‘I will never quit.’
FROM THE NAVY SEAL CREED
WHEN MARCUS LUTTRELL was 15 years old he already knew that he wanted to be a US Navy SEAL.
There’s nothing like aiming high.
The SEALs are one of the toughest, most skilled fighting forces in the world. And that means they take only the toughest, most skilled American recruits.
Marcus and his twin brother Morgan knew this, even as teenagers, so they enlisted the help of a former US Army soldier who lived nearby. He instructed them in the principles of fitness and endurance. They would be essential qualities when it came to the gruelling task of SEAL qualification training … and beyond.
Different special forces around the world have different training regimes. The SEALs start out with a twenty-four-week Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL course, or BUD/S for short. This includes a physical ‘conditioning’ phase, part of which comprises a week of intense and sleep-deprived training known as ‘Hell Week’.
During Hell Week, you’re only allowed to sleep for a total of four hours – not per night but per week! The rest of the time is spent undergoing extreme physical training, including more than 200 miles of running (that’s nearly eight marathons) over a period of five days. You’re exercising over twenty hours a day. You’re always hungry, wet and exhausted. You eat 7,000 calories a day and still lose weight. Your skin is blasted with sand and mud. There are medical staff on hand day and night, because some bodies just aren’t made to endure that kind of intensity.
Hell Week tests your physical fitness, of course, but it’s also designed to test something just as important: your mental strength. I call it ‘spirit’. Lots of candidates drop out of BUD/S during Hell Week. The stress beats their bodies and their minds.
Marcus Luttrell didn’t make it through BUD/S the first time, but it was nothing to do with lack of fitness or endurance. He broke his leg halfway through. It didn’t put him off. As soon as the bone was healed, he returned for second helpings. He was that kind of guy.
Sure enough, Luttrell made it through BUD/S the next time, and eventually became a SEAL. But, as any special-forces soldier will tell you, qualification is just the beginning. If you think Hell Week is as bad as it’s going to get, think again. You put yourself up for selection every time you step into your boots, and it’s when you start the job proper that the hard work really begins.
As Luttrell was soon to find out, the rigours of Hell Week at Coronado, the SEAL training facility in San Diego, are nothing compared to advancing to contact in the badlands of Afghanistan.
*
When it comes to inhospitable parts of the world, Afghanistan takes some beating. The terrain in this war-torn country is one of the most hostile on earth. Arid, sweltering deserts. Freezing, almost unpassable mountains. But that’s what the SEALs train for.
There were three other men in Marcus Luttrell’s unit that day in the summer of 2005: Mike Murphy, Matthew ‘Axe’ Axelson and Danny Dietz. When they fast-roped into the Hindu Kush – the unforgiving mountain range stretching from central Afghanistan to northern Pakistan – from an MH-47 helicopter on the night of 27 June, they did so as part of Operation Red Wings. Their mission: to carry out surveillance on a group of buildings known to be used by a local Taliban commander called Ahmad Shah.
Shah was a highly trained militant and a known associate of Osama bin Laden. He needed taking out.
The unit was to find him, check out how big his militia force was, then call in an airstrike to finish the job. And, if it looked like Shah was getting away, then they were to take him out themselves.
A typical special-forces mission, deep in enemy heartland.
Their insertion point was 10,000 feet above sea level, where the air was oxygen-deficient. But Luttrell’s unit was well trained to cope with such environments. After they had inserted, they moved off on foot towards their objective. But almost at once, events started to slip from their control.
A small group of Afghan goat herders stumbled upon them. It would have been immediately obvious to the locals that these were American soldiers, so the SEAL unit took the herders captive while they discussed what to do with them. There were really only two options:
1) Let them go, and hope that they kept quiet about what they had just seen.
2) Kill them.
They took a vote. It’s a testament to the humanity as well as the courage of those four men that they made the decision to spare the goat herders’ lives. Sure, they were acting in accordance with the rules of engagement. Sure, they had no evidence that these were Taliban sympathizers. But Taliban sympathizers don’t walk round with T-shirts declaring their loyalty. Arguably, the correct military decision would have been a swift, silent execution.
The soldiers knew letting the herders go was a risk. But that was the call they made. It was a decision that would come back to haunt them.
Did the goat herders shop them to the Taliban? Almost certainly. Because within the hour, the SEAL unit entered a particularly treacherous area with high ground on three sides. And there, waiting for them, and with the advantage of height, were Ahmad Shah’s forces.
*
Some reports say that there were fifty Taliban in that ambush. Others say that there were two hundred. The numbers are academic. What matters is that the four soldiers were facing a hardened militia force armed with machine guns, assault rifles, 82 mm mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. These militants knew how to use their weapons. You don’t need many guys packing that kind of hardware, and firing down on you from an elevated position, for the outcome to be a fast annihilation.
An ordinary military unit would have been wiped out in seconds. But this was not an ordinary military unit. This was SEAL Team 10.
Luttrell and his colleagues engaged the Taliban, cutting down their numbers with a barrage of accurate fire. But their only real option was to retreat. Trouble was, the way back was an almost sheer drop down the mountain. As Luttrell and Murphy retreated rapidly and under intense fire, they tumbled out of control for 200 yards before literally falling over the lip of a cliff. Luttrell somersaulted twice in the air before slamming down on to the rock-hard ground.
Amazingly, both men survived the fall. Luttrell had lost all his gear except his rifle. The skin had been ripped clean away from one side of his face. He was covered in blood and bruises and he hurt like hell. Murphy was worse. He’d been shot during the fall, and blood was pumping from his stomach. When Danny and Axe joined them, it turned out Danny’s right thumb had also been blown off.
There was no time to tend their wounds. Taliban rocket-propelled grenades were incoming. The guys were directly in the kill zone and were forced to hurl themselves over another precipice. During this manoeuvre, Danny was shot for a second time. A Kalashnikov round, in through his back, out through his stomach. Blood was everywhere, spurting from the wound and dribbling from Danny’s mouth.
Still they carried on fighting.
Danny took a third bullet. Straight in the throat.
They tumbled down another precipice.
The rounds kept coming. Hundreds of them. Thousands. It was a miracle that only two of them had been shot. But then Danny took another round in the neck.
And then in the face.
Blood spilled out of his head. Life out of his body.
Four had become three.
They couldn’t stop for even a beat to mourn him. Bullets were raining down everywhere. They continued their tactical retreat, trying to find defensible ground.
Mike Murphy took a round to the chest. Axe one to the head.
Things were now looking really bad.
Their only real chance was to get backup. But that meant getting into open ground to find a signal. Mike Murphy knew that. He knew that he was sacrificing himself. With blood spurting from his chest he staggered out into that fatal but essential open ground. He made the distress call back to base. Then he took a final, fatal shot to the back. Blood exploded from his chest. He tried to continue the withdrawal, but the life was pouring from him as fast as the bullets continued to come. He died screaming in agony.
Three had become two.
And Axe was clearly dying too. He had managed to fit a bandage to his head, but his eyes had turned black as blood from the wounds seeped into the sockets. His last words? ‘Stay alive, Marcus. And tell Cindy I love her.’
Stay alive. After a brutal two-hour firefight that had killed his three buddies, that was exactly what Luttrell was determined to do.
But the Taliban had other ideas. They knew his location. He heard the ominous fizz of an RPG heading in his direction. Then the sudden thunderclap as it exploded right next to him.
The blast blew him over the edge of the ravine. He lost consciousness before he hit the ground.
Luttrell woke up upside down in a hollow. He was in a bad, bad way. His trousers had been blasted off, but that was the least of his problems. He couldn’t feel his left leg. Its flesh was riddled with shrapnel from the RPG and blood was gushing relentlessly from his wounds.
He had a broken nose, a broken shoulder and a broken back. That hurts. Trust me. Every time he moved, he left a trail of blood. He packed his wounds with mud to stop the blood leaking out. But he was a gruesome, mashed-up mess.
The gunfire had stopped. It was scant comfort. The mountains were crawling with Taliban and they would hunt him down.
There was just one glimmer of hope. Murphy’s heroic distress call had made it back to base. A QRF (quick reaction force) was being dispatched. Right now, they looked like Luttrell’s only chance.
The QRF comprised a Chinook containing eight SEALs and eight special-forces air crew. The Chinook was chaperoned by Apache attack helicopters. A serious team flying in to serious work. The Chinook is an amazing piece of equipment, but it’s not invulnerable. It took real guts for those guys to fly straight into the kill zone. They knew they were a highly visible and anticipated target for the insurgents who had just killed three of their comrades.
It only took a single rocket-propelled grenade to bring the Chinook down. It was fired straight into the open tailgate as the guys were preparing to fast-rope to the ground. Then it hit the fuel tank. In seconds, the Chinook was an inferno. Burning men fell screaming from the aircraft to the ground. The helicopter itself veered out of control before slamming into the mountain.
All sixteen men died.
So far, Operation Red Wings had seen the SEALs’ biggest loss of life in a single day. An unbelievable tragedy for all involved. But one man was still going. Just.
Marcus Luttrell.
*
Marcus was alive, but he was torn to bits: light-headed through his blood loss; parched with thirst having lost his water bottle; barely able to walk with three shattered vertebrae, numerous fractured bones and shrapnel sticking out of his flesh. To move an inch was unbearable torture, but staying still wasn’t an option. The Taliban were hunting him. If they found him, they’d kill him, and brutally. If they didn’t, he’d still die, either of his wounds or of thirst.
He needed to get to the top of the mountain: a defensible position where a helicopter could land. And he needed to find water.
Luttrell started to hike, or hobble. Never mind that the terrain was rocky and unforgiving. Never mind that the high-altitude air was thin. Never mind that his back was broken.
If he found grass, he licked the mountain dew from it. If he found a tree, he broke off the thinnest twigs and tried to suck out the sap. He even tried wringing out his socks to get some liquid. Still, the thirst was all-consuming.
He navigated using the stars, and hobbled up the mountain all night, well aware that the Taliban were tracking him. He fought to ignore the indescribable pain his body was in.
By first light he was so thirsty that his tongue had stuck to the roof of his mouth. He was afraid that if he moved it, he would tear the skin. The sun grew hotter. And hotter. His thirst grew worse. He somehow ignored it, as well as the agony of his shattered bones. Instead he focused on his escape and evasion.
And on finding water.
All the while, the Taliban were combing the mountains for him. Ahmad Shah and his men knew the surrounding peaks like the backs of their hands. They’d grown up there. The heat of the Afghan summer was nothing to them. And, of course, their bodies were whole and unbroken.
Afternoon came. Somewhere in the distance Marcus heard the unmistakable tinkle of a mountain stream, and desperately started making his way towards it.
Suddenly, a shot rang out.
A brutal thud in his leg.
Pain, screaming through his body.
He had been shot by a Taliban sniper.
The force of the bullet knocked him back down the mountain, opening up his wounds as AK-47 rounds flew everywhere.
He could only crawl now, so that’s what he did. Over hills, down gullies, blood pouring from his wound and leaving a trail behind him, AK-47 bullets pinging over his head. When a Taliban scout caught up with him, Luttrell managed to shoot him in the chest. When he realized two more were nearby, he lobbed a grenade in their direction and took them out. Somehow, despite everything, he was still able to fight smart.
Now he was starting to black out. Still he crawled, somehow managing to evade his hunters. Towards late afternoon he found a waterfall, but before he could reach it he slipped an excruciating 1,000 feet down the mountain – and then had to climb up it again. He did so on all fours.
Finally he reached the precious water, where he drank deeply. The sweetest water, he would later say, that he ever tasted.
As he looked up he saw three Afghan men watching him.
Like a wounded animal, he prepared for his final stand.
He tried to shoot them, but blood trickled down his forehead and into his eyes, blinding him. More blood from his brutalized body was turning the ground around him red. The world started to spin.
He might have gone down fighting, but now, he knew he was finally defeated.
Only he wasn’t. These people were not Taliban. They were mountain tribal people and were well-disposed towards Americans. They would help him.
Here, in the most hostile region on earth, at the end of a truly incredible escape and evasion, surrounded by killers who wanted him dead, could it possibly be that Luttrell had found friends?
*
I don’t know about you, but if I’d just been double-crossed by four Afghan goat herders, I’d be wary of mixing with any more locals. Luttrell had put his trust in human nature once, and it had failed him. Should he now put his trust in the kindness of strangers? Did he have a choice?
He had no option but to pray, and to trust them.
Good move.
When a Pashtun tribesman offers you help, he means it. That offer of help brings with it an unbreakable promise to defend you to the death.
Those men and women gave Marcus shelter in their village. Even when it was surrounded by Taliban, they refused to give him up. They smuggled him out of the village into some nearby caves to keep him from the enemy’s clutches. Those simple Afghan villagers repaid his trust in them a hundredfold.
They tended his wounds as best they could, but the truth was that Luttrell needed specialist medical treatment, and soon. He needed to let the Americans know where he was. The nearest American base was in Asadabad, 40 miles over the mountain. There was no way Luttrell could make that journey. And so the village elder, a tough old man who had no time for the Taliban’s violence, volunteered to make the journey himself.
That is hospitality. That is grace.
The man eventually managed to alert American forces to Luttrell’s presence, and they came to his rescue. It had been six days since the contact that had killed the rest of his patrol.
Six days of pain, danger, sand, fatigue and fear. You could call it Hell Week.
*
Marcus Luttrell returned home a hero. But a man does not easily lose nineteen of his colleagues on the field of battle. The guilt for the survivor can be the toughest battle to face. People deal with it in different ways. Luttrell’s way was inspiring.
After a second tour of duty in Afghanistan (yes, he went back for more!) Marcus Luttrell started the Lone Survivor Foundation. It’s an organization that aims to help wounded soldiers and their families as they try to make the difficult readjustment to life back home. That’s a cause worth fighting for. These men and women go into battle to defend our liberty. Some pay a very high price. Arguably the ultimate price.
To take a stand, get back in the fight and to determine to help those most in need, takes courage, heart and determination. Men like Marcus Luttrell have those qualities in spades.