Victory Point - Ed Darack [85]
“Marines won’t have anything to do with this. This is a SEAL mission. We’re gonna get our men outta there! Give us the walk-in. You don’t gimme the walk-in and I’ll—”
“He’s with First Lieutenant Matthew Bartels, at the base he commands—Camp Blessing—at Nangalam,”Wood stated, then stormed out of the “meeting.”
Shina stayed with Matt and Sultan through the daylight hours of the thirtieth, during which time the lieutenant and his terp worked with the elderly Afghan to pinpoint the exact location of Gulab’s home on a map. Salar Ban, like most villages in the Kunar, sprawls across a huge expanse of rugged terrain; even a large American force would need to spend upward of a week to locate Luttrell if a search-and-rescue operation required comprehensively sweeping individual houses (many of which blend into the mountainous surroundings so well that outsiders can stare directly at them from just thirty feet away without noticing a “house” at all). The Afghan, who knew his land intimately, knew just his land—and not a graphical representation of it, like a map. He couldn’t even give directions; he just had to physically show Bartels or Sultan—or a SEAL rescue team—himself.
“What if we took him up in a helicopter?” Matt asked Sultan.
“No way, his eyes have never seen the landscape around him without his feet planted firmly on that land, just like a large piece of paper printed with squiggly lines showing the terrain around his home means nothing to him. He needs to kick his own steps up those trails he’s walked for decades, with any outsiders who want to know the secrets of the villager’s mountainous world paying good attention as they follow closely behind him.”
Bartels and Sultan quickly established a rapport with Shina, who, despite the drama of their introduction, now saw the two as friends, and extended an invitation to the duo to come to his home in Salar Ban. On the evening of 30 June, Bartels, now partially briefed on the SOF disaster, received another heated call from the SEAL captain in Bagram, who demanded that Bartels disclose the location of Gulab’s house.
“I don’t know, sir. But as you know, the guy who can take a rescue team to him is sitting here at my base.”
“Get him to point it out on a map!” the SEAL thundered.
“Been trying all day. He doesn’t even know what a map is, sir,” Bartels explained. “He can’t even vaguely describe where the house is, sir. He just has to walk there himself, and show someone firsthand.”
“What if we get him in the air? He can point out the location to a team from the air, right?”
“No. He’s not used to seeing the world from the air, just from the trails he’s walked his whole life,” Bartels replied.
“Keep him there. Don’t let him move. Absolutely don’t let your eyes off him!” The SEAL captain then tersely ended the conversation.
Later that evening, a helicopter swooped onto Blessing’s landing strip, carrying two unidentified, bearded SOF personnel who charged into the tearoom, demanding, “That him?” as they pointed to Shina. Matt nodded, then the duo threw a black bag over Shina’s head, tightly flexicuffed the villager’s hands behind his back, and dragged him into the helicopter, which then roared into the night. Bartels and Sultan shot each other stunned looks.
“I guess that’s why he didn’t want to go to Asadabad,” Matt said with a tone of disbelief and embarrassment, astonished that fellow American military servicemen would treat a local clearly trying to help with such unnecessary brutality.
“Too bad we couldn’t keep Asadabad from coming to him, sir,” Sultan replied.
Earlier on the twenty-ninth, as Shina journeyed to Camp Blessing, Ahmad Shah and his men descended upon Salar Ban. They’d