Marcus luttrell

“Axe! Moving!”
He had time to shout back, 
“Roger that!”
before they shot 
him in the chest. I watched his rifle fall from his grasp. He slumped forward and slipped down 
the rock he’d been leaning on, all the way to the ground. 

---

I absolutely froze. This could not be happening. Matt Axelson, a family fixture, Morgan’s best 
friend, a part of our lives. I started calling his name, irrationally, over and over. Privately I 
thought Danny was dying, and all I could see was a stain of blood gathering in the red dirt where 
Axe was slumped. For a brief moment I thought I might be losing it. 
But then Axe reached for his rifle and got up. He leveled the weapon, got a hold of another 
magazine, shoved it into the breech, and opened fire again, blood pumping out of his chest. He 
held his same firing position, leaning against the rock. He showed the same attitude of solid 
Navy SEAL know-how, the same formidable steadiness, staring through his scope, those brilliant 
blue eyes of his scanning the terrain. 
When Axe got up, it was the bravest thing I ever saw. Except for Danny. Except for Mikey, still 
commanding us after taking a bullet through his stomach so early in the battle. 
And now Murph was masterminding a way down the escarpment. He had chosen the route and 
called up Axe to follow him down. And still the bullets were humming around us as the Taliban 
started their pursuit. Mikey and Axe were about seventy-five yards in front, and I was dragging 
Danny along while he did everything he could to help, trying to walk, trying to give us covering 
fire. 
“It’s okay, Danny,” I kept saying. “We just need to catch up with the others. It’s gonna be all 
right.” 
Right then a bullet caught him full in the upper part of his face. I heard it hit home, I turned to 
help him, and the blood from his head wound spilled over us both. I called out to him. But it was 
too late. He wasn’t fighting the terrible pain anymore. And he couldn’t hear me. Danny Dietz 
died right there in my arms. I don’t know how quickly hearts break, but that nearly broke mine. 
And still the gunfire never abated. I dragged Danny off the open ground maybe five feet, and 
then I said good-bye to him. I lowered him down, and I had to leave him or else die out here with 
him. But I knew one thing for certain. I still had my rifle and I was not alone, and neither was 
Danny, a devout Roman Catholic. I left him with God. 
And now I had to get back to help my team. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. 
To this day I have nightmares about it, a chilling dream where Danny’s still talking to me, and 
there’s blood everywhere, and I have to walk away and I don’t even know why. I always wake 
up in tears, and it will always haunt me, and it’s never going to go away. 
And now I could hear Murph yelling to me. I grabbed my rifle, ducked down, slipped and fell off 
a rock, then started to run toward him and Axe while they provided heavy covering fire nonstop 
aimed at the Taliban’s rocky redoubt, maybe another forty yards back. 
I reached the edge, ran almost blindly into a tree, bounced off, skidded down the slope, which 
was not very deep, and landed on my head right in the fucking stream. Like any good frogman, I 
was seriously pissed off because my boots got wet. I really hate that. 

---

Finally I caught up with them. Axe was out of ammunition and I gave him a new magazine. 
Mikey wanted to know where Danny was, and I had to tell him that Danny had died. He was 
appalled, completely shocked, and so was Axe. Although Mikey would not say it, I knew he 
wanted to go back for the body. But we both knew there was no time and no reason. We had 
nowhere to take the remains of a fallen teammate, and we could not continue this firefight while 
carrying around a body. 
Danny was dead. And strangely, I was the first to pull myself together. I said suddenly, “I’ll tell 
you what. We have to get down this goddamned mountain or we’ll all be dead.” 
And as if to make up our minds for us, the Taliban were again closing in, trying to make that 
360-degree movement around us. And they were doing it. Gunfire was coming in from 
underneath us now. We could see the tribesmen still swarming, and I tried to count them as I had 
been trying to do for almost an hour. 
I thought there were now only about fifty, maybe sixty, but the bullets were still flying. The 
grenades were still coming in, blasting close, sending up dust clouds of smoke and dirt with 
flying bits of rock. There had never been a lull in the amount of ordnance the enemy was piling 
down on us. 
Right now, again tucked low behind rocks, the three of us could look down and see the village 
one and a half miles distant, and it remained our objective. 
Again I told Mikey, “If we can just make it down there and get some cover, we’ll take ’em all 
out on the flat ground.” 
I knew we were not in great shape. But we were still SEALs. Nothing can ever take that away. 
We were still confident. And we were never going to surrender. If it came down to it, we would 
fight to the death with our knives against their guns. 
“Fuck surrender,” said Mikey. And he had no need to explain further, either to Axe or me. 
Surrender would have been a disgrace to our community, like ringing the bell at the edge of the 
grinder and putting your helmet in the line. No one who had made it through this far, to this no-
man’s-land in the Afghan mountains, would have dreamed of giving up. 
Remember the philosophy of the U.S. Navy SEALs: “I will never quit...My Nation expects me to 
be physically harder and mentally stronger than my enemies. If knocked down, I will get back 
up, every time. I will draw on every remaining ounce of strength to protect my teammates...I am 
never out of the fight.” 
Those words have sustained many brave men down the years. They were engraved upon the soul 
of every SEAL. And they were in the minds of all of us. 
Mikey suddenly said, above the rage of the battle, “Remember, bro, we’re never out of it.” 
I nodded tersely. “It’s only about another thousand yards to flat ground. If we can just get down 
there, we got a chance.” 

---

Trouble was, we couldn’t get down there, at least not right then. Because once more we were 
pinned down. And we faced the same dilemma: the only escape was to go down, but our only 
defensive strategy was to go up. Once more, we had to get off this ground, away from the 
ricochets. Back up the left flank. 
We were trying to fight the battle our way. But even though we were still going, we were 
battered half to death. I led the way back up the rocks, blasting away, shooting down anyone I 
could see. But they caught on to that real quick, and now they really unloaded on us, Russian-
made rocket grenades. Coming straight down their right flank, our left. 
The ground shook. The very few trees swayed. The noise was worse than any blast all day. Even 
the walls of this little canyon shook. The stream splashed over its banks. This was one gigantic 
Taliban effort to finish us. We hit the deck, jamming ourselves into our rocky crevasse, heads 
down to avoid the lethal flying debris, rock fragments and shrapnel. As before they did not kill 
anyone with this type of thunderous bombardment, and as before they waited till the dust had 
cleared and then opened fire again. 
Above me I could see the tree line. It was not close, but it was nearer than the village. But the 
Taliban knew our objective, and as we tried to fight our way forward, they drove us back with 
sheer weight of fire. 
We’d tried, against all the odds, and just could not make it. They’d knocked us back again. And 
we retreated down, making a long pathetic loop, back the way we’d come. But once more we 
landed up in a good spot, a sound defensive position, well protected by the rock face on either 
side. Again we tried to take the fight to them, picking our targets and driving them back, making 
some ground now toward the village. 
They were up and screaming at us, yelling as the battle almost became close quarters. We yelled 
right back and kept firing. But there were still so many of them, and then they got into better 
position and shot Mikey Murphy through the chest. 
He came toward me, asking if I could give him another magazine. And then I saw Axe stumbling 
toward me, his head pushed out, blood running down his face, bubbling out of the most shocking 
head wound. 
“They shot me, bro,” he said. “The bastards shot me. Can you help me, Marcus?” What could I 
say? What could I do? I couldn’t help except by trying to fight off the enemy. And Axe was 
standing right in my line of fire. 
I tried to help him get down behind a rock. And I turned to Mikey, who was obviously badly hurt 
now. “Can you move, buddy?” I asked him. 
And he groped in his pocket for his mobile phone, the one we had dared not use because it would 
betray our position. And then Lieutenant Murphy walked out into the open ground. He walked 
until he was more or less in the center, gunfire all around him, and he sat on a small rock and 
began punching in the numbers to HQ. 

---

I could hear him talking. “My men are taking heavy fire...we’re getting picked apart. My guys 
are dying out here...we need help.” 
And right then Mikey took a bullet straight in the back. I saw the blood spurt from his chest. He 
slumped forward, dropping his phone and his rifle. But then he braced himself, grabbed them 
both, sat upright again, and once more put the phone to his ear. 
I heard him speak again. “Roger that, sir. Thank you.” Then he stood up and staggered out to our 
bad position, the one guarding our left, and Mikey just started fighting again, firing at the enemy. 
He was hitting them too, having made that one last desperate call to base, the one that might yet 
save us if they could send help in time, before we were overwhelmed. 
Only I knew what Mikey had done. He’d understood we had only one realistic chance, and that 
was to call in help. He also knew there was only one place from which he could possibly make 
that cell phone work: out in the open, away from the cliff walls. 
Knowing the risk, understanding the danger, in the full knowledge the phone call could cost him 
his life, Lieutenant Michael Patrick Murphy, son of Maureen, fiancé of the beautiful Heather, 
walked out into the firestorm. 
His objective was clear: to make one last valiant attempt to save his two teammates. He made the 
call, made the connection. He reported our approximate position, the strength of our enemy, and 
how serious the situation was. When they shot him, I thought mortally, he kept talking.