“Eternal Father, faithful friend, Be quick to answer those we send In brotherhood and urgent trust, On hidden missions dangerous, O hear us when we cry to Thee, For SEALs in air, on land, and sea.”
The Taliban had seen me by now. I was the only one they could see, and I heard a volley of bullets screaming around me. One shot smacked into the tree just to my right. The rest were hitting the dirt and sending up puffs of dust. I heaved at the log. I heaved with all my might, but I could not move that sucker. I was pinned down.
I was trying to look backward, wondering if Mikey had seen me and might try a rescue, when suddenly I saw the stark white smoke trail of an incoming RPG against the mountain. The RPG smashed into the tree trunk right next to me and exploded with a shattering blast as I tried frantically to turn away from it. I can’t tell what happened next, but it blew the trunk clean in half and shot me straight over the cliff.
I guess it was about fifteen feet down to where Axe was moving into firing position, and I landed close. Considering I’d just been blown over the ledge like a human cannonball, I was pretty lucky to be still standing. And there right next to me on the ground was my rifle, placed there by the Hand of God Himself.
I reached down to pick it up and listened again for His voice. But this time there was no noise, just one brief second of silence in my mind, amid all the chaos and malevolence of this monstrous struggle for supremacy, apparently being conducted on behalf of His Holy Prophet Muhammad.
I was not sure whether either of them would have approved. I don’t know that much about Muhammad, but, by all that’s holy, I don’t think my own God wished me to die. If He had been indifferent to my plight, He surely would not have taken such good care of my gun, right? Because how on earth that was still with me, I will never know.
That rifle had so far fought three separate battles in three different places, been ripped out of my grasp twice, been blown over a cliff by a powerful grenade, fallen almost nine hundred feet down a mountain, and was still somehow right next to my outstretched hand. Fluke? Believe what you will. My own faith will remain forever unshaken.
― Marcus Luttrell, Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10
