Lone survivor: the eyewitness account of Operation Redwing and the lost heroes of SEAL team 10 by Patrick Robinson, Marcus Luttrell Read Free Book Online

miles along the northern shoreline of the Arabian Sea and commands, strategically, the inward and outward oil lanes to the Persian Gulf. Despite a lot of very angry tribal chiefs, Baluchistan is part of Pakistan and has been since the partition with India in 1947. But that doesn’t make the chiefs any happier with the arrangement.
    And it’s probably worth remembering that no nation, not the Turks, the Tatars, the Persians, the Arabs, the Hindus, or the Brits has ever completely conquered Baluchistan. Those tribesmen even held off Genghis Khan, and his guys were the Navy SEALs of the thirteenth century.
    They never tell us, or anyone else, the precise route of U.S. Special Forces into any country. But there’s a big American base in the Baluchistan coastal town of Pasni. I guess we made our landfall somewhere along there, long before first light, and then flew on over four mountain ranges for 250 miles up to another U.S. military base near the city of Dalbandin.
    We never stopped, but Dalbandin lies only fifty miles south of the Afghan border, and the airspace is safe around there. At least, it’s as safe as anything can be in this strange, wild country, which is kind of jammed into a triangle among Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
    Baluchistan, its endless mountains a safe haven for so many fleeing al Qaeda recruits and exiled Taliban fighters, currently provides shelter for up to six thousand of these potential terrorists. And even though Chief Healy, me, and the guys were nine miles above this vast, underpopulated, and secretive land, it still gave me the creeps, and I was pleased when the aircrew finally told us we were in Afghanistan airspace, running north for another four hundred miles, up toward Kabul.
    I fell asleep somewhere over the Regestan Desert, east of one of Afghanistan’s greatest waterways, the 750-mile-long Hel-mand River, which flows and irrigates most of the southern farmlands.
    I cannot remember my dreams, but I expect they were of home. They usually are when I’m serving overseas. Home for us is a small ranch out in the piney woods of East Texas, near Sam Houston National Forest. We live down a long, red dirt road in a lonely part of the country, close by another two or three ranches, one of which, our adjoining neighbor, is about four thousand times bigger than ours and sometimes makes us seem a whole lot bigger than we are. I have a similar effect on my identical twin brother, Morgan.
    He’s about seven minutes older than I am, and around the same size (six feet five inches, 230 pounds). Somehow I’ve always been regarded as the baby of the family. You wouldn’t believe seven minutes could do that to a guy, would you? Well, it did, and Morgan is unflagging in his status as senior man.
    He’s a Navy SEAL as well, a little behind me in rank, because I joined first. But he still assumes a loose command whenever we’re together. And that’s pretty often, since we share a house in Coronado, California, hard by the SEAL teams.
    Anyway, there’s two or three houses on our Texas property, the main one being a single-story stone ranch surrounded by a large country garden, which contains one little plantation for corn and another couple for vegetables. All around us, just about as far as you can see in any direction, there’s pasture, studded with huge oak trees and grazing animals. It’s a peaceful place for a God-fearing family.
    Right from kids, Morgan and I were brought up to believe in the Lord. We weren’t compelled to go to church or anything, and to this day the family are not churchgoers. In fact, I’m the only one who does go to church on a somewhat regular basis. On Sunday mornings when I’m home, I drive over to the Catholic church, where people know me. I was not baptized a Catholic, but it suits me, its beliefs and doctrines sit easily with me. Since I was young, I have always been able to recite the Twenty-third Psalm and several others from beginning to end.
    Also, I thought