The Book: The Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and The Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10, by Marcus Luttrell
The Story: A team of four U.S. Navy SEALS was sent out to an area near the Afghanistan/Pakistan border to check out this village where an al Qaeda leader was rumored to be staying and building up a Taliban army. For these guys, the mission actually seemed fairly cut-and-dry, the kind of thing that they did pretty frequently. They were all good friends and were comfortable going into a potentially dangerous situation together. Just a few hours into the mission, something goes terribly wrong and they are soon in the middle of this firefight with over 100 members of the Taliban. They fight hard and do well, but after 4 or 5 hours, Marcus is the only member of his team that has survived. He has no real way of communication and he’s wounded pretty bad.
What follows is Marcus’ story of survival. He crawled miles and made it to a village where the people nursed him back to help, kept him safe, and fought for him. The Taliban fights hard and even manages to crash the rescue helicopter that comes to save Marcus. Back home his family is starting to mourn his death, but Marcus uses his wits, not to mention quite a bit of luck, to get out of this thing alive.
What I Thought: Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first: Marcus is totally full of himself. It is clear throughout the book that he genuinely thinks that he and other Navy SEALS are the end all be all of the whole world. To be fair, I think that that is probably part of their training. Had he not thought that he was tough and that he could survive anything and that he was the smartest person in the country and on and on, he may not have survived this situation. I found myself, several times, kind of rolling my eyes at him talking about how strong he was, how smart, how great… but after awhile I just figured that most SEALS are probably like that and let it go.
The other thing that got on my nerves were the intermittent rants about the “liberal media.” The first time I just kind of grinned and thought, “Well, I guess we know which way he leans,” but after paragraphs and paragraphs about how the liberal media criminalizes soldiers for doing what they were trained to do and yadda yadda, it really did become distracting for me. I don’t really know what his goal was with all the ranting, but for me it just served to make me like him a little less. Not for having these views, mind you, but for feeling like he had to bring them up every chapter. So you know, I totally disagree with him. He talked a lot about how the troops were made out to be bad guys and that the liberal media’s sympathies seem to lie with Afghanis and Iraqi people. Huh? I would say that any criticism is usually directed at military higher-ups or on crazy atrocities like Abu Ghraib (which Marcus said was justified and said that they deserved much worse than what they got…). So. That’s my rant on his rants. The end.
Other than those two little things though, I really did think that this was a great book. I tend to shy away from books about the military just because I’m not familiar with their terminology, ranks, and have a hard time picturing combat. This book was written in kind of a “user friendly” way that made me feel totally comfortable. I liked how he kind of chronicled his journey from Texas, through SEALS training and into combat-zones. The SEALS training had me reading with my jaw hanging open.
When he got to the actual mission and how everything went down, I thought that he presented everything in this really clear way and was great about putting his guts into it. Instead of the “this guy shot this guy and this guy took position and yadda yadda,” I really felt like he told how he was feeling, how everything was playing out and kind of just how he was taking everything in. I am sure that to write such a detailed description of these hours was just horribly painful, but he did a great job and those chapters were the best written in the whole book.
The chapters, however, that got to me the most were the ones of Marcus’ family back home just waiting to hear news on him. His twin brother said all along that he had a connection to Marcus and that he was still alive. Their mom was totally beside herself with hope and grief, and watching their family, their town, friends and members of the military just gather around her and the rest of Marcus’ family was just gut-wrenching. When they got the call that Marcus survived, I cried real, actual tears.
Conclusion: If you can just get used to the cockiness and ignore the political rants, read this. It seems like more of a guy book (what with no kissing or anything), but it really isn’t. It is bloody and the guns have nicknames, but there is also real heart here.