Marcus luttrell

pretending
to be civilians? What about 
those guys? How about the innocent-looking camel drovers making their way through the 
mountain passes with enough high explosive strapped to the backs of their beasts to blow up 
Yankee Stadium? How about those guys? 
We all knew that we’d chosen to do what 999 Americans out of every thousand would not even 
think about doing. And we were taught that we were necessary for the security of our nation. We 
were sent to Afghanistan to carry out hugely dangerous missions. But we were also told that we 
could not shoot that camel drover before he blew up all of us, because he might be an unarmed 
civilian just taking his dynamite for a walk. 
And how about his buddy? The younger guy with the stick, running along behind, prodding the 
freakin’ camels? How about him? How about if he can’t wait to scamper up those mountains and 
find his brother and the rest of the Taliban hard men? The ones with the RPGs, waiting in the 
hidden cave? 
We wouldn’t hear him reveal our position, and neither would the politicians who drafted those 
ROEs. And those men in suits won’t be on that mountainside when the first grenade explodes 
among us and takes off someone’s leg, or head. 
Should we have shot that little son of a gun right off the bat, before he had a chance to run? Or 
was he just an unarmed civilian, doing no harm to anyone? Just taking his TNT for a walk, right? 
These terrorist/insurgents know the rules as well as they did in Iraq. They’re not their rules. 
They’re 
our
rules, the rules of the Western countries, the civilized side of the world. And every 
terrorist knows how to manipulate them in their own favor. Otherwise the camel drovers would 
be carrying guns. 
But they don’t. Because they know we are probably scared to shoot them, because we might get 
charged with murder, which I actually know they consider to be on the hysterical side of 

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laughable. 
And if we did shoot a couple of them, they would be on their cell phones with the speed of ten 
thousand gigabytes, direct to the Arab television station al-Jazeera: 
BRUTAL US TROOPS GUN DOWN 
PEACE-LOVING AFGHAN FARMERS 
US Military Promises SEALs
Will Be Charged
Well, something like that. I’m sure you get my drift. The media in the United States of America 
would crucify us. These days, they always do. Was there ever a greater uproar than the one that 
broke out over Abu Ghraib? In the bigger scheme of things, in the context of all the death and 
destruction that Muslim extremists have visited upon this world, a bunch of Iraqi prisoners being 
humiliated does not ring my personal alarm bell. And it would not ring yours either if you ever 
saw firsthand what these guys are capable of. I mean, Jesus, they cut off people’s heads, 
American heads, aid workers’ heads. They think nothing of slaughtering thousands of people; 
they’ve stabbed and mutilated young American soldiers, like something out of the Middle Ages. 
The truth is, in this kind of terrorist/insurgent warfare, no one can tell who’s a civilian and who’s 
not. So what’s the point of framing rules that cannot be comprehensively carried out by anyone? 
Rules that are unworkable, because half the time no one knows who the goddamned enemy is, 
and by the time you find out, it might be too late to save your own life. Making sense of the 
ROEs in real-time situations is almost impossible. 
Also, no one seems clear on what we should be called in Afghanistan. Are we a peace-keeping 
force? Are we fighting a war against insurgents on behalf of the Afghan government, or are we 
fighting it on behalf of the U.S.A.? Are we trying to hunt down the master terrorist bin Laden, or 
are we just trying to prevent the Taliban from regaining control of the country, because they 
were the protectors of bin Laden and all who fought for him? 
Search me. But everything’s cool with us. Tell us what you want, and we’ll do it. We’re loyal 
servants of the U.S. government. But Afghanistan involves fighting behind enemy lines. Never 
mind we were invited into a democratic country by its own government. Never mind there’s no 
shooting across the border in Pakistan, the illegality of the Taliban army, the Geneva 
Convention, yada, yada, yada. 
When we’re patrolling those mountains, trying everything we know to stop the Taliban 
regrouping, striving to find and arrest the top commanders and explosive experts, we are always 
surrounded by a well-armed, hostile enemy whose avowed intention is to kill us all. That’s 
behind enemy lines. Trust me. 

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And we’ll go there. All day. Every day. We’ll do what we’re supposed to do, to the letter, or die 
in the attempt. On behalf of the U.S.A. But don’t tell us who we can attack. That ought to be up 
to us, the military. And if the liberal media and political community cannot accept that 
sometimes the wrong people get killed in war, then I can only suggest they first grow up and 
then serve a short stint up in the Hindu Kush. They probably would not survive. 
The truth is, any government that thinks war is somehow fair and subject to rules like a baseball 
game probably should not get into one. Because nothing’s fair in war, and occasionally the 
wrong people do get killed. It’s been happening for about a million years. Faced with the 
murderous cutthroats of the Taliban, we are not fighting under the rules of Geneva IV Article 4. 
We are fighting under the rules of Article 223.556mm — that’s the caliber and bullet gauge of 
our M4 rifle. And if those numbers don’t look good, try Article .762mm, that’s what the stolen 
Russian Kalashnikovs fire at us, usually in deadly, heavy volleys. 
In the global war on terror, we have rules, and our opponents use them against us. We try to be 
reasonable; they will stop at nothing. They will stoop to any form of base warfare: torture, 
beheading, mutilation. Attacks on innocent civilians, women and children, car bombs, suicide 
bombers, anything the hell they can think of. They’re right up there with the monsters of history. 
And I ask myself, Who’s prepared to go furthest to win this war? Answer: they are. They’ll 
willingly die to get their enemy. They will take it to the limit, any time, any place, whatever it 
takes. And they don’t have rules of engagement. 
Thus we have an extra element of fear and danger when we go into combat against the Taliban or 
al Qaeda — the fear of our own, the fear of what our own navy judge advocate general might 
rule against us, the fear of the American media and their unfortunate effect on American 
politicians. We all harbor fears about untrained, half-educated journalists who only want a good 
story to justify their salaries and expense accounts. Don’t think it’s just me. We all detest them, 
partly for their lack of judgment, mostly because of their ignorance and toe-curling opportunism. 
The first minute an armed conflict turns into a media war, the news becomes someone’s opinion, 
not hard truths. When the media gets involved, in the United States, that’s a war you’ve got a 
damned good chance of losing, because the restrictions on us are immediately amplified, and 
that’s sensationally good news for our enemy. 
Every now and then, a news reporter or a photographer gets in the way sufficiently to stop a 
bullet. And without missing a beat, those highly paid newspeople become national heroes, lauded 
back home in the press and on television. SEALs are not churlish, but I cannot describe how 
irksome this is to the highly trained but not very well paid guys who are doing the actual 
fighting. These are superb professionals who say nothing and place themselves in harm’s way 
every day, too often being killed or wounded. They are silent heroes, unknown soldiers, except 
in equally unknown, heartbroken little home communities. 

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We did one early mission up there in the passes at checkpoint 6 that was worse than lethal. We’d 
just managed to get into position, about twenty of us, when these Afghan wild men hidden in the 
mountains unleashed a barrage of rockets at us, hundreds and hundreds of them, flying over our 
heads, slamming into the mountainside. 
We couldn’t tell whether they were classified as armed combatants against the United States or 
unarmed civilians. It took us three days to subdue them, and even then we had to call in heavy air 
support to enable us to get out. Three days later, the satellite pictures showed us the Taliban had 
sent in twelve cutthroats by night, armed with Kalashnikovs and tribal knives, who crept through 
the darkness intent on murder, directly to our old position.