But then Axe reached for his rifle and got up. He leveled the weapon, got a hold of another magazine, shoved it into the breech, and opened fire again, blood pumping out of his chest. He held his same firing position, leaning against the rock. He showed the same attitude of solid Navy SEAL know-how, the same formidable steadiness, staring through his scope, those brilliant blue eyes of his scanning the terrain.

When Axe got up, it was the bravest thing I ever saw. Except for Danny. Except for Mikey, still commanding us after taking a bullet through his stomach so early in the battle.

And now Murph was masterminding a way down the escarpment. He had chosen the route and called up Axe to follow him down. And still the bullets were humming around us as the Taliban started their pursuit. Mikey and Axe were about seventy-five yards in front, and I was dragging Danny along while he did everything he could to help, trying to walk, trying to give us covering fire.

“It’s okay, Danny,” I kept saying. “We just need to catch up with the others. It’s gonna be all right.”

Right then a bullet caught him full in the upper part of his face. I heard it hit home, I turned to help him, and the blood from his head wound spilled over us both. I called out to him. But it was too late. He wasn’t fighting the terrible pain anymore. And he couldn’t hear me. Danny Dietz died right there in my arms. I don’t know how quickly hearts break, but that nearly broke mine.

And still the gunfire never abated. I dragged Danny off the open ground maybe five feet, and then I said good-bye to him. I lowered him down, and I had to leave him or else die out here with him. But I knew one thing for certain. I still had my rifle and I was not alone, and neither was Danny, a devout Roman Catholic. I left him with God.

And now I had to get back to help my team. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

To this day I have nightmares about it, a chilling dream where Danny’s still talking to me, and there’s blood everywhere, and I have to walk away and I don’t even know why. I always wake up in tears, and it will always haunt me, and it’s never going to go away.

And now I could hear Murph yelling to me. I grabbed my rifle, ducked down, slipped and fell off a rock, then started to run toward him and Axe while they provided heavy covering fire nonstop aimed at the Taliban’s rocky redoubt, maybe another forty yards back.

I reached the edge, ran almost blindly into a tree, bounced off, skidded down the slope, which was not very deep, and landed on my head right in the fucking stream. Like any good frogman, I was seriously pissed off because my boots got wet. I really hate that.

Finally I caught up with them. Axe was out of ammunition and I gave him a new magazine. Mikey wanted to know where Danny was, and I had to tell him that Danny had died. He was appalled, completely shocked, and so was Axe. Although Mikey would not say it, I knew he wanted to go back for the body. But we both knew there was no time and no reason. We had nowhere to take the remains of a fallen teammate, and we could not continue this firefight while carrying around a body.

Danny was dead. And strangely, I was the first to pull myself together. I said suddenly, “I’ll tell you what. We have to get down this goddamned mountain or we’ll all be dead.”

And as if to make up our minds for us, the Taliban were again closing in, trying to make that 360-degree movement around us. And they were doing it. Gunfire was coming in from underneath us now. We could see the tribesmen still swarming, and I tried to count them as I had been trying to do for almost an hour.

I thought there were now only about fifty, maybe sixty, but the bullets were still flying. The grenades were still coming in, blasting close, sending up dust clouds of smoke and dirt with flying bits of rock. There had never been a lull in the amount of ordnance the enemy was piling down on us.

Right now, again tucked low behind rocks, the three of us could look down and see the village one and a half miles distant, and it remained our objective.

Again I told Mikey, “If we can just make it down there and get some cover, we’ll take ’em all out on the flat ground.”

I knew we were not in great shape. But we were still SEALs. Nothing can ever take that away. We were still confident. And we were never going to surrender. If it came down to it, we would fight to the death with our knives against their guns.

“Fuck surrender,” said Mikey. And he had no need to explain further, either to Axe or me. Surrender would have been a disgrace to our community, like ringing the bell at the edge of the grinder and putting your helmet in the line. No one who had made it through this far, to this no-man’s-land in the Afghan mountains, would have dreamed of giving up.

Remember the philosophy of the U.S. Navy SEALs: “I will never quit...My Nation expects me to be physically harder and mentally stronger than my enemies. If knocked down, I will get back up, every time. I will draw on every remaining ounce of strength to protect my teammates...I am never out of the fight.”

Those words have sustained many brave men down the years. They were engraved upon the soul of every SEAL. And they were in the minds of all of us.

Mikey suddenly said, above the rage of the battle, “Remember, bro, we’re never out of it.”

I nodded tersely. “It’s only about another thousand yards to flat ground. If we can just get down there, we got a chance.”

Trouble was, we couldn’t get down there, at least not right then. Because once more we were pinned down. And we faced the same dilemma: the only escape was to go down, but our only defensive strategy was to go up. Once more, we had to get off this ground, away from the ricochets. Back up the left flank.

We were trying to fight the battle our way. But even though we were still going, we were battered half to death. I led the way back up the rocks, blasting away, shooting down anyone I could see. But they caught on to that real quick, and now they really unloaded on us, Russian-made rocket grenades. Coming straight down their right flank, our left.

The ground shook. The very few trees swayed. The noise was worse than any blast all day. Even the walls of this little canyon shook. The stream splashed over its banks. This was one gigantic Taliban effort to finish us. We hit the deck, jamming ourselves into our rocky crevasse, heads down to avoid the lethal flying debris, rock fragments and shrapnel. As before they did not kill anyone with this type of thunderous bombardment, and as before they waited till the dust had cleared and then opened fire again.

Above me I could see the tree line. It was not close, but it was nearer than the village. But the Taliban knew our objective, and as we tried to fight our way forward, they drove us back with sheer weight of fire.

We’d tried, against all the odds, and just could not make it. They’d knocked us back again. And we retreated down, making a long pathetic loop, back the way we’d come. But once more we landed up in a good spot, a sound defensive position, well protected by the rock face on either side. Again we tried to take the fight to them, picking our targets and driving them back, making some ground now toward the village.

They were up and screaming at us, yelling as the battle almost became close quarters. We yelled right back and kept firing. But there were still so many of them, and then they got into better position and shot Mikey Murphy through the chest.

He came toward me, asking if I could give him another magazine. And then I saw Axe stumbling toward me, his head pushed out, blood running down his face, bubbling out of the most shocking head wound.

“They shot me, bro,” he said. “The bastards shot me. Can you help me, Marcus?” What could I say? What could I do? I couldn’t help except by trying to fight off the enemy. And Axe was standing right in my line of fire.