Marcus luttrell

 
But you can’t prove their intentions!
I hear the liberals squeal. No. Of course not. They were just 
headed up there for a cup of coffee. 
Those Taliban night attacks were the very same tactics the mujahideen used against the Russians, 
sliding through the darkness and cutting the throats of guards and sentries until the Soviet 
military, and the parents of young soldiers, could stand it no more. The mujahideen has now 
emerged as the Taliban or al Qaeda. And their intentions against us are just as bloodthirsty as 
they were against the Russians. 
The Navy SEALs can deal with that, as we can deal with any enemy. But not if someone wants 
to put us in jail for it back home in the U.S.A. And we sure as hell don’t want to hang around in 
the mountains waiting for someone to cut our throats, unable to fight back just in case he might 
be classified as an unarmed Afghan farmer. 
But these are the problems of the modern U.S. combat soldier, the constant worry about 
overstepping the mark and an American media that delights in trying to knock us down. Which 
we have done nothing to deserve. Except, perhaps, love our country and everything it stands for. 
In the early weeks of our duties in Afghanistan, the fight went on. Platoons of us went out night 
after night, trying to halt the insurgents creeping through the mountain passes. Every time there 
was a full moon, we launched operations, because that was really the only time we could get a 
sweep of light over the dark mountains. 
Following this lunar cycle, we’d send the helicopters up there to watch these bearded fanatics 
squirting over the border into Afghanistan, and then we’d round them up, the helos driving them 
like sheepdogs, watching them run for their lives, straight toward us and the rest of the waiting 
U.S. troops for capture and interrogation. 
I realize it might seem strange that underwater specialists from SDV Team 1 should be groping 
around nine thousand feet above sea level. It is generally accepted in the navy that the swimmer 

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delivery vehicle (SDV), the minisubmarine that brings us into our ops area, is the stealthiest 
vehicle in the world. And it follows that the troops manning the world’s stealthiest vehicle are 
the world’s sneakiest guys. That’s us, operating deep behind enemy lines, observing and 
reporting, unnoticed, living on the edge of our nerves. And our principal task is always to find 
the target and then call in the direct action guys. That’s really what everyone wants to do, direct 
action, but it can’t be done without the deadly business we conduct up there in those lonely peaks 
of the Hindu Kush. 
Lieutenant Commander Eric Kristensen was always aware of our value, and in fact was a very 
good friend of mine. He used to name the operations for me. I was a Texan, which, being as he 
was a Virginia gentleman, somehow amused the life out of him. He thought I was some kind of 
cross between Billy the Kid and Buffalo Bill, quick on the draw and 
Dang mah breeches!
Never 
mind both those cowboys were from way north of me, Kansas or somewhere. So far as Eric was 
concerned, Texas and all points west and north of it represented the badlands, lawless frontiers, 
Colt .44s, cattlemen and Red Indians. 
Thus we were always flying out on Operation Longhorn or Operation Lone Star. Naming the ops 
for his Texas boy really broke him up. The vast majority of our missions were very quiet and 
involved strict surveillance of mountain passes or villages. We were always trying to avoid 
gunfire as we photographed and then swooped on our target. Invariably we were looking for the 
misfit, the one man in the village who did not fit in, the hit man of the Taliban who was plainly 
not a farmer. 
Sometimes we’d run across a group of these guys sitting around a campfire, bearded, sullen, 
drinking coffee, their AK-47s at the ready. Our first task was to identify them. Were they 
Pashtuns? Peaceable shepherds, goatherds? Or armed warriors of the Taliban, the ferocious 
mountain men who’d slit your throat as soon as look at you? It took only a few days to work out 
that Taliban fighters were nothing like so rough and dirty as Afghan mountain peasants. Many of 
them had been educated in America, and here they were, carefully cleaning their AK-47s, getting 
ready to kill us. 
And it did not take us much longer to realize how impressive they could be in action up here on 
their home ground. I always thought they would turn and run for it when we discovered them. 
But they did nothing of the kind. If they held or could reach the high ground, they would stand 
and fight. If we came down on them they’d usually either give up or head right back to the 
border and into Pakistan, where we could not follow them. But close up you could always see the 
defiance in their eyes, that hatred of America, the fire of the revolutionary that burned in their 
souls. 
It was pretty damn creepy for us, because this was the heartland of terror, the place where the 
destruction of the World Trade Center was born and nourished, perfected by men such as these. 
I’ll be honest, it seemed kind of unreal, not possible. But we all knew that it had happened. Right 

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here in this remote dust bowl was the root of it all, the homeland of bin Laden’s fighters, the 
place where they still plot and scheme to smash the United States. The place where the loathing 
of Uncle Sam is so ingrained, a brand of evil flourishes that is beyond the understanding of most 
Westerners. Mostly because it belongs to a different, more barbaric century. 
And here stood Mikey, Shane, Axe, me, and the rest, ready for a face-off anytime against these 
silent, sure-footed warriors, masters of the mountains, deadly with rifle and tribal knife. 
To meet these guys in these remote Pashtun villages only made the conundrum more difficult. 
Because right here we’re talking Primitive with a big 
P.
Adobe huts made out of sun-dried clay 
bricks with dirt floors and an awful smell of urine and mule dung. Downstairs they have goats 
and chickens living in the house. And yet here, in these caveman conditions, they planned and 
then carried out the most shocking atrocity on a twenty-first-century city. 
Sanitation in the villages is as rudimentary as it gets. They have a communal head, a kind of a 
pit, out on the edge of the houses. And we are all warned to watch out for them, particularly on 
night patrols. I misjudged it one night, slipped, and got my foot in there. That caused huge 
laughter up there in the dead of night, everyone trying not to explode. Wasn’t funny to me, 
however. 
The next week it was much worse. We were all in the pitch dark, creeping through this very 
rough ground, trying to set up a surveillance point above a very small cluster of huts and goats. 
We could not see a thing without NVGs (night-vision goggles), and suddenly I slipped into a 
gaping hole. 
I dared not yell. But I knew I was on my way down, and I shuddered to think where I was going 
to land. I just rammed my right arm rigid straight up, holding on tight to the rifle, and crashed 
straight into the village head. I went right under, vaguely hearing my teammates hiss, “Look out! 
Luttrell just found the shitter again!” 
Never has there been that much suppressed laughter on an Afghan mission. But it was one of the 
worst experiences of my life. I could have given typhoid to the entire Bagram base. I was 
freezing cold but I cheerfully jumped into a river in full combat gear just to get washed off. 
Sometimes there was real trouble on those border post checkpoints, and we occasionally had to 
load up the Humvees and transport about eighteen guys out there and then walk for miles. The 
problem was, the Pakistani government has obvious sympathy with the Taliban, and as a result 
leaves the border area in the northeast uncontrolled. Pakistan has decreed its authorities can 
operate on tarmac roads and then for twenty meters on either side of the road. Beyond that, 
anything goes, so the Taliban fighters simply swerve off the road and enter Afghanistan over the 

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ancient pathways. They come and go as they please, the way they always have, unless we 
prevent them. Many of them only want to come in and rustle cattle, which we do not bother with. 
However, the Taliban know this, and they move around disguised as cattle farmers, and we most 
certainly do bother with that. And those little camel trains laden with high explosive, they really 
get our attention. 
And every single time, we came under attack. The slightest noise, any betrayal of our position, 
someone would open fire on us, often from the Pakistan side of the border, where we could not 
go. So we moved stealthily, gathered our photographs, grabbed the ringleaders, stayed in touch 
with base, and whistled up reinforcements whenever we needed help. 
It was the considered opinion of our commanders that the key to winning was intel, identifying 
the bombmakers, finding their supplies, and smashing the Taliban arsenal before they could use 
it. But it was never easy. Our enemy was brutal, implacable, with no discernible concern about 
time or life. As long as it takes, was their obvious belief. In the end they assume they will rid 
their holy Muslim soil of the infidel invaders. After all, they always have, right? Sorry, 
nyet?
Sometimes, while the head sheds (that’s SEAL vernacular for our senior commanders) were 
studying a specific target, we were kept on hold. I volunteered my spare time working in the 
Bagram hospital, mostly in the emergency room, helping with the wounded guys and trying to 
become a better medic for my team. 
And that hospital was a real eye-opener, because we were happy to treat Afghans as well as our 
own military personnel. And they showed up at the emergency room with every kind of wound, 
mostly bullets, but occasionally stabbings. That’s one of the real problems in that country — 
everyone has a gun. There seems to be an AK-47 in every living room. And there were a lot of 
injuries. Afghan civilians would show up at the main gates so badly shot we had to send out 
Humvees to bring them into the ER. We treated anyone who came, at the American taxpayer’s 
expense, and we gave everyone as good care as we could. 
Bagram was an excellent place for me to improve my skills, and I hoped I was doing some good 
at the same time. I was, of course, unpaid for this work. But medicine has always been a vocation 
for me, and those long hours in that hospital were priceless to the doctor I hoped one day to be. 
And while I tended the sick and injured, the never-ending work of the commanders continued, 
filtering the intel reports, checking the CIA reports, trying to identify the Taliban leaders so we 
could cut the head off their operation. 
There was always a very big list of potential targets, some more advanced than others. By that I 
mean certain communities where the really dangerous guys had been located, identified, and 
pinpointed by the satellites or by us. It was work that required immense perseverance and the 

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ability to assess the likelihood of actually finding the guy who mattered. 
The teams in Bagram were prepared to go out there and conduct this very dangerous work, but 
no one likes going on a series of wild-goose chases where the chances of finding a top Taliban 
terrorist are remote. And of course the intel guys have to be aware at all times that nothing is 
static up there in the mountains. Those Taliban guys are very mobile and very smart. They know 
a lot but not all there is to know about American capability. And they surely understand the merit 
of keeping it moving, from village to village, cave to cave, never remaining in one place long 
enough to get caught with their stockpiles of high explosive. 
Our senior chief, Dan Healy, was outstanding at seeking out and finding the good jobs for us, 
ones where we had a better than average chance of finding our quarry. He spent hours poring 
over those lists, checking out a certain known terrorist, where he spent his time, where he was 
last seen. 
Chief Healy would comb through the photographic evidence, checking maps, charts, working out 
the places we had a real chance of victory, of grabbing the main man without fighting an all-out 
street battle. He had a personal short list of the prime suspects and where to find them. And by 
June, he had a lot of records, the various methods used by these kingpin Taliban guys and their 
approximate access to TNT. 
And one man’s name popped right out at him. For security reasons, I’m going to call him Ben 
Sharmak, and suffice to say he’s a leader of a serious Taliban force, a sinister mountain man 
known to make forays into the cities and known also to have been directly responsible for several 
lethal attacks on U.S. Marines, always with bombs. Sharmak was a shadowy figure of around 
forty. He commanded maybe 140 to 150 armed fighters, but he was an educated man, trained in 
military tactics and able to speak five languages. He was also known to be one of Osama bin 
Laden’s closest associates. 
He kept his troops mobile, moving into or camping on the outskirts of friendly Pashtun villages, 
accepting hospitality and then traveling on to the next rendezvous, recruiting all the way. These 
mountain men were unbelievably difficult to trace, but even they need to rest, eat and drink, and 
perhaps even wash, and they need village communities to do all of that. 
Almost every morning Chief Healy would run the main list of potential targets past Mikey, our 
team officer, and me. He usually gave us papers with a list of maybe twenty names and possible 
locations, and we made a short list of the guys we considered we should go after. We thus 
created a rogues’ gallery, and we made our mission choices depending on the amount of intel we 
had. The name Ben Sharmak kept on showing up, and the estimates of his force size kept going 
up just as often. 

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Finally there was a tentative briefing about a possible Operation Redwing, which involved the 
capture or killing of this highly dangerous character. But he was always elusive. First he was 
here, then there, like the freakin’ Scarlet Pimpernel. And the photos available were just head and 
shoulders, not great quality and very grainy. Still, we knew approximately what the sonofabitch 
looked like, and on the face of it, this was stacking up to be like any other SR operation — get 
above the target, stalk him, photograph him, and, if at all possible, grab him. 
We had very decent intel on him, which suggested the CIA and probably the FBI were also 
extremely interested in his capture or death. And as the various briefings went on, Ben Sharmak 
seemed to get progressively more important. There were now reports of an eighty-troop 
minimum and a two-hundred-troop maximum in his army, and this constituted a very big 
operation. And Chief Healy decreed that me and my three buddies in Alfa Platoon were the 
precise guys to carry it out. 
We were not expected to take on this large bunch of wild-eyed killers. Indeed, we were expected 
to stay quieter than we had ever been in our lives. “Just find this bastard, nail him down, his 
location and troop strength, then radio in for a direct action force to come in by air and take him 
down.” Simple, right? 
If we thought he might be preparing an immediate evacuation of the village in which he resided, 
then we would take him out forthwith. That would be me or Axe. The chances were I’d get only 
one shot at Sharmak, just one time when I could trap him in the crosshairs and squeeze that 
trigger, probably from hundreds of yards away. I knew only one thing: I better not miss, because 
the apparitions of Webb and Davis, not to mention every other serving SEAL, would surely rise 
up and tear my ass off. This was, after all,