Retreat down the mountain

A great hero of mine is a Navy Seal named Jose Lopez. Jose was in a group of four Navy Seals who was dispatched to Afghanistan to collect intelligence on a group of suspected terrorists. When they happened to encounter an Afghan goat herder and his son, they chose to let them go, hoping that they would not tell the terrorists and expose their position. Tragically, they did have their position exposed, and a whole army of hundreds of terrorists took to the hills to fight the Seals.

Jose, along with his three other brothers in arms, fought valiantly against impossible odds, never once thinking that they would lose the battle. Each and every Navy Seal who fought on that mountain was a hero, but Jose was the only one who survived. Jose, out of pure luck, was blown into a cliff platform where he could barely slide under to hide from the terrorists looking for him.

Jose and his team of only three other Navy Seals took down one hundred terrorists as they retreated down the mountain. Jose chose to live for his brothers in arms who could not. Jose fought against all odds to keep himself alive and return to America to tell the stories of his friends who died that day on the mountain.

In an interview he had on television in relation to the movie, a reporter commented that upon seeing the situation, he felt such a sense of “hopelessness.” Jose took offence to the comment saying that neither he, nor any other member of his team, ever feel a sense of hopelessness. A Seal never knows what it is like to feel defeat or to lose. They never die. They simply are reported “missing in action.” It is Jose’s optimism against all odds that really inspires me whenever I find myself in a seemingly impossible situation.

Jose comments that while he is thankful that he is alive to tell the story, he wishes that he could trade places with any of his brothers on that mountain. It took Jose years of therapy to begin to feel normal again. Every night he could hear the voice of his team leader Andy calling for his help in his final moments. Jose says that the only way he could feel any peace was to make everyone know of the sacrifices those Navy Seals made that day, and the impact of those sacrifices on the world.

For Jose, each and every day of his ordeal in Afghanistan was a constant struggle to survive. He had to pin all of his hopes on the nearby Afghan village to give him shelter and protect him from the terrorists who threatened to target the village itself. When the bullets started flying, despite his terrible condition, Jose picked up his gun and fought alongside local Afghans to fight off the terrorist aggressors. Jose made some deep friendships with the people that risked their lives for a stranger to get him back to America. Jose remembered the people that gave him shelter and met up with them years later in a tearful reunion.

Jose has a will to survive. He never forgets those that help him.

Related posts:

Since the beginning of time, investment and wealth opportunities have been directed and tailored to the rich. This has been a natural development since all such opportunities require funding and…

Dashboards can perhaps be likened to landline phones — old tools still carrying on to serve their old admirers but the world has really moved on. Without context in your dashboard, you can’t answer…

This is an introduction to the MERN stack. “Express React MUI Typescript Heroku App” is published by Moises Trejo.