“That thing need new batteries?” I asked him.

“No. It’s fine, but they won’t fucking answer me.”

The minutes went by. The goatherds sat still, Axe and Murph with their rifles aimed straight at them, Danny acting like he could have thrown the comms system over the goddamned cliff.

“They won’t answer,” he said through gritted teeth. “I don’t know why. It’s like no one’s there.”

“There must be someone there,” said Murph, and I could hear the anxiety in his voice.

“Well, there isn’t,” said Danny.

“Murphy’s god-awful law,” I said. “Not you, Mikey, that other prick, the god of screwups.”

No one laughed. Not even me. And the dull realization dawned on us: we were on our own and had to make our own decision.

Mike Murphy said quietly, “We’ve got three options. We plainly don’t want to shoot these guys because of the noise. So, number one, we could just kill them quietly and hurl the bodies over the edge. That’s probably a thousand-foot drop. Number two is we kill them right here, cover ’em up as best we can with rocks and dirt.

“Either way we get the hell out and say nothing. Not even when the story comes out about the murdered Afghan goatherds. And some fucking headline back home which reads, ‘Navy SEALs Under Suspicion.’

“Number three, we turn ’em loose, and still get the hell out, in case the Taliban come looking.”

He stared at us. I can remember it just like it was yesterday. Axe said firmly, “We’re not murderers. No matter what we do. We’re on active duty behind enemy lines, sent here by our senior commanders. We have a right to do everything we can to save our own lives. The military decision is obvious. To turn them loose would be wrong.”

If this came to a vote, as it might, Axe was going to recommend the execution of the three Afghans. And in my soul, I knew he was right. We could not possibly turn them loose. But my trouble is, I have another soul. My Christian soul. And it was crowding in on me. Something kept whispering in the back of my mind, it would be wrong to execute these unarmed men in cold blood. And the idea of doing that and then covering our tracks and slinking away like criminals, denying everything, would make it more wrong.

To be honest, I’d have been happier to stand ’em up and shoot them right out in front. And then leave them. They’d just be three guys who’d found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Casualties of war. And we’d just have to defend ourselves when our own media and politicians back in the U.S.A. tried to hang us on a murder charge.

None of us liked the sneaky options. I could tell that. I guess all four of us were Christians, and if we were thinking like ordinary law-abiding U.S. citizens, we would find it very hard to carry out the imperative military decision, the overriding one, the decision any great commander would have made: these guys can never leave this place alive. The possible consequences of that were unacceptable. Militarily.

Lieutenant Murphy said, “Axe?”

“No choice.” We all knew what he meant.

“Danny?”

“As before. I don’t give a shit what you decide. Just tell me what to do.”

“Marcus?”

“I don’t know, Mikey.”

“Well, let me tell you one more time. If we kill these guys we have to be straight about it. Report what we did. We can’t sneak around this. Just so you all understand, their bodies will be found, the Taliban will use it to the max. They’ll get it in the papers, and the U.S. liberal media will attack us without mercy. We will almost certainly be charged with murder. I don’t know how you guys feel about that...Marcus, I’ll go with you. Call it.”

I just stood there. I looked again at these sullen Afghan farmers. Not one of them tried to say a word to us. They didn’t need to. Their glowering stares said plenty. We didn’t have rope to bind them. Tying them up to give us more time to establish a new position wasn’t an option.

I looked Mikey right in the eye, and I said, “We gotta let ’em go.”

It was the stupidest, most southern-fried, lamebrained decision I ever made in my life. I must have been out of my mind. I had actually cast a vote which I knew could sign our death warrant. I’d turned into a fucking liberal, a half-assed, no-logic nitwit, all heart, no brain, and the judgment of a jackrabbit.

At least, that’s how I look back on those moments now. Probably not then, but for nearly every waking hour of my life since. No night passes when I don’t wake in a cold sweat thinking of those moments on that mountain. I’ll never get over it. I cannot get over it. The deciding vote was mine, and it will haunt me till they rest me in an East Texas grave.

Mikey nodded. “Okay,” he said, “I guess that’s two votes to one, Danny abstains. We gotta let ’em go.”

I remember no one said anything. We could just hear the short staccato sounds of the goats: ba-aaaa...baaa...baaa. And the tinkling of the little bells. It provided a fitting background chorus to a decision which had been made in fucking fairyland. Not on the battlefield where we, like it or not, most certainly were.

Axe said again, “We’re not murderers. And we would not have been murderers, whatever we’d done.”

Mikey was sympathetic to his view. He just said, “I know, Axe, I know, buddy. But we just took a vote.”

I motioned for the three goatherds to get up, and I signaled them with my rifle to go on their way. They never gave one nod or smile of gratitude. And they surely knew we might very well have killed them. They turned toward the higher ground behind us.

I can see them now. They put their hands behind their backs in that peculiar Afghan way and broke into a very fast jog, up the steep gradient, the goats around us now trotting along to join them. From somewhere, a skinny, mangy brown dog appeared dolefully and joined the kid. That dog was a gruesome Afghan reminder of my own robust chocolate Labrador, Emma, back home on the ranch, always bursting with health and joy.

I guess that’s when I woke up and stopped worrying about the goddamned American liberals. “This is bad,” I said. “This is real bad. What the fuck are we doing?”

Axe shook his head. Danny shrugged. Mikey, to be fair, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Like me, he was a man who knew a massive mistake had just been made. More chilling than anything we had ever done together. Where were those guys headed? Were we crazy or what?

Thoughts raced through my mind. We’d had no comms, no one we could turn to for advice. Thus far we had no semblance of a target in the village. We were in a very exposed position, and we appeared to have no access to air support. We couldn’t even report in. Worse yet, we had no clue as to where the goatherds were headed. When things go this bad, it’s never one thing. It’s every damn thing.

We watched them go, disappearing up the mountain, still running, still with their hands behind their backs. And the sense that we had done something terrible by letting them go was all-pervading. I could just tell. Not one of us was able to speak. We were like four zombies, hardly knowing whether to crash back into our former surveillance spots or leave right away.

“What now?” asked Danny.

Mikey began to gather his gear. “Move in five,” he said.

We packed up our stuff, and right there in the noonday sun, we watched the goatherds, far on the high horizon, finally disappear from view. By my watch, it was precisely nineteen minutes after their departure, and the mood of sheer gloom enveloped us all.

We set off up the mountain, following in the hoofprints of the goats and their masters. We moved as fast as we could, but it took us between forty minutes and one hour to cover the same steep ground. At the top, we could no longer see them. Mountain goats, mountain herders. They were all the goddamned same, and they could move like rockets up in the passes.