around, and ordered her to look him straight in the eye. “Listen, Holly,” he said, “Marcus is missing in action. That’s MIA in our language. That’s all. Missing means what it says. It means we cannot at present locate him. It does not mean he’s dead. And he’s not dead until I tell you he’s dead, understand?
“We do not have a body. But we do have movement on the ground. We cannot tell right now who it is, or how many there are. But no one, repeat, no one in SPECWARCOM believes he is dead. I want you to understand that, clearly.”
The austere words of a professional must have hit home. Mom rallied after that, aided and comforted by Morgan, who still claimed he was in contact with me and that whatever else was happening, I was not dead.
There were now thirty-five SEALs on the property, including Commander Jeff Bender, Admiral Maguire’s public relations officer and a fantastic encouragement to everyone. Navy SEAL chaplain Trey Vaughn from Coronado was a spiritual pillar of strength. Everyone wanted to talk to him, and he dealt with it all with optimism and hope. When the mood was becoming morbid and there were too many people in tears, he would urge them to be positive. “Stop that crying right now...we need you...we need your prayers...and Marcus needs your prayers. But most of all we need your energy. No giving up, hear me?” No one will ever forget Trey Vaughn.
There were also two naval chaplains from the local command who just showed up out of nowhere. Chief Bruce Misex, the navy recruiter boss from Houston, who’d known me a long time, turned up and never left. As the days had worn on, shipments of seafood started to arrive from the gulf ports to the south: fresh shrimp, catfish, and other white fish. One lady brought an enormous consignment of sushi every day. And families who had spent generations in the South stuck hard by that old southern tradition of bringing covered dishes containing pots of chicken and dumplings to a funeral.
Dad thought that was a bit premature, but there were a lot of people to feed, and he assumed a loose command of the cooking. Everyone was grateful for everything. He says it was strange but there was never any question of anyone going home. They were just going to stay there, for better or for worse.
Meanwhile, back in the freakin’ thunderstorm, more than thirty pounds lighter than when I first set off on this mission, I was sleeping like a child. Gulab said at 0300 it had been raining for nearly six hours without ever slowing up. I was out to the world, the first time I had slept soundly for a week, oblivious to the weather, oblivious to the Taliban.
I slept right through the night and woke up in broad daylight after the rain. I checked my watch and rounded on Gulab. I was supposed to be in Monagee, for chris’sakes, why the hell hadn’t he made sure I was? What kind of a guide was he, allowing me to oversleep?
Gulab was sanguine. And since we were growing very efficient at communicating, he was able to tell me he knew it was the first time I had been able to sleep for a long time, and he thought it would be better to leave me. Anyway, he said, we could not possibly have gone out in that weather because it was too dangerous. The overnight walk to Monagee had been out of the question.
One way and another, I took all this pretty badly. I actually stormed out of the house, racked by yet another disappointment; after the helicopters that never came, Sarawa’s sudden vanishing while I was in the cave, the village elder taking off without me. And now the trip to Monagee in ruins. Christ. Could I ever believe a goddamned word these people said?
I’d been asleep for so long, I decided to indulge myself in a luxurious and prolonged pee. I walked outside wearing my harness and a very sour expression, temporarily forgetting entirely that I owed my life to the people of this village. I left my rifle behind and walked slowly down the steep hill, which was now as slippery as all hell because of the rain.
At the conclusion of this operation, I took myself up the hill a little way and sat down on the drying grass, mainly because I did not wish to be any ruder to Gulab than I already had been, but also because I just wanted to sit alone for a while and nurse my thoughts.
I still considered my best bet would be to find a way to get to the nearest American military base. And that was still Monagee. I stared up at the towering mountain I would have to cross, the rain and dew now glinting off it in the early morning sun, and I think I visibly flinched.
It really would be one heck of a climb, and my leg was aching already, not at the thought of it but because I’d walked a hundred yards; bullet wounds tend to take a while to heal up. Also, despite Sarawa’s bold efforts, that leg was, I knew, still full of shrapnel, which would not be much of a help toward a pain-free stroll over the peak.
Anyway, I just sat there on the side of the mountain and tried to clear my mind, to decide whether there was anything else I could do except sit around and wait for a new night when Gulab and the guys could assist me to Monagee. And all the time, I was weighing the possibility of the Taliban coming in on some vengeful attack in retribution for yesterday’s bombardment.
The fact was, I was a living, breathing target as well as a distress signal. There sat the mighty Sharmak, with his second in command, “Commodore Abdul,” and a large, trained army, all of them with essentially nothing else to do except kill me. And if they managed to make it into the village and hit the house I was staying in, I’d be lucky to fend them off and avoid a short trip to Pakistan for publicity and execution.
Christ, those guys would have loved nothing more in all the world than to grab me and announce to the Arab television stations they had defeated one of the top U.S. Navy SEAL teams. Not just defeated, wiped them out in battle, smashed the rescue squad, blown up the helicopter, executed all survivors, and here they had the last one.
The more I thought about it, the more untenable my position seemed to be. Could the goatherds of Sabray band together and fight shoulder to shoulder to save me? Or would the brutal killers of al Qaeda and the Taliban in the end get their way? It was odd, but I still did not realize the full power of that lokhay. No one had fully explained it to me. I knew there was something, but that ancient tribal law was still a mystery to me.
I stared around the hills, but I could see no one outside of the village. Gulab and his guys always behaved as if the very mountainside was alive with hidden danger, and while he did not in my mind make much of an alarm clock, he had to be an expert on the bandit country which surrounds his own Sabray.
It was thus with rising concern that I saw Gulab racing down the hill toward me. He literally dragged me into a standing position and then pulled me down the trail leading to the lower reaches of the village. He was running and trying to make me keep up with him, and he kept shouting, signaling, again and again: Taliban! Taliban are here! In the village! Run, Dr. Marcus, for God’s sake, run!
He pushed his right shoulder up under my left arm to bear some of my fast-dwindling weight, and I half hobbled, half ran, half fell down the hill. Of course by my own recent standards this was like a stroll on the beach.
I suddenly realized we might have to fight and I’d left my rifle back in the house. I had my ammunition in the harness, but nothing to fire it with. And now it was my turn to yell, “Gulab! Gulab! Stop! Stop! I don’t have my gun.”
He replied something I took to be Afghan for “What a complete fucking idiot you’ve turned out to be.”
But whatever had put the fear of God into him was still right there, and he had no intention of stopping until he had located a refuge for us. We ducked and dived through the lower village trails until he found the house he was looking for. Gulab kicked the door open, rammed it shut behind him, and helped me down onto the floor. And there I sat, unarmed, largely useless, and highly apprehensive about what might happen in the next hour.
Gulab, without a word, opened the front door and took off at high speed. He went past the window like a rocket, running hard up the gradient, possibly going for the Hindu Kush all-comers 100-meters record. God knows where he was going, but he’d gone.
Three minutes later he kicked open the door and came charging back into the house. He was carrying my rifle as well as his own AK-47. I had seventy-five rounds left. I think he had more in his own ammunition belt. Gravely he handed me the Mark 12 sniper rifle and said simply, “Taliban, Dr. Marcus. We fight.”
He looked more serious than I’d ever seen him. Not afraid, just full of determination. Up on that mountain, when he had first seen me, Sarawa had made the decision with his buddies that I, a wounded American, should be granted lokhay. The doctor knew perfectly well from the first moment by that gushing mountain river that the situation might ultimately come to this. Even if I didn’t.
It was a decision that, right from the start, had affected everyone in the village. I think most people had accepted it, and it had obviously been endorsed by the village elder. I’d seen a few angry faces full of hatred, but they were not in the majority. And now the village chief of law and order, Mohammad Gulab, was prepared to stand by that unspoken vow his people had given to me.
He was doing it not for personal gain but out of a sense of honor that reached back down the generations, two thousand years of Pashtunwalai tradition: You will defend your guest to the death. I watched Gulab carefully as he rammed a new magazine into his AK. This was a man preparing to step right up to the plate. And I saw that light of goodness in his dark eyes, the way you always do when someone is making a brave and selfless action.
I thanked Gulab and banged a new magazine into my rifle. I stared out the window and assessed the battlefield. We were low down on almost flat terrain, but the Taliban’s attack would be launched from the higher ground, the way they always preferred it. I wondered how many other rock-and-mud houses in Sabray were also shielding men who were about to fight.
The situation was serious but not dire. We had excellent cover, and I didn’t think the enemy knew precisely where I was. So far as I could see, the Battle for Murphy’s Ridge represented a two-edged sword. First of all, the tribesmen could be seething with fury about the number of their guys killed in action by Mikey, Axe, Danny, and me. This might even mean a suicide bomber or an attack so reckless they’d risk any number of warriors just to get me. I wasn’t crazy about either option.
On the other hand, they might be slightly scared at the prospect of facing even one of that tiny American team that had wiped out possibly 50 percent of a Taliban assault force.
Sure, they knew I was wounded, but they also knew I would be well armed by the villagers, even if I had lost my own rifle. I guessed they would either throw everything at me, the hell with the expense, or take it real steady, fighting their way through the village house by house until they had Gulab and me cornered.
But an impending attack requires quick, expert planning. I needed to operate fast and make Gulab understand our tactics. He immediately gave way to my experience, which made me think he had never quite accepted my story about being a doctor. He knew I’d fought on the ridge, and right now he was ready to do my bidding.
We had two areas to cover, the door and the window. It wouldn’t have been much good if I’d been blasting away through the window at Taliban down the street when a couple of those sneaky little bastards crept through the front door and shot me in the back.
I explained it was up to Gulab to cover the entrance, to make sure I had the split second I would need to swing around and cut ’em down before they could open fire. Ideally I would have preferred him to issue an early warning that the enemy was coming. That way I might have been able to get into the shadows in the corners and take ’em out maybe six at a time instead of just gunning down the leader.
Ideally I would have liked a heavy piece of furniture to ram in front of the door, just to buy me a little extra time. But there was no furniture, just those big cushions, which were obviously not sufficiently heavy.
Anyway, Gulab understood the strategy and nodded fiercely, the way he always did when he was sure of something. “Okay, Marcus,” he said. And it did not escape me, he’d dropped the Dr. part.
When battle began, Gulab would man the end of the window that gave him the best dual view of the door. I would concentrate on whatever frontal assault might be taking place. I’d need to shoot steadily and straight, wasting nothing, just like Axe and Danny did on the mountain while Mikey called the shots.
I tried to tell Gulab to stay calm and shoot straight, nothing hysterical. That way we’d win or, at worst, cause a disorderly Taliban retreat.
He looked a bit vacant. I could tell he was not understanding. So I hit him with an old phrase we always use before a conflict: “Okay, guys, let’s rock ’n’ roll.”
Matter of fact, that was worse. Gulab thought I was about to give him dancing lessons. It might have been funny if the situation had not been so serious. And then we both heard the opening bursts of gunfire, high up in the village.
There was a lot of it. Too much. The sheer volume of fire was ridiculous, unless the Taliban were planning to wipe out the entire population of Sabray. And I knew they would not consider that because such a slaughter would surely end all support from these tribal villages up here in the mountains.
No, they would not do that. They wanted me, but they would never kill another hundred Afghan people, including women and children, in order to get me. The Taliban and their al Qaeda cohorts were mercilessly cruel, but this Ben Sharmak was not stupid.
Besides, I detected no battlefield rhythm to the gunfire. It was not being conducted with the short, sharp bursts of trained men going for a target. It came in prolonged volleys, and I listened carefully. There was no obvious return of fire, and right then I knew what was happening.
These lunatics had come rolling out of the trees into the village, firing randomly into the air and aiming at nothing, the way they often do, all jumping up and down and shouting, “Death to the infidel.” Stupid pricks.
Their loose objective is always to frighten the life out of people, and right now they seemed to be succeeding. I could hear women screaming, children crying, but no return of fire from the tribesmen of Sabray. I knew precisely what that would sound like, and I was not hearing it.
I looked at Gulab. He was braced for action, leaning in the window with me, one eye on the front door. We both clicked our safety catches open.
Up above we could still hear the screaming, but the gunfire subsided. Little sonsabitches were probably beating up the kids. Which might have inspired me to get right back up there and take on the whole jihadist army single-handed, but I held back, held my fire, and waited.
We waited for maybe forty-five minutes and then it was quiet. As if they had never been here. That unseen village calm had returned, there was no sense of panic or sign of injured people. I left it to Gulab to call this one. “Taliban gone,” he said simply.
“What happens now?” I asked him. “Bagram?”
Gulab shook his head. “Bagram,” he said. Then he signaled for the umpteenth time, “Helicopter will come.”
I rolled my eyes heavenward. I’d heard this helicopter crap before. And I had news for Gulab. “Helicopter no come,” I told him.
“Helicopter come,” he replied.
As ever, I could not really know what Gulab knew or how he had discovered what was happening. But right now he believed the Taliban had gone into the house where I had been staying and found I was missing. No one had betrayed me, and they had not dared to conduct a house-to-house search for fear of further alienating the people and, in particular, the village elder.
This armed gang of tribesmen, who were hell-bent on driving out the Americans and the government, could not function up here in these protective mountains entirely alone. Without local support their primitive supply line would perish, and they would rapidly begin to lose recruits. Armies need food, cover, and cooperation, and the Taliban could only indulge in so much bullying before these powerful village leaders decided they preferred the company of the Americans.
That’s why they had just evacuated Sabray. They would still surround the village, awaiting their chance to grab me, but they would not risk causing major disruption to the day-to-day lives of the people. I’d been here for five nights now, including the night in the cave, and the Taliban had crossed the boundaries of Sabray only twice, once for a few hours of violence late in the evening, and once just now for maybe an hour.
Gulab was certain they had gone, but he was equally certain we could not dare go back to the house. It was almost ten in the morning by now, and Gulab was preparing to leave and take me with him, once more out into the mountains.
It had passed midnight back in Texas and the vigil at our ranch continued. The media was still voicing its opinion that the SEAL team was dead, and the latest call from Coronado had been received. There was still no news of me. They all knew there would be another call at 0400, and everyone waited out there in the hot July night, their hopes diminishing, according to Mom, as the hours ticked by.
People were starting to speculate how I could possibly have survived if no one at the American base knew where I was. But news was really scarce, except for the part some members of the media invented. And people were beginning to lose heart.
Except, apparently, for Morgan and the other SEALs, none of whom would even consider I was dead. At least that’s what they always told everyone. “MIA,” they kept repeating. “MIA. He’s not dead till we say he’s dead.”
Morgan continued to tell everyone that he was thinking about me and I was thinking about him. He was in contact, even if no one else was. And Senior Chief Gothro kept a careful eye on my mom in case she disintegrated.
But she remembers that night to this day, and how there were people growing sadder by the minute. And how the SEALs held it all together, the chaplains, the officers, the noncoms, some ordering, some imploring, but asking everyone to keep the faith.
“Marcus needs you!” Chaplain Trey Vaughn told this large and disparate gathering. “And God is protecting him, and now repeat after me the words of the Twenty-third Psalm. ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.’ ”
Solemnly, some of the toughest men in the U.S. Armed Forces stood shoulder to shoulder with the SEAL chaplain, each of them thinking of me as an old and, I hope, trusted friend and teammate. Each of them, at those moments, alone with his God. As I was with mine, half a world away.
At 0400 the call came through to the ranch from Coronado. Still no news. And the SEALs started the process all over again, encouraging, sharing their optimism, explaining that I had been especially trained to withstand such an ordeal. “If anyone can get out of this, it’s Marcus,” Chaplain Vaughn said. “And he’ll feel the energy in your prayers — and you will give him strength — and I forbid you to give up on him — God will bring him home.”
Out there in the dry summer pastures, surrounded by thousands of head of cattle, the words of the United States Navy Hymn echoed into the night. There were no neighbors to wake. Everyone for miles around was in our front yard. Mom says everyone was out there that night, again nearly three hundred. And the policemen and the judges and the sheriffs and all the others joined Mom and Dad and the iron men from SPECWARCOM, just standing there, singing at the top of their lungs, “ ‘O hear us when we cry to Thee, for SEALs in air, on land and sea . . .’ ”
Back in Sabray, Gulab and I were making a break for it. Clutching our rifles, we left our little mud-and-rock redoubt in the lower street and headed farther down the mountain. Painfully, I made the two hundred yards to a flat field which had been cultivated and recently harvested. It was strictly dirt now, but raked dirt, as if ready for a new crop.
I had seen this field before, from the window of house two, which I could just see maybe 350 yards back up the mountain. I guess the field was about the size of two American football fields; it had a dry rock border all around. It was an ideal landing spot for a helicopter, I thought, certainly the only suitable area I had ever seen up there. It was a place where a pilot could bring in an MH-47 without risking a collision with trees or rolling off a precipice or landing in the middle of a Taliban trap.
For a few moments, I considered writing a large SOS in the dirt, but Gulab was anxious, and he half carried, half manhandled me out of the field and back onto the lush mountain slopes, and there he found me a resting place at the side of the trail where I could take cover under a bush. And this carried a bonus, because the bush contained a full crop of blackberries. And I lay down there in the shade luxuriously eating the berries, which were not quite ripe but tasted damned good to me.
It was very quiet again now, and my trained sniper’s ear, honed perhaps better than ever before, detected no unusual sound in the undergrowth. Not a snapped twig, not an unusual rustling in the grass. No unusual shadow behind a tree. Nothing.
We waited there for a short while before Gulab stood up and walked a little way, then turned and whispered, “We go now.” I got hold of my rifle and twisted onto my right side, ready to heave myself upward, a movement that this week had taken a lot of concentration and effort.
I don’t know why it happened. But something told me to look up, and I cast my eyes to the slope behind us. And right there sitting very quietly, his gaze steady upon me and betraying nothing, was Sharmak, the Taliban leader, the man I had come to capture or kill.
I’d seen only a grainy, not very good photograph of him, but it was enough for me. I was certain it was him. And I think he knew I knew. He was a lean character, like all of them, fortyish, with a long, black, red-flecked beard. He wore black Afghan garb, a reddish vest, and a black turban.
I seem to recall he had green eyes, and they were filled with a hatred which would have melted a U.S. Army tank. He stared right through me and spoke not one word. I noticed he was unarmed, and I tightened my grip on the Mark 12 and very slowly turned it on him until the barrel was aimed right between his eyes.
He was not afraid. He never flinched, never moved, and I had a powerful instinct to shoot that bastard dead, right here on the mountain. After all, it was what I had come for; that or capture him, and that last part wasn’t going to happen.
Sharmak was surrounded by his army. If I’d shot him, I would not have lasted twenty seconds. His guys would have gunned down both me and Gulab and then, minus their beloved commander in chief, probably would have massacred the entire village, including the kids. I considered that and rejected shooting him.
I also considered that Sharmak was clearly not about to shoot me. The presence of Gulab made it a complete standoff, and Sharmak was not about to call in his guys to shoot the oldest son of Sabray’s village elder. Equally, I did not feel especially inclined to commit suicide. Everyone held their fire.
Sharmak just sat there, and then Gulab nodded to the Taliban boss, who I noticed made an infinitesimal incline of his head, like a pitcher acknowledging a catcher’s signal. And then Gulab walked slowly across to talk to him, and Sharmak stood up, and they turned their backs on me and moved farther up the mountainside, out of my sight.
There was only one subject they could possibly be discussing. Would the people of Sabray now agree to give me up? And I could not know how far Gulab and his father would still go to defend me.
I just slumped back under the blackberry bush, uncertain of my fate, uncertain what these two mountain tribesmen would decide. Because each of them, in his way, had so far proved to be unbending in his principles. The relentless killer, a man who saw himself as the warrior-savior of Afghanistan, now in conference with the village cop, a man who seemed prepared to risk everything just to defend me.