Lone Survivor -- A Review

Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10
by Marcus Luttrell, with Patrick Robinson
Little Brown & Co, 2007

Most of the books about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan we see reviewed here are either analyses of the policies that led to the wars or critiques of their execution. We tend to overlook a stark reality: The wars are being fought by individual soldiers who actually can get injured or killed in the process. Though they tend not to write books about their wars, when they do, we probably should read them. Indeed, in a very real way, they have earned our attention. One such warrior/writer is Marcus Luttrell.

Because I'm going to say some uncomplimentary things about this book and its author, I want to make something clear: Marcus Luttrell shed his blood attempting to carry out the missions his commanders gave him, and I admire him for that and appreciate his sacrifices very much. He's done things I know for a fact I couldn't do. This book is his account of Operation Redwing, which resulted in the deaths of his three SEAL teammates and of sixteen would-be rescuers in the mountains of Kunar Province, Afghanistan, in June, 2005.

It is a story that deserves to be told, but unfortunately, this book is very nearly unreadable.

First, the actual account of Operation Redwing comprises only about a third of the text. The rest is endlessly repetitive macho boasting. Luttrell is a rip-roaring, six-gun shooting, God-fearing Texan, as we hear over and over and over and over. The SEALs are the roughest, toughest, baddest dudes walking the earth, as we hear over and over and over and over. Do you remember those loud-mouth, over-bearing jocks you went to high school with? Luttrell is one of them.

Second, Luttrell's dramatic you-are-there account of his unit's heroic fight to the death against overwhelming odds is badly—and sadly—marred by his complete failure to comprehend why it happened the way it did. Three interacting factors led to the deaths of Operation Redwing's casualties: bad planning and intelligence, bad luck, and arrogance. Luttrell's four-person SEAL team was plunked down on a barren mountainside that offered little cover and, most importantly, no easy way to escape if anything went wrong. They were there to watch for and, if possible, capture or kill a Taliban leader believed to be in the area. Unbeknownst to the mission’s planners, he was there with hundreds of his fighters. While the SEALs were crouched on the mountainside watching, three goat-herders and several dozen bleating goats almost literally stepped right on them.

The mission was doomed at that point. The SEALs could have killed or detained the goat-herders, but their disappearance and the goats milling around on the hillside would have aroused the suspicions of the villagers. The SEALs chose to let them go, but then, for some unfathomable reason, they didn't immediately abort the mission and depart the area. A short while later, they were attacked by about a hundred Taliban fighters and cut to pieces. Luttrell was the only survivor, mostly because a grenade blew him into a ravine where the Taliban couldn't find him, and he eventually was rescued by some villagers who decided to protect him, even though they put their lives at great risk doing so. Later, a rescue helicopter searching the area at low altitude and slow speed was shot down by the Taliban with a rocket-propelled grenade, killing all sixteen aboard.

Luttrell believes that everyone died not due to bad planning and bad luck, but as a direct result of liberal politicians and media in the US, who won't let the military kill anyone they want. Luttrell preposterously claims that while his team was being shot at, they discussed whether the liberals would prosecute them for murder if they shot back. Of course, there's not a chance that really happened. Nor is there the slightest possibility that the hero of the book, Lt. Michael Murphy, who was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor for his actions that day, took a vote about whether to release the goat-herders, and fear of liberals caused the SEALs to let them go.

Luttrell directly states that no civilians should have the right to even know what the military is doing, let alone the right to control it. Even worse, he is aggressively and arrogantly ignorant about the places he's sent to, the events that have transpired there, and the people who live there. He asserts that everyone who hates America in the region—Saddam, the Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias in Iraq, the Taliban, al Qaeda, the Iranians, and everyone else—are all in a carefully orchestrated conspiracy to destroy us. Further, there actually are weapons of mass destruction hidden in Iraq, but—you guessed it—the liberals won't let the military go after them. This kind of claptrap goes on for many, many pages.

Finally, the book is riddled with factual errors, some the result of Luttrell's braggadocio, but others more serious. For example, he tells us that his father was a Texan born and bred, but a few pages later, he was actually born in Oklahoma, then a few pages later, he's a native-born Arkansas woodsman. No big deal, really, but we also learn that the Pakistani border is in Afghanistan's northwest, that the C-130 that Luttrell flies in is built by Boeing, not Lockheed, that the Taliban are the Mujahedeen who fought the Russians, and so on. There are many, many such errors, and one wonders why a respectable publisher like Little, Brown apparently didn't do any fact-checking.

At its best, this book is the story of a man who is willing to go to one of the most dangerous spots on earth, knowing that there is a very real possibility he may die there, simply because he believes to the core of his being that he must do his duty. At its worst, this book seems to be nothing more than the story of a loudmouthed Rambo wannabe.

So, while I admire Luttrell for his sacrifices, the book he and his co-writer produced is so badly flawed as to be nearly unreadable. And that is a great shame.