To the east stand the awesome ramparts of the Himalayas, 1,550 miles of towering summits that block out the early morning light from the western escarpments, all the way from southern China to Afghanistan. There are tiny mountain villages clinging to the slopes of the Hindu Kush range where the sun does not peer over the pinnacles until long after the herdsmen have led the goats to the damp pastures above the mud-built dwellings. The light is soft and suffused, the brightness in the sky being perhaps ten thousand feet higher, like God’s fluorescence, and the valleys seem gloomy, painted only with the colors of the earth. It was into this half-lit melancholy that SEAL Team 10, representing an infuriated United States of America, came bursting through on a cool autumn morning in 2004. The time was 6:30 a.m., and there were twelve of them from Foxtrot Platoon, fanning out, pounding across the rough ground, taking this apparently peaceful and defenseless township by the throat, terrifying women and children.
