Marcus luttrell

instill in you?
I meant, 
ram home with a jack-
hammer.
Teamwork. They slam that word at you every other minute. 
Teamwork. Teamwork. 
Teamwork.
This is also where you first understand the concept of a swim buddy, which in SEAL 
ethos is an absolutely gigantic deal. You work with your buddy as a team. You never separate, 
not even to go to the john. In IBS (that stands for “inflatable boat, small”) training, if one of you 
falls over the side into the freezing ocean, the other joins him. Immediately. In the pool, you are 
never more than an arm’s length away. Later on, in the BUD/S course proper, you can be failed 
out of hand, thrown out, for not staying close enough to your swim buddy. 
This all comes back to that ironclad SEAL folklore — we never leave a man behind on 
the battlefield, dead or alive. No man is ever alone. Whatever the risk to the living, however 
deadly the opposing fire, SEALs will fight through the jaws of death to recover the remains of a 
fallen comrade. It’s a maxim that has survived since the SEALs were first formed in 1962, and it 
still applies today. 
It’s a strange thing really, but it’s not designed to help widows and parents of lost men. 
It’s designed for the SEALs who actually do the fighting. There’s something about coming 
home, and we all want to achieve that, preferably alive. But there is a certain private horror about 
being killed and then left behind in a foreign land, no grave at home, no loved ones to visit your 
final resting place. 
I know that sounds kind of nuts, but nonetheless, it’s true. Every one of us treasures that 
knowledge: No matter what, I will not be left behind, I will be taken home. We are all prepared 
to give everything. And in the end it does not seem too much to ask in return, since we fight, 
almost without exception, on the enemy’s ground, not our own. 
That World War I English poet and serving soldier Rupert Brooke understood the Brits 
do not traditionally bring home their war dead. And he expressed it right: “If I should die, think 
only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England.” There’s 
not a Navy SEAL anywhere in the world who does not understand those lines and why Brooke 
wrote them. 

---

It’s a sacred promise to us from our high command. That’s why it gets drummed into us 
from the very first day in Coro-nado — you are not going to be alone. Ever. And you’re not 
going to leave your swim buddy alone. 
I suffered a minor setback in the early part of that summer when I was in Class 226. I 
managed to fall from about fifty feet up a climbing rope and really hurt my thigh. The instructor 
rushed up to me and demanded, “You want to quit?” 
“Negative,
” I responded. 
“Then get right back up there,” he said. I climbed again, fell again, but somehow I kept going. 
The leg hurt like hell, but I kept training for another couple of weeks before the medics 
diagnosed a cracked femur! I was immediately on crutches but still hobbling along the beach and 
into the surf with the rest of them. Battle conditions, right? 
Eventually, when the leg healed, I was put back and then joined BUD/S Class 228 in 
December for phase two. We lived in a small barracks right behind the BUD/S grinder. That’s 
the blacktop square where a succession of SEAL instructors have laid waste to thousands of 
hopes and dreams and driven men to within an inch of their lives. 
Those instructors have watched men drop, watched them fail, watched them quit, and 
watched them quietly, with ice-cold, expressionless faces. That’s not heartless; it’s because they 
were only interested in the others, the ones who did not crack or quit. The ones who would rather 
die than quit. The ones with no quit in them. 
It was only the first day of Indoc, and my little room was positioned right next to the 
showers.