“Just didn’t want to make any noise,” said Axe. “I drew a bead on him and kept him in my sights until he reached your log. One false move, I’d have killed him right there.”
I told the guy to siddown, against the log. And then something ridiculous happened. About a hundred goats, all with little bells around their necks, came trotting up the mountain, swarming all around the spot where we were now standing. Then up over the hill came two more guys. All of us were now surrounded by goats. And I motioned for them to join their colleague on the ground against the log. That’s the Afghans, not the goats.
Finally, Mikey and Danny made their way up through the bleating herd and saw immediately what was going on. Like me, they noted that one of the three was just a kid, around fourteen years old. I tried to ask them if they were Taliban, and they all shook their heads, the older men saying, in English, “No Tali-ban...no Taliban.”
I gave the kid one of my power bars, and he scowled at me. Just put it down on a rock next to him, with no thanks or nod of appreciation. The two adults glared at us, making it obvious they disliked us intensely. Of course, they were probably wondering what the hell we were doing wandering about their farm with enough weapons and ammunition to conquer an entire Afghan province.
The question was, What did we do now? They were very obviously goatherds, farmers from the high country. Or, as it states in the pages of the Geneva Convention, unarmed civilians. The strictly correct military decision would still be to kill them without further discussion, because we could not know their intentions.
How could we know if they were affiliated with a Taliban militia group or sworn by some tribal blood pact to inform the Taliban leaders of anything suspicious-looking they found in the mountains? And, oh boy, were we suspicious-looking.
The hard fact was, if these three Afghan scarecrows ran off to find Sharmak and his men, we were going to be in serious trouble, trapped out here on this mountain ridge. The military decision was clear: these guys could not leave there alive. I just stood there, looking at their filthy beards, rough skin, gnarled hands, and hard, angry faces. These guys did not like us. They showed no aggression, but neither did they offer or want the hand of friendship.
Axelson was our resident academic as well as our Trivial Pursuit king. And Mikey asked him what he considered we should do. “I think we should kill them, because we can’t let them go,” he replied, with the pure, simple logic of the born intellect.
“And you, Danny?”
“I don’t really give a shit what we do,” he said. “You want me to kill ’em, I’ll kill ’em. Just give me the word. I only work here.”
“Marcus?”
“Well, until right now I’d assumed killing ’em was our only option. I’d like to hear what you think, Murph.”
Mikey was thoughtful. “Listen, Marcus. If we kill them, someone will find their bodies real quick. For a start, these fucking goats are just going to hang around. And when these guys don’t get home for their dinner, their friends and relatives are going to head straight out to look for them, especially for this fourteen-year-old. The main problem is the goats. Because they can’t be hidden, and that’s where people will look.
“When they find the bodies, the Taliban leaders will sing to the Afghan media. The media in the U.S.A. will latch on to it and write stuff about the brutish U.S. Armed Forces. Very shortly after that, we’ll be charged with murder. The murder of innocent unarmed Afghan farmers.”
I had to admit, I had not really thought about it quite like that. But there was a terrible reality about Mikey’s words. Was I afraid of these guys? No. Was I afraid of their possible buddies in the Taliban? No. Was I afraid of the liberal media back in the U.S.A.? Yes. And I suddenly flashed on the prospect of many, many years in a U.S. civilian jail alongside murderers and rapists.
And yet...as a highly trained member of the U.S. Special Forces, deep in my warrior’s soul I knew it was nuts to let these goatherds go. I tried to imagine what the great military figures of the past would have done. Napoleon? Patton? Omar Bradley? MacArthur? Would they have made the ice-cold military decision to execute these cats because they posed a clear and present danger to their men?
If these Afghans blew the whistle on us, we might all be killed, right out here on this rocky, burning-hot promontory, thousands and thousands of miles from home, light-years from help. The potential force against us was too great. To let these guys go on their way was military suicide.
All we knew was Sharmak had between 80 and 200 armed men. I remember taking the middle number, 140, and asking myself how I liked the odds of 140 to 4. That’s 35 to 1. Not much. I looked at Mikey and told him, “Murph, we gotta get some advice.”
We both turned to Danny, who had fired up the comms system and was valiantly trying to get through to HQ. We could see him becoming very frustrated, like all comms operators do when they cannot get a connection. He kept trying, and we were rapidly coming to the conclusion the goddamned radio was up the creek.
“That thing need new batteries?” I asked him.
“No. It’s fine, but they won’t fucking answer me.”
The minutes went by. The goatherds sat still, Axe and Murph with their rifles aimed straight at them, Danny acting like he could have thrown the comms system over the goddamned cliff.
“They won’t answer,” he said through gritted teeth. “I don’t know why. It’s like no one’s there.”
“There must be someone there,” said Murph, and I could hear the anxiety in his voice.
“Well, there isn’t,” said Danny.
“Murphy’s god-awful law,” I said. “Not you, Mikey, that other prick, the god of screwups.”
No one laughed. Not even me. And the dull realization dawned on us: we were on our own and had to make our own decision.
Mike Murphy said quietly, “We’ve got three options. We plainly don’t want to shoot these guys because of the noise. So, number one, we could just kill them quietly and hurl the bodies over the edge. That’s probably a thousand-foot drop. Number two is we kill them right here, cover ’em up as best we can with rocks and dirt.
“Either way we get the hell out and say nothing. Not even when the story comes out about the murdered Afghan goatherds. And some fucking headline back home which reads, ‘Navy SEALs Under Suspicion.’
“Number three, we turn ’em loose, and still get the hell out, in case the Taliban come looking.”
He stared at us. I can remember it just like it was yesterday. Axe said firmly, “We’re not murderers. No matter what we do. We’re on active duty behind enemy lines, sent here by our senior commanders. We have a right to do everything we can to save our own lives. The military decision is obvious. To turn them loose would be wrong.”
If this came to a vote, as it might, Axe was going to recommend the execution of the three Afghans. And in my soul, I knew he was right. We could not possibly turn them loose. But my trouble is, I have another soul. My Christian soul. And it was crowding in on me. Something kept whispering in the back of my mind, it would be wrong to execute these unarmed men in cold blood. And the idea of doing that and then covering our tracks and slinking away like criminals, denying everything, would make it more wrong.
To be honest, I’d have been happier to stand ’em up and shoot them right out in front. And then leave them. They’d just be three guys who’d found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Casualties of war. And we’d just have to defend ourselves when our own media and politicians back in the U.S.A. tried to hang us on a murder charge.
None of us liked the sneaky options. I could tell that. I guess all four of us were Christians, and if we were thinking like ordinary law-abiding U.S. citizens, we would find it very hard to carry out the imperative military decision, the overriding one, the decision any great commander would have made: these guys can never leave this place alive. The possible consequences of that were unacceptable. Militarily.
Lieutenant Murphy said, “Axe?”
“No choice.” We all knew what he meant.
“Danny?”
“As before. I don’t give a shit what you decide. Just tell me what to do.”
“Marcus?”
“I don’t know, Mikey.”
“Well, let me tell you one more time. If we kill these guys we have to be straight about it. Report what we did. We can’t sneak around this. Just so you all understand, their bodies will be found, the Taliban will use it to the max. They’ll get it in the papers, and the U.S. liberal media will attack us without mercy. We will almost certainly be charged with murder. I don’t know how you guys feel about that...Marcus, I’ll go with you. Call it.”
I just stood there. I looked again at these sullen Afghan farmers. Not one of them tried to say a word to us. They didn’t need to. Their glowering stares said plenty. We didn’t have rope to bind them. Tying them up to give us more time to establish a new position wasn’t an option.
I looked Mikey right in the eye, and I said, “We gotta let ’em go.”
It was the stupidest, most southern-fried, lamebrained decision I ever made in my life. I must have been out of my mind. I had actually cast a vote which I knew could sign our death warrant. I’d turned into a fucking liberal, a half-assed, no-logic nitwit, all heart, no brain, and the judgment of a jackrabbit.
At least, that’s how I look back on those moments now. Probably not then, but for nearly every waking hour of my life since. No night passes when I don’t wake in a cold sweat thinking of those moments on that mountain. I’ll never get over it. I cannot get over it. The deciding vote was mine, and it will haunt me till they rest me in an East Texas grave.
Mikey nodded. “Okay,” he said, “I guess that’s two votes to one, Danny abstains. We gotta let ’em go.”
I remember no one said anything. We could just hear the short staccato sounds of the goats: ba-aaaa...baaa...baaa. And the tinkling of the little bells. It provided a fitting background chorus to a decision which had been made in fucking fairyland. Not on the battlefield where we, like it or not, most certainly were.
Axe said again, “We’re not murderers. And we would not have been murderers, whatever we’d done.”
Mikey was sympathetic to his view. He just said, “I know, Axe, I know, buddy. But we just took a vote.”
I motioned for the three goatherds to get up, and I signaled them with my rifle to go on their way. They never gave one nod or smile of gratitude. And they surely knew we might very well have killed them. They turned toward the higher ground behind us.
I can see them now. They put their hands behind their backs in that peculiar Afghan way and broke into a very fast jog, up the steep gradient, the goats around us now trotting along to join them. From somewhere, a skinny, mangy brown dog appeared dolefully and joined the kid. That dog was a gruesome Afghan reminder of my own robust chocolate Labrador, Emma, back home on the ranch, always bursting with health and joy.
I guess that’s when I woke up and stopped worrying about the goddamned American liberals. “This is bad,” I said. “This is real bad. What the fuck are we doing?”
Axe shook his head. Danny shrugged. Mikey, to be fair, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Like me, he was a man who knew a massive mistake had just been made. More chilling than anything we had ever done together. Where were those guys headed? Were we crazy or what?
Thoughts raced through my mind. We’d had no comms, no one we could turn to for advice. Thus far we had no semblance of a target in the village. We were in a very exposed position, and we appeared to have no access to air support. We couldn’t even report in. Worse yet, we had no clue as to where the goatherds were headed. When things go this bad, it’s never one thing. It’s every damn thing.
We watched them go, disappearing up the mountain, still running, still with their hands behind their backs. And the sense that we had done something terrible by letting them go was all-pervading. I could just tell. Not one of us was able to speak. We were like four zombies, hardly knowing whether to crash back into our former surveillance spots or leave right away.
“What now?” asked Danny.
Mikey began to gather his gear. “Move in five,” he said.
We packed up our stuff, and right there in the noonday sun, we watched the goatherds, far on the high horizon, finally disappear from view. By my watch, it was precisely nineteen minutes after their departure, and the mood of sheer gloom enveloped us all.
We set off up the mountain, following in the hoofprints of the goats and their masters. We moved as fast as we could, but it took us between forty minutes and one hour to cover the same steep ground. At the top, we could no longer see them. Mountain goats, mountain herders. They were all the goddamned same, and they could move like rockets up in the passes.
We searched around for the trail we had arrived by, found it, and set off back toward the initial spot, the one we had pulled out of because of the poor angle on the village and then the dense fog bank. We tried the radio and still could not make a connection with home base.
Our offensive policy was in pieces. But we were headed for probably the best defensive position we had found since we got here, on the brink of the mountain wall, maybe forty yards from the summit, with tree cover and decent concealment. Right now we sensed we must remain in strictly defensive mode, lie low for a while and hope the Taliban had not been alerted or if they had that we would be too well hidden for them to locate us. We were excellent practitioners of lying low and hiding.
We walked on along the side of the mountain, and I have to say the place looked kind of different in broad daylight. But its virtues were still there. Even from the top of the escarpment we would be damn near impossible to see.
We climbed down and took up our precise old positions. We were still essentially carrying out our mission, but we remained on the highest possible alert for Taliban fighters. Below me, maybe thirty yards to my right, looking up the hill, Danny slipped neatly into his yoga tree, cross-legged, still looking like a snake charmer. I got myself wedged into the old mulberry tree, where I reapplied my camouflage cream and melted into the landscape.
Below me on the left, same distance as Danny, was Axe with our heaviest rifle. Mikey was right below me, maybe ten yards, jammed into the lee of a boulder. Above us the mountain was nearly sheer, then it went flat for a few yards, then it angled sharply up to the top. I’d tried looking down from there, so had Murph, and we were agreed, you could not really see anything over the small outward ridge which protected us.
For the moment, we were safe. Axe had the glass for twenty minutes, and then I took over for the next twenty minutes. Nothing stirred in the village. It had now been more than an hour and a half since we turned the goatherds loose. And it was still quiet and peaceful, hardly a breath of wind. And by Christ it was hot.
Mikey was closest to me when he suddenly whispered, “Guys, I’ve got an idea.”
“What is it, sir,” I asked, suddenly formal, as if our situation demanded some respect for the man who must ultimately take command.
“I’m going down to the village, see if I can borrow a phone!”
“Beautiful,” said Axe. “See if you can pick me up a sandwich.”
“Sure,” said Mikey. “What’ll it be? Mule dung or goat’s hoof?”
“Hold the mayo,” growled Axe.
The jokes weren’t that great, I know. But perched up there on this Afghan rock face, poised to fend off an attacking army, I thought they were only just shy of grade-one hilarity.
It was, I suppose, a sign of nerves, like cracking a one-liner on your deathbed. But it showed we all felt better now; not absolutely A-OK, but cheerful enough to get to our work and toss out the occasional light remark. More like our old selves, right? Anyhow, I said I was just going to close my eyes for a short while, and I pulled my camouflage hat down over my eyes and tried to nod off, despite my pounding heart, which I could not slow down.
Around ten minutes more passed. Suddenly I heard Mikey make a familiar al
ert sound...Sssst! Sssst! I lifted up my hat and instinctively looked left, over my portside quarter, to the spot where I knew Axe would be covering our flank. And he was right there, rigid, in firing position, his rifle aimed straight up the mountain.
I twisted around to look directly behind me. Mikey was staring wide-eyed up the hill, calling orders, instructing Danny to call in immediate backup from HQ if he could make the radio work. He saw I was on the case, looked hard at me, and pointed straight up the hill, urging me with hand signals to do the same.
I fixed my Mark 12 in firing position, pulled my head back a few inches, and looked up the hill. Lined along the top were between eighty and a hundred heavily armed Taliban warriors, each one of them with an AK-47 pointing downward. Some were carrying rocket-propelled grenades. To the right and to the left they were starting to move down our flanks. I knew they could see past me but not at me. They could not have seen Axe or Danny. I was unsure whether they had seen Mikey.
My heart dropped directly into my stomach. And I cursed those fucking goatherds to hell, and myself for not executing them when every military codebook ever written had taught me otherwise. Not to mention my own raging instincts, which had told me to go with Axe and execute them. And let the liberals go to hell in a mule cart, and take with them all of their fucking know-nothing rules of etiquette in war and human rights and whatever other bullshit makes ’em happy. You want to charge us with murder? Well, fucking do it. But at least we’ll be alive to answer it. This way really sucks.
I pressed back against my tree. I was still sure they had not seen me, but their intention was to outflank us on both wings. I could see that. I scanned the ground directly above me. The hilltop still swarmed with armed men. I thought there were more than before. There was no escape by going straight up, and no possibility of moving left or right. Essentially they had us trapped, if they had spotted us. I still was unsure.
And so far not a shot had been fired. I looked up the hill again at one single tree above and to my left, maybe twenty yards away. And I thought I saw a movement. Then it was confirmed, first by a turban, then by an AK-47, its barrel pointed in my general direction though not directly at me.