Текст книги "Lone survivor"

Автор книги: Marcus Luttrell

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Morgan and I were terrified of him. I used to have nightmares when we were due to report to him the next morning, because he drove us without mercy, never mind our extreme youth. We were in a class of maybe a dozen guys, all midteens.

“I’m gonna break you down, mentally and physically,” he yelled at us. “Break you down, hear me? Then I’m gonna build you right back up, as one fighting unit – so your mind and body are one. Understand me? I’m gonna put you through more pain than you’ve ever been in.”

Right about then, half the class ran for their lives rather than face this bulldog, this ex–Texas Tech tailback who could run like a Mack truck going downhill. He had the support of a local high school, which allowed him to use their gym free of charge to train future special forces from our part of the world.

“I’m not your friend,” he’d shout. “Not right here in this gym. I’m here to get you right – fit, trained, and ready for the SEALs, or the Berets, or the Rangers. I’m not getting one dime from anyone to do this. And that’s why you’re gonna do it right, just so you don’t waste my time.

“Because if any one of you fails to make the grade in the special forces, it will not be because you were too weak. Because that would mean I’d failed, and I’m gonna make sure that cannot happen, because right here, failure’s not an option. I’m gonna get you right. All of you. Understand?”

He’d take us on twelve-mile runs, hauling the concrete blocks till we nearly collapsed. Guys would have blood on the backs of their heads from the chafing. And he never took his eyes off us, never tolerated idleness or lack of concentration. He just made us grind it out, taking it to the limit. Every time.

That’s what built my strength, gave me my basis. That’s how I learned the fitness creed of the SEALs. Billy was extremely proud of that; proud to pass on his knowledge.

And he asked only for undying devotion to the cause, the discipline of a samurai warrior, and lungs like a pair of bagpipes. He was absolutely relentless, and he really loved Morgan and me, two of only six survivors in the class.

Once, when I came back from a tour of duty in Iraq, I went to see him after a couple of weeks’ easy living and Mom’s cooking, and he threw me out of the gym!

“You’re a goddamned fat, pitiful excuse for a SEAL, and I can’t stand to look at you!” he yelled. “Get out of my sight!” Holy shit! I was out of there, ran down the stairs, and didn’t dare go back until I’d dropped eight pounds. No one around here argues with Billy Shelton.

The other skill I needed was still to come. No Navy SEAL can operate without a high level of expertise in unarmed combat. Billy told me I’d need to take martial-arts classes as soon as possible. And so I found a teacher to work with. All through my grade school and college career, I studied and learned that strange, rather mystical Asian skill. I worked at it for many years instead of becoming involved in other sports. And I attained all of my goals.

Morgan says the real truth is I don’t know my own strength and should be avoided at all times.

By any standards, I had a head start in becoming a Navy SEAL. I was made aware of the task at a young age, and I had two strong engines driving me forward: my dad and Billy Shelton. Everything I learned beyond the schoolroom, down from my early years, seems to have directed me to Coronado. At least, looking back now it seems that way.

Everyone understands why there’s a huge rate of dropouts among applicants for the SEALs. And when I think of what I went through in the years before I got there, I can’t even imagine what it must be like for guys who try out with no prior training. Morgan and I were groomed to be SEALs, but it was never easy. The work is brutally hard, the fitness regimes are as harsh and uncompromising as any program in the free world. The examinations are searching and difficult. Nothing but the highest possible standard is acceptable in the SEAL teams.

And perhaps above all, your character is under a microscope at all times; instructors, teachers, senior chiefs, and officers are always watching for the character flaw, the weakness which may one day lead to the compromise of your teammates. We can’t stand that. We can stand damn near anything, except that.

When someone tells you he is in the SEAL teams, it means he has passed every test, been accepted by some of the hardest taskmasters in the military. And a short nod of respect is in order, because it’s harder to become a Navy SEAL than it is to get into Harvard Law School. Different, but harder.

When someone tells you he’s in a SEAL team, you know you are in the presence of a very special cat. Myself, I was just born lucky, somehow fluked my way in with a work ethic bequeathed to me by my dad. The rest of those guys are the gods of the U.S. Armed Forces. And in faraway foreign fields, they serve their nation as required, on demand, and mostly without any recognition whatsoever.

They would have it no other way, because they understand no other way. Accolades just wash off them, they shy away from the spotlight, but in the end they have one precious reward – when their days of combat are over, they know precisely who they are and what they stand for. That’s rare. And no one can buy it.

Back in the C-130, crossing into the southern wastes of the Regestan Desert, the gods of the U.S. Armed Forces with whom I traveled were asleep, except for the beach god Shane, who was still rockin’.

Somewhere out in the darkness, to our starboard side, was the Pakistani city of Quetta, which used to be quite important when the Brits ran the place. They had a big army staff college down there, and for three years in the mid-1930s, Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, later the victor of the Battle of Ala-mein, taught there. Which proves, I suppose, that I’m as much addicted to military trivia as I am to the smart-ass remark.

However, we stayed on the left-hand, Afghanistan side of the border, I think, and continued on above the high western slopes of the great range of the Hindu Kush mountains. The most southerly peak, the one nearest the desert, is 11,000 feet high. After that it gets pretty steep, and it was to those mountains we were headed.

Way below us was the important city of Kandahar, which a few weeks later, on June 1, 2005, was the scene of one of the most terrible Taliban attacks of the year. One of their suicide bombers killed twenty people in Kandahar’s principal mosque. In that central-city disaster, they killed the security chief of Kabul, who was attending the funeral of an anti-Taliban cleric who had been killed three days earlier by a couple of guys on a motorbike.

I think that Chief Healy and myself, in particular, were well aware of the dangers in this strife-torn country. And we realized the importance of our coming missions, to halt the ever-burgeoning influx of Taliban recruits streaming in over the high peaks of the Hindu Kush and to capture their leaders for interrogation.

The seven-hour journey from Bahrain seemed endless, and we were still an hour or more south of Kabul, crawling north high above the treacherous border that leads directly to the old Khyber Pass and then to the colossal peaks and canyons of the northern Hindu Kush. After that, the mountains swerve into Tajikstan and China, later becoming the western end of the Himalayas.

I was reading my guidebook, processing and digesting facts like an Agatha Christie detective. Chaman, Zhob, key entry points for the Taliban and for bin Laden’s al Qaeda as they fled the American bombs and ground troops. These tribesmen drove their way over sixteen-thousand-foot mountains, seeking help from the disgruntled Baluchistan chiefs, who were now bored sideways by Pakistan and Afghanistan, Great Britain, Iran, the U.S.A., Russia, and anyone else who tried to tell them what to do.

Our area of operations would be well north of there, and I spent the final hours of the journey trying to glean some data. But it was hard to come by. Trouble is, there’s not much happening in those mountains, not many small towns and very few villages. Funny, really. Not much was happening, and yet, in another way, every damn thing in the world was happening: plots, plans, villainy, terrorism, countless schemes to attack the West, especially the United States.

There were cells of Taliban warriors just waiting for their chance to strike against the government. There were bands of al Qaeda swarming around a leader hardly anyone had seen for several years. The Taliban wanted power in Afghanistan again; bin Laden’s mob wanted death and destruction of U.S. citizens, uniformed or not. One way or another, they were all a goddamned nightmare, and one that was growing progressively worse. Which was why they sent for us.

In the weeks before our arrival, there had been widespread incidents of violence, confirming everyone’s dread that the generally hated Taliban was once more on the rise and a serious threat to the new government of Afghanistan. Even with the support of thirty thousand U.S. and NATO troops, President Hamid Karzai struggled to control the country anywhere outside of Kabul.

A few weeks earlier, in February, the Taliban flatly announced they were increasing their attacks on the government as soon as the weather improved. And from then on they launched a series of drive-by shootings and bombings, usually directed at local officials and pro-government clergy. In the south and over to the east, they started ambushing American soldiers.

It’s a strange word, Taliban. Everyone’s heard it, like insurgent, Sunni, ayatollah, or Taiwan. But what does Taliban really stand for? I’ve suffered with them, what you might describe as close encounters of the most god-awful type. And I’ve done a lot of reading. The facts fit the reality. Those guys are evil, murderous religious fanatics, each one of them with an AK-47 and a bloodlust. You can trust me on that one.

The Taliban have been in prominence since 1994. Their original leader was a village clergyman named Mullah Mohammad Omar, a tough guy who lost his right eye fighting the occupying forces of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. By the mid-’90s, the Taliban’s prime targets in Afghanistan – before I showed up – were the feuding warlords who (a) formed the mujahideen and (b) threw the Soviets out of the country.

The Taliban made two major promises which they would carry out once in power: to restore peace and security, and to enforce sharia, or Islamic law. Afghans, weary of the mujahideens’ excesses and infighting, welcomed the Taliban, which enjoyed much early success, stamping out corruption, curbing lawlessness, and making the roads safe for commerce to flourish. This applied to all areas that came under their control.

They began their operation in the southwestern city of Kandahar and moved quickly into other parts of the country. They captured the province of Herat, which borders Iran, in September 1995. And one year later, their armies took the Afghan capital of Kabul, overthrowing the regime of President Burhanuddin Rabbani and his defense minister, Ahmed Shah Massoud. By 1998, they were in control of almost 90 percent of the country.

Once in power, however, the Taliban showed their true colors. They set up one of the most authoritarian administrations on earth, one that tolerated no opposition to their hard-line policies. Ancient Islamic punishments, like public executions for convicted murderers and amputations at the wrist for those charged with theft, were immediately introduced. I cannot even think about the penalty a rapist or an adulterer might anticipate.

Television, music, sports, and cinema were banned, judged by the Taliban leaders to be frivolities. Girls age ten and above were forbidden to go to school; working women were ordered to stay at home. Men were required to grow beards, women had to wear the burka. These religious policies earned universal notoriety as the Taliban strived to restore the Middle Ages in a nation longing to join the twenty-first century. Their policies concerning human rights were outrageous and brought them into direct conflict with the international community.

But there was another issue, which would bring about their destruction. And that was their role in playing host to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda movement. In August 1998 Islamic fanatics bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 225 people. Washington immediately presented the Taliban leaders with a difficult choice – either expel bin Laden, who was held responsible for the bombings by the U.S. government, or face the consequences.

The Taliban flatly refused to hand over their Saudi-born guest, who was providing them with heavy funding. President Bill Clinton ordered a missile attack on the main bin Laden training camp in southern Afghanistan, which failed to kill its leader. Then in 1999 the United States persuaded the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Two years later, even harsher sanctions were put in place in another attempt to force the Taliban to hand over bin Laden.

Nothing worked. Not sanctions nor the denial of Afghanistan’s U.N. seat. The Taliban were still in power, and they were still hiding Osama bin Laden, but their isolation, political and diplomatic, was becoming total.

But the Taliban would not budge. They took their isolation as a badge of honor and decided to go whole hog with an even more fundamentalist regime. The poor Afghan people realized too late what they had done: handed over the entire country to a group of bearded lunatics who were trying to inflict upon them nothing but stark human misery and who controlled every move they made under their brutal, repressive, draconian rule. The Taliban were so busy trying to enslave the citizens, they forgot about the necessity for food, and there was mass starvation. One million Afghans fled the country as refugees.

All of this was understood by the West. Almost. But it took horrific shock, delivered in March 2001, to cause genuine inter-national outrage. That was when the Taliban blasted sky-high the two monumental sixth-century statues of the Bamiyan Buddhas, one of them 180 feet high, the other 120 feet, carved out of a mountain in central Afghanistan, 143 miles northwest of Kabul. This was tantamount to blowing up the Pyramids of Giza.

The statues were hewn directly from sandstone cliffs right in Bamiyan, which is situated on the ancient Silk Road, the caravan route which linked the markets of China and central Asia with those of Europe, the Middle East, and south Asia. It was also one of the revered Buddhist religious sites, dating back to the second century and once home to hundreds of monks and many monasteries. The two statues were the largest standing Buddha carvings on earth.

And their summary destruction by the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan caused museum directors and curators all over the world to have about four hemorrhages apiece. The Taliban effectively told the whole lot of them to shove it. Whose statues were they, anyway? Besides, they were planning to destroy all the statues in Afghanistan, on the grounds they were un-Islamic.

The Bamiyan Buddhas were destroyed in accordance with sharia law. Only Allah the Almighty deserves to be worshipped, not anyone or anything else. Wraps that up then, right? Praise Allah and pass the high explosive.

The blasting of the Buddhas firmed up world opinion that something had to be done about Afghanistan’s rulers. But it took another explosion to provoke savage action against them. That took place on September 11, the same year, and was the beginning of the end for the Taliban and bin Laden’s al Qaeda.

Before the dust had settled on lower Manhattan, the United States demanded the Taliban hand over bin Laden for masterminding the attack on U.S. soil. Again the Taliban refused, perhaps not realizing that the new(ish) U.S. president, George W. Bush, was a very different character from Bill Clinton.

Less than one month later, on October 7, the Americans, leading a small coalition force, unleashed an onslaught against Afghanistan that shook that area of the world to its foundations. U.S. military intelligence located all of the al Qaeda camps in the mountains of the northeast part of the country, and the military let fly with one of the biggest aerial bombardments in modern warfare.

It began with fifty cruise missiles launched from U.S. warships and Royal Navy submarines. At the same time, long after dark in Afghanistan, twenty-five carrier-based aircraft and fifteen land-based bombers took off and destroyed Taliban air defenses, communications infrastructure, and the airports at Kabul, Jalalabad, Kandahar, and Herat. The U.S. bombs blasted the big radar installations and obliterated the control tower in Kandahar. This was the city where Mullah Omar lived, and a navy bomber managed to drop one dead in the middle of his backyard. That one-eyed ole bastard escaped, though.

The Taliban, its military headquarters now on fire, did own a somewhat insignificant air-strike capacity, just a few aircraft and helicopters, and the U.S. Air Force wiped that right out with smart bombs as a matter of routine.

Navy bombers taking off from the carriers targeted the Taliban’s other military hardware, heavy vehicles, tanks, and fuel dumps. Land-based B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers were also in the air, the B-52s dropping dozens of five-hundred-pound gravity bombs on al Qaeda terrorist training camps in eastern Afghanistan, way up in the border mountains where we would soon be visiting.

One of the prime U.S. objectives was the small inventory of surface-to-air missiles and shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles, stolen from either the Russians or the old mujahideen. These were hard to locate, and various caches were removed by the tribesmen and hidden in the mountains. Hidden, sadly, for use another day.

One hour after that nighttime bombardment began, the Northern Alliance opened fire with a battery of rockets from an air base twenty-five miles north of Kabul. They aimed them straight at Taliban forces in the city. There were five thunderous explosions and all electric power was knocked out throughout the capital.

But the United States never took its eye off the ball. The true objective was the total destruction of al Qaeda and the leader who had engineered the infamous attack on the Twin Towers – “the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century,” as the president described it. And that meant a massive strike on the sinister network of caves and underground tunnels up in the mountains, where bin Laden made his headquarters.

The cruise missiles had softened up the area, but that was only the start. The real heavyweight punch from the world’s only superpower would come in the form of a gigantic bomb – the BLU-82B/C-130, known as Commando Vault in Vietnam and now nicknamed Daisy Cutter. This is a high-altitude, fifteen-thousand-pound conventional bomb that needs to be delivered from the huge MC-130 aircraft because it is far too heavy for the bomb racks on any other attack aircraft.

This thing is awesome. It was originally designed to create instant clearings for helicopter landings in the jungle. Its purpose in Afghanistan was as an antipersonnel weapon up in those caves. Its lethal radius is colossal, probably nine hundred feet. Its flash and sound is obvious from literally miles away. The BLU-82B is the largest conventional bomb ever built and, of course, leaves no nuclear fallout. (For the record, the Hiroshima atom bomb was a thousand times more powerful.)

On the upside, the Daisy Cutter is extremely reliable, no problems with wind speed or thermal gradient. Its conventional explosive technique incorporates both agent and oxidizer. It is not fuel-air explosive, like the old FAE systems used for much, much smaller bombs. It’s nearly twelve feet long and more than four feet wide.

The BLU-82B depends on precise positioning of the delivery aircraft, coordinates gotten from fixed ground radar or onboard navigation equipment. The aircraft must be perfectly positioned prior to final countdown and release. The navigator needs to make dead-accurate ballistic and wind computations.

The massive blast effect of the bomb means it cannot be released below an altitude of 6,000 feet. Its warhead, containing 12,600 pounds of low-cost GSX slurry (ammonium nitrate, aluminum powder, and polystyrene), is detonated by a 38-inch fuse extender a few feet above ground level, so it won’t dig a crater. The entire blast blows outward, producing overpressure of 1,000 pounds per square inch. Hence the nickname Daisy Cutter.

The United States has never specified how many of these things were dropped on the Tora Bora area of the White Mountains, where the al Qaeda camps were located. But there were at least four, maybe seven. The first one, according to a public announcement by the Pentagon, was dropped after a reported sighting of bin Laden. We can only imagine the crushing effect such a blast would have inside the caves where the al Qaeda high command and senior leadership operated. Wouldn’t have been too good even if you were standing in the middle of a field – but a cave! Jesus, that’s brutal. That thing wiped out hundreds of the enemy at a time.

The United States really did a number on the Taliban, flattened their stronghold in Kunduz in the north, shelled them out of the Shomali Plains north of Kabul, carpet bombed them anywhere they could be located around the Bagram air base, where, four years later, we were headed in the C-130.

In the fall of 2001, the Taliban and al Qaeda were mostly fleeing the U.S. offensive or surrendering. In the subsequent years, they drifted together on the other side of the Pakistani border, reformed, and began their counteroffensive to retake Afghanistan.

Somehow these hickory-tough tribesmen not only survived the onslaught of American bombing and escaped from the advancing Northern Alliance, but they also evaded one of the biggest manhunts in the history of warfare as an increasingly frustrated United States moved heaven and earth to capture bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and the rest. I guess their propensity to run like hell from strong opposition and their rapid exit into the Pakistani mountains on the other side of the border allowed them to limit their human and material resources.

It also bought them time. And while they undoubtedly lost many of their followers after a front-row view of what the American military could and would do, they also had many months to begin recruiting and training a brand-new generation of supporters. And now they were back as an effective fighting army, launching guerrilla operations against the U.S.-led coalition forces only four years after they’d lost power, been driven into exile, and had nearly been annihilated.

As we prepared for our final approach to the great, sprawling U.S. base at Bagram, the Taliban were once again out there, killing aid workers and kidnapping foreign construction workers. Parts of eastern and southern Afghanistan have been officially designated unsafe due to increasingly daring Taliban attacks. There was evidence they were extending their area of influence, working closely again with bin Laden’s al Qaeda, forging new alliances with other rebel groups and anti-government warlords. Same way they’d grabbed power last time, right? Back in 1996.

Only this time they had one principal ambition before seizing power, and that was to destabilize the U.S.-led coalition forces and eventually drive them out of Afghanistan forever.

I ought to mention the Pashtuns, the world’s oldest living tribal group; there are about forty-two million of them. Twenty-eight million live in Pakistan, and 12.5 million of them live in Afghanistan; that’s 42 percent of the entire population. There are about 88,000 living in Britain and 44,000 in the U.S.A.

In Afghanistan, they live primarily in the mountains of the northeast, and they also have heavily populated areas in the east and south. They are a proud people who adhere to Islam and live by a strict code of honor and culture, observing rules and laws known as Pashtunwalai, which has kept them straight for two thousand years.

They are also the quintessential supporters of the Taliban. Their warriors form the backbone of the Taliban forces, and their families grant those forces shelter in high mountain villages, protecting them and providing refuge in places that would appear almost inaccessible to the Western eye. That, by the way, does not include U.S. Navy SEALs, who do have Western eyes but who don’t do inaccessible. We can get in anywhere.

It’s easy to see why the Pashtuns and the Taliban get along just fine. The Pashtuns were the tribe who refused to buckle under to the army of the Soviet Union. They just kept fighting. In the nineteenth century, they fought the British to the verge of surrender and then drove them back into Pakistan. Three hundred years before that, they wiped out the army of Akbar the Great, the most fearsome of India’s Mogul rulers.

Those Pashtuns are proud of their stern military heritage, and it’s worth remembering that in all the centuries of bitter, savage warfare in Baluchistan, during which time they were never subdued, half the population was always Pashtun.

The concept of tribal heritage is very rigid. It involves bloodlines, amazing lineages that stretch back through the centuries, generation after generation. You can’t join a tribe in the way you can become an American citizen. Tribes don’t hand out green cards or passports. You either are, or you aren’t.

Language, traditions, customs, and culture play a part, but, I repeat, you can’t join the Pashtuns. And that gives them all a steel rod of dignity and self-esteem. Their villages may not be straightforward military strongholds as the Taliban desire, but the Pashtuns are not easily intimidated.

The people are organized strictly by relationships; male relationships, that is. The tribal lineage descends from the father’s side, the male ancestors. I understand they don’t give a damn for Mom and her ancestors. Inheritances are strictly for the boys, and land rights go directly to sons.

They have a proverb that says a lot: I against my brothers; my brothers and I against my cousins; my brothers, my cousins, and I against the world. That’s how they do it. The tight military formation has, again and again, allowed them to knock eight bells out of more sophisticated invaders.

The tribal code, Pashtunwalai, has heavy demands: hospitality, generosity, and the duty to avenge even the slightest insult. Life among the Pashtuns is demanding – it depends on the respect of your peers, relatives, and allies. And that can be dangerous. Only the tribe’s principles of honor stand in the way of anarchy. A tribesman will fight or even kill in order to avoid dishonor to himself and his family.

And killing throws the whole system into confusion, because death must be avenged; killers and their families are under permanent threat. Which puts a big air brake on violence. According to the learned Charles Lindhorn, a professor of anthropology at Boston University, homicide rates among the Pashtun tribes are way lower than homicide rates in urban areas of the United States. I am grateful to the professor for his teachings on this subject.

The Taliban creed comes right out of the Pashtun handbook: women are the wombs of patrilineage, the fountainheads of tribal honor and continuity. Their security and chaste way of life is the only guarantee of the purity of the lineage. This seclusion of women is known as purdah, and it is designed to keep women concealed, maintaining the household, and it gives them a high sense of honor.

Purdah represents the status of belonging. A woman’s husband can go fight the invaders while she controls the household, enjoying the love and respect of her sons, expecting one day to rule as matriarch over her daughters-in-law and their children. That’s the basis of the Taliban view of women. And I guess it works fine up in the Hindu Kush, but it might not go over too well in downtown Houston.

Anyway, there’s been a lot of terrible fighting on the Pashtuns’ lands, mostly by outsiders. But the ole Pashtunwalai has kept them intact. Their tradition of generous hospitality, perhaps their finest virtue, includes the concept of lokhay warkawal. It means “giving of a pot.” It implies protection for an individual, particularly in a situation where the tribe might be weaker than its enemies. When a tribe accepts lokhay, it undertakes to safeguard and protect that individual from an enemy at all costs.

I, perhaps above all other Western visitors, have reason to be eternally grateful for it.

We were on our final approach to the enormous U.S. base at Bagram. Everyone was awake now, seven hours after we left Bahrain. It was daylight, and down below we could see at last the mountains we had heard so much about and among which we would be operational in the coming weeks.

There was still snow on the high peaks, glittering white in the rising sun. And below the snow line, the escarpments looked very steep. We were too high to pick up villages on the middle slopes, but we knew they were there, and that’s where we were probably going in the not too distant future.

The huge runway at Bagram runs right down the side of the complex, past hundreds and hundreds of bee huts, lines and lines of them. On the ground we could see parked aircraft and a whole lot of Chinook helicopters. We didn’t worry about whom we’d have to share with. SEALs are always billeted together, separate from anyone else, thus avoiding loose talk about highly classified missions. All of our missions are, of course, highly classified, and we do not talk loosely, but other branches of the services are not so stringently trained as we are, and no one takes any chances.

Here we were at last, in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, a country the size of Texas, landlocked on all sides, protected by the granite walls of mountains, war torn for years and years and still at it. Just like always, warlords were trying to drive out the usurpers. Us. And we weren’t even usurping, just trying to stop another bloody tribal upheaval and another regime change from the elected to the dictators.