Marcus luttrell

under
the jail, never mind 
in
it. And then I’d be charged with murder. 
Tell you what. I’d still shoot the sonofabitch. 

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2
 
 
Baby Seals...and Big Ole Gators
 
I wrestled with one once and was pretty glad when that sucker decided he’d had enough 
and took off for calmer waters. But to this day my brother loves to wrestle alligators, just for fun. 
We flew on, high over the southern reaches of the Gulf of Oman. We headed east-
northeast for four hundred miles, forty-five thousand feet above the Arabian Sea. We crossed the 
sixty-first line of longitude in the small hours of the morning. That put us due south of the 
Iranian border seaport of Gavater, where the Pakistan frontier runs down to the ocean. 
Chief Healy snored quietly. Axe did a 
New York Times
crossword. And the miracle was that 
Shane’s headset didn’t explode, as loud as his rock-and-roll music was playing. 
“Do you really need to play that shit at that volume, kiddo?” 
“It’s cool, man...dude, chill.” 
“Jesus Christ.” 
The C-130 roared on, heading slightly more northerly now, up toward the coast of 
Baluchistan, which stretches 470 miles along the northern shoreline of the Arabian Sea and 
commands, strategically, the inward and outward oil lanes to the Persian Gulf. Despite a lot of 
very angry tribal chiefs, Baluchistan is part of Pakistan and has been since the partition with 
India in 1947. But that doesn’t make the chiefs any happier with the arrangement. 
And it’s probably worth remembering that no nation, not the Turks, the Tatars, the 
Persians, the Arabs, the Hindus, or the Brits has ever completely conquered Baluchistan. Those 
tribesmen even held off Genghis Khan, and his guys were the Navy SEALs of the thirteenth 
century. 
They never tell us, or anyone else, the precise route of U.S. Special Forces into any 
country. But there’s a big American base in the Baluchistan coastal town of Pasni. I guess we 
made our landfall somewhere along there, long before first light, and then flew on over four 
mountain ranges for 250 miles up to another U.S. military base near the city of Dalbandin. 
We never stopped, but Dalbandin lies only fifty miles south of the Afghan border, and the 
airspace is safe around there. At least, it’s as safe as anything can be in this strange, wild country, 
which is kind of jammed into a triangle among Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. 
Baluchistan, its endless mountains a safe haven for so many fleeing al Qaeda recruits and exiled 
Taliban fighters, currently provides shelter for up to six thousand of these potential terrorists. 
And even though Chief Healy, me, and the guys were nine miles above this vast, 
underpopulated, and secretive land, it still gave me the creeps, and I was pleased when the 

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aircrew finally told us we were in Afghanistan airspace, running north for another four hundred 
miles, up toward Kabul. 
I fell asleep somewhere over the Regestan Desert, east of one of Afghanistan’s greatest 
waterways, the 750-mile-long Hel-mand River, which flows and irrigates most of the southern 
farmlands. 
I cannot remember my dreams, but I expect they were of home. They usually are when 
I’m serving overseas. Home for us is a small ranch out in the piney woods of East Texas, near 
Sam Houston National Forest. We live down a long, red dirt road in a lonely part of the country, 
close by another two or three ranches, one of which, our adjoining neighbor, is about four 
thousand times bigger than ours and sometimes makes us seem a whole lot bigger than we are. I 
have a similar effect on my identical twin brother, Morgan. 
He’s about seven minutes older than I am, and around the same size (six feet five inches, 
230 pounds). Somehow I’ve always been regarded as the baby of the family. You wouldn’t 
believe seven minutes could do that to a guy, would you? Well, it did, and Morgan is unflagging 
in his status as senior man. 
He’s a Navy SEAL as well, a little behind me in rank, because I joined first. But he still 
assumes a loose command whenever we’re together. And that’s pretty often, since we share a 
house in Coronado, California, hard by the SEAL teams. 
Anyway, there’s two or three houses on our Texas property, the main one being a single-
story stone ranch surrounded by a large country garden, which contains one little plantation for 
corn and another couple for vegetables. All around us, just about as far as you can see in any 
direction, there’s pasture, studded with huge oak trees and grazing animals. It’s a peaceful place 
for a God-fearing family. 
Right from kids, Morgan and I were brought up to believe in the Lord. We weren’t 
compelled to go to church or anything, and to this day the family are not churchgoers. In fact, 
I’m the only one who does go to church on a somewhat regular basis. On Sunday mornings when 
I’m home, I drive over to the Catholic church, where people know me. I was not baptized a 
Catholic, but it suits me, its beliefs and doctrines sit easily with me. Since I was young, I have 
always been able to recite the Twenty-third Psalm and several others from beginning to end. 
Also, I thought the late Pope John Paul was the holiest man in the world, an 
uncompromising Vicar of Christ, a man whose guidelines were unshakable. Tough old guy, John 
Paul. A lot too tough for the Russians. I’ve always thought if he hadn’t been a vicar, he’d have 
made a good Navy SEAL. 
Down home, in our quiet backwoods area, it looks like an untroubled life. There are a 
few minor irritants, most of those being snakes. However, Dad taught us how to deal with them 
long ago, especially the coral snakes and those copperhead vipers. There’s also rattlesnakes, 
eastern diamondbacks, and king snakes, which eat the others. In the local lake you can find the 
occasional water moccasin, and he is one mean little sonofabitch. He’ll chase you, and while I 
don’t much like ’em, I’m not scared of them. Morgan goes after them as a sport, likes to hustle 
’em up, keep ’em alert. 

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A mile or so up the road from us, there’s a mighty herd of Texas longhorns. Beyond the 
house there’s a half dozen paddocks for my mom’s horses, some of them belonging to her, others 
boarders from other people. 
People send horses to her for her near-mystical power to bring sick or weak animals back 
to full fighting form. No one knows how she does it. She’s plainly a horse whisperer. But she has 
some special ways of feeding them, including, for a certain type of ailing racehorse, some kind 
of a seaweed concoction she swears to God can turn a cow pony into Secretariat. Sorry, Mom. 
Didn’t mean that. Just joking. 
Seriously, Holly Luttrell is a brilliant horsewoman. And she does turn horses that seem 
very poorly into gleaming, healthy runners again. I guess that’s why those horses keep on 
coming. She can only cope with about ten at a time, and she’s out there in the barn at five every 
morning looking after them. If you take the time, you can see the effect she has on them, the very 
obvious results of her very obvious skills. 
My mom’s a seventh-generation Texan, although she did once immigrate to New York 
City. Around here, that’s like moving to Shanghai, but Mom has always been a rather glamorous 
blonde and she wanted to make a career as an air stewardess. Didn’t last long, though. She was 
back in the big country of East Texas real quick, raising horses. Like all of us, she feels Texas is 
a part of her spirit. It’s in mine, in Dad’s, and it sure as hell is the very essence of Morgan. 
None of us would live anywhere else. We’re right at home down here, with people we have 
known and trusted for many years. There’s no one like Texans for a spirit of expansiveness, 
optimism, friendship, and decency. I realize that might not be acceptable to everyone, but that’s 
how it seems to us. We’re out of place anywhere else. It’s no good pretending otherwise. 
That might mean we just get real homesick quicker than other people. But I will come back to 
live here when I’m finished in the military. And I intend, sometime, to die here. Hardly a day 
goes by, wherever I am in the world, when I don’t think of our little ranch and my huge circle of 
family and friends, of having a beer on the front porch and telling tall stories full of facts, some 
of ’em true, all of ’em funny. 
So while I’m on the subject I’ll explain how a farm boy from the backwoods of East 
Texas came to be made a petty officer first class and a team leader in the U.S. Navy SEALs. 
The short explanation is probably talent, but I don’t have any more of that than the next guy. In 
fact, my natural-born assets are very average. I’m pretty big, which was an accident of birth. I’m 
pretty strong, because a lot of other people took a lot of trouble training me, and I’m 
unbelievably determined, because when you’re as naturally ungifted as I am, you have to keep 
driving forward, right? 
I’ll outwork anyone. I’ll just go on and on until the dust clears. Then I’m usually the only 
one left standing. As an athlete, I’m not very fast, but I’m kind of sharp. I know where to be, I’m 
good at anticipating things, and I guess that’s why I was a halfway decent sportsman. 
Give me a golf ball and I can hit that sucker a country mile. That’s because golf is a game 
that requires practice, practice, and more practice. That’s my brand of doggedness. I can do that. 
I play to a reasonable handicap, although I wasn’t born a Ben Hogan or anything. But Ben came 
from Texas like me. We were born about ninety-four miles apart, and in my country that’s the 

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equivalent of a sand wedge. Ben, of course, was known to practice more than any other golfer 
who had ever lived. Must be something in the water. 
I was born in Houston but raised up near the Oklahoma border. My parents, David and 
Holly Luttrell, owned a fair-sized horse farm, about 1,200 acres at one time. We had 125 head up 
there, mostly Thoroughbreds and quarter horses. My mom ran the breeding programs, and Dad 
took charge of the racing and sales operation. 
Morgan and I were brought up with horses, feeding, watering, cleaning out the barns, 
riding. Most every weekend we’d go in the horse van to the races. We were just kids at the time, 
and both our parents were excellent riders, especially Mom. That’s how we learned. We worked 
the ranch, mended fences, swinging sledgehammers when we were about nine years old. We 
loaded the bales into the loft, worked like adults from a young age. Dad insisted on that. And for 
a lot of years, the operation did very well. 
At the time, Texas itself was in a boom-time hog heaven. Out in West Texas, where the 
oil drillers and everyone surrounding them were becoming multimillionaires, the price of oil 
went up 800 percent between 1973 and 1981. I was born in 1975, before that wave even started 
to crest, and I have to say the Luttrell family was riding high. 
It was nothing for my dad to breed a good-looking horse from a $5,000 stallion and sell 
the yearling for $40,000. He did it all the time. And my mom was a pure genius at improving a 
horse, buying it cheap and devoting months of tender loving care and brilliant feeding to produce 
a young runner worth eight times what she paid. 
And breeding horses was precisely the right line to be in. Horses were right up there with 
Rolex watches, Rolls-Royces, Learjets, Gulfstream 1s, palaces rather than regular houses, and 
boats, damn great boats. Office space was at a premium all over the state, and massive new high-
rise blocks were under construction. Retail spending was at an all-time high.