Marcus luttrell

Christ! If she can do it, I’m definitely gonna do it,
and I launched myself into 
the clear skies above Fort Benning. 
Next stop for me was the Eighteenth Delta Force medical program, conducted at Fort Bragg, 
North Carolina. That’s where they turned me into a battlefield doctor. I suppose it was more like 
a paramedic, but the learning curve was huge: medicine, in-jections, IV training, chest tubes, 
combat trauma, wounds, burns, stitches, morphine. It covered just about everything a wounded 
warrior might need under battle conditions. On the first day I had to memorize 315 examples of 
medical terminology. And they never took their foot off the high-discipline accelerator. Here 
I was, working all day and half the night, and there was 
still
an instructor telling me to get wet 
and sandy during training runs. 
I went straight from North Carolina to SEAL qualification training, three more months of hard 
labor in Coronado, diving, parachute jumping, shooting, explosives, detonation, a long, intensive 
recap of everything I had learned. Right after that, I was sent to join the SDV school 
(submarines) at Panama City, Florida. I was there on 9/11, and little did I realize the massive 
impact those terrible events in New York City would have on my own life. 
I remember the pure indignation we all felt. Someone had just attacked the United States of 
America, the beloved country we were sworn to defend. We watched the television with 
mounting fury, the fury of young, inexperienced, but supremely fit and highly trained combat 
troops who could not wait to get at the enemy. We wished we could get at Osama bin Laden’s al 
Qaeda mob in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, or wherever the hell these lunatics lived. But be careful 
what you wish for. You might get it. 
A lot of guys passed SEAL qualification training and received their Tridents on Wednesday 
afternoon, November 7, 2001. They pinned it right on in a short ceremony out there on the 
grinder. You could see it meant all the world to the graduates. There were in fact only around 
thirty left from the original 180 who had signed up on that long-ago first day of Indoc. For 
myself, because of various educational commitments, I had to wait until January 31, 2002, for 
my Trident. 

---

But the training never stopped. Right after I formally joined what our commanders call the 
brotherhood, I went to communication school to study and learn satellite comms, high-frequency 
radio links, antenna wavelength probability, in-depth computers, global positioning systems, and 
the rest. 
Then I went to Sniper School back at Camp Pendleton, where, unsurprisingly, they made sure 
you could shoot straight before you did anything else. This entailed two very tough exams 
involving the M4 rifle; the SR-25 semiautomatic sniper rifle, accurate to nine hundred yards; and 
the heavy, powerful 300 Win Mag bolt-action .308-caliber rifle. You needed to be expert with all 
of them if you were planning to be a Navy SEAL sniper. 
Then the real test started, the ultimate examination of a man’s ability to move stealthily, unseen 
and undetected, across rough, enemy-held ground where the slightest mistake might mean instant 
death or, worse, letting your team down. 
Our instructor was a veteran of the first wave of U.S. troops who had gone in after Osama. He 
was Brendan Webb, a terrific man. Stalking was his game, and his standards were so high they 
would have made an Apache scout gasp. Working right alongside him was Eric Davis, another 
brilliant SEAL sniper, who was completely ruthless in his examination of our abilities to stay 
concealed. 
The final “battleground” was a vast area out near the border of Pendleton. There was not much 
vegetation, mostly low, flat bushes, but the rough rocks-boulders-and-shale terrain was full of 
undulations, valleys, and gullies. Trees, the sniper’s nearest and dearest friends, were damn 
sparse, obviously by design. Before they let us loose in this barren, dusty no-man’s-land, they 
subjected us to long lectures stressing the importance of paying attention to every detail. 
They retaught us the noble art of camouflage, the brown and green creams, the way to arrange 
branches in your hat, the dangers of a gust of wind, which might ruffle your branches alone if 
they weren’t set tight, betraying your position. We practiced all the hours God made, and then 
they sent us out onto the range. 
It’s a vast sweep of ground, and the instructors survey it from a high platform. Our stalk began a 
thousand yards from that platform, upon which the gimlet-eyed Webb and Davis stood, scanning 
the acres like a pair of revolving radars. 
The idea was to get within two hundred yards of them and then fire through the crosshairs at the 
target. We had practiced doing this alone and with a partner, and boy, does this ever teach you 
patience. It can take hours just to move a few yards, but if the instructors catch you as they 
sweep the area with high-powered binoculars, you fail the course. 
For the final test I was working with a partner, and this meant we both had to stay well 
concealed. In the end, he finds the range and calls the shot, and I adhere to his command. At this 
stage the instructors have installed walkers all over the place, and they’re communicating by 
radios with the platform. If the walker gets within two steps of you, you’ve failed. 
Even if you get your shot off unseen