Marcus luttrell

particular mass murderer was right where we were going, somewhere. 
Generally speaking, we were to grab our man in the village if he was protected by, say, only four 
bodyguards. No problem. But if there were more of them, some kind of Taliban garrison 
crawling with armed men, we were to call for a proper fighting force to fly in and take care of 
the problem. Either way, when we arrived, things ceased to look great for young Abdul the 
Bombmaker measuring out his dynamite down there in Main Street, Mud Hut Central, Northeast 
Afghanistan. 
Our next mission was a huge operation, around fifty guys dropped into the mountains, in the 
worst terrain you’ve ever seen. Well, maybe not if there are any mountain goats or mountain 
lions among my readers, but it sure as hell was the worst I’d ever seen. There were steep cliff 
faces, loose footing, sheer drops, hardly any bushes or trees, nothing to grab, nowhere to take 
cover if necessary. 
I have explained how supremely fit we were. We could all climb anything, go anywhere. But — 
you’re not going to believe this — we took 
eight hours
to walk one and a half miles. Guys were 
falling down the goddamned mountain, getting hurt, bad. It was hotter than a Texas griddle, and 
one of my buddies told me later, “I’d have quit the teams just to get out of there.” 
I know he didn’t mean it. But we all knew the feeling. We were tired, frustrated, roped together 
in teams, crawling across the face of this dangerous mountain with full rucksacks and rifles. To 

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this day it remains the worst journey of my life. And we weren’t even facing the enemy. It was 
so bad we made up a song about it, which our resident expert banjo player put to the music of the 
Johnny Cash song “Ring of Fire”: 
I fell into a hundred-foot ravine,
We went down, down, down, and busted up my spleen,
And it burned, burned, burned — that Ring of Fire . . .
Our dual targets on that next mission were two Afghan villages set into the mountainside, one 
above the other. We had no clues which one harbored the most Taliban forces, and it had been 
decided we needed to take them both at gunpoint. No bullshit. The reason for this was a very 
young guy. We had terrific intel on him, from both satellites and the FBI. We did not, however, 
have photographs. 
I never knew where he was educated, but this young Taliban kid was a scientist, a master of 
explosives. We call them IED guys (improvised explosive devices), and in this part of the 
mountains, this kid was King IED. And he and his men had been wreaking havoc on U.S. troops, 
blowing stuff up all over the place. He’d recently blown up a couple of U.S. Marine convoys and 
killed a lot of guys. 
Foxtrot Platoon regrouped in the small hours of the morning after the trek across the mountains 
and positioned ourselves high above the upper village. As the sun came up, we moved swiftly 
down the hillside and charged into the village, crashing down the doors to the houses, arresting 
anyone and everyone. We were not shooting, but we were very intimidating, no doubt about that. 
And no one resisted. But the kid wasn’t there. 
Meanwhile the main force, SEAL Team 10, was in and playing hell in the bigger, lower village. 
It took them a while, because this required interrogation, a skill at which we were all very 
competent. In these circumstances, we were grilling everyone, looking for the liar, the guy who 
changed his story, the guy who was somehow different. We wanted the guy who was obviously 
not a goatherd, as the rest of them were; a young guy who lacked the gnarled, rough look of the 
native mountain farmer. 
We got our man. It was my first close-up encounter with a fanatical Taliban fighter. I’ll never 
forget him. He was only just old enough to have a decent beard, but he had wild, crazy eyes, and 
he stared at me like I’d just rejected the entire teachings of the Koran. 
I knew in that instant that if he could have killed me, he would have. No one had ever looked at 
me before, or has since, with that much hatred. 
That second operation in Afghanistan, the snatch-and-grab of Abdul the Bombmaker or whatever 
the hell his name was, brought home two aspects of this conflict to us newly arrived SEALs. 

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First, the rabid hatred these Muslim extremists had for all of us; second, the awkwardness of 
complying with our rules of engagement (ROE) in this type of warfare. 
SEALs, by our nature, training, and education, are not very stupid. And along with everyone 
else, we read the newspaper headlines from all over the world about serving members of the 
armed forces who have been charged with murder in civilian courts for doing what they thought 
was their duty, attacking their enemy. 
Our rules of engagement in Afghanistan specified that we could not shoot, kill, or injure 
unarmed civilians. But what about the unarmed civilian who was a skilled spy for the illegal 
forces we were trying to remove? What about an entire secret army, diverse, fragmented, and 
lethal, creeping through the mountains in Afghanistan