August 2007
Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10

Book Description
On a clear night in late June 2005, four U.S. Navy SEALs left their base in northern Afghanistan for the mountainous Pakistani border. Their mission was to capture or kill a notorious al Qaeda leader known to be ensconced in a Taliban stronghold surrounded by a small but heavily armed force. Less then twenty-four hours later, only one of those Navy SEALs remained alive.


This is the story of fire team leader Marcus Luttrell, the sole survivor of Operation Redwing, and the desperate battle in the mountains that led, ultimately, to the largest loss of life in Navy SEAL history. But it is also, more than anything, the story of his teammates, who fought ferociously beside him until he was the last one left-blasted unconscious by a rocket grenade, blown over a cliff, but still armed and still breathing. Over the next four days, badly injured and presumed dead, Luttrell fought off six al Qaeda assassins who were sent to finish him, then crawled for seven miles through the mountains before he was taken in by a Pashtun tribe, who risked everything to protect him from the encircling Taliban killers.


A six-foot-five-inch Texan, Leading Petty Officer Luttrell takes us, blow-by-blow, through the brutal training of America's warrior elite and the relentless rites of passage required by the Navy SEALs. He transports us to a monstrous battle fought in the desolate peaks of Afghanistan, where the beleaguered American team plummeted headlong a thousand feet down a mountain as they fought back through flying shale and rocks. In this rich , moving chronicle of courage, honor, and patriotism, Marcus Luttrell delivers one of the most powerful narratives ever written about modern warfare-and a tribute to his teammates, who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

He Lived to Tell the Tale (and Write a Best Seller)
Posted August 9th, 2007 in NavySEALs.com Intel
Source: New York Times
By MOTOKO RICH
On June 7 Marcus Luttrell was discharged from the Navy, having served with the elite Seals, survived a fierce battle in Afghanistan and earned a Navy Cross for combat heroism. Less than a month later "Lone Survivor," Mr. Luttrell's memoir of the 2005 battle and his rescue, became a best seller.

Unlike Pat Tillman or Jessica Lynch, Mr. Luttrell was not a soldier whose name had been widely reported in the news media. Until he was released from the Navy, he was not permitted to do any publicity for the book, which went on sale June 12.

Yet backed by strong support from military blogs and right-wing pundits like Michelle Malkin as well as appearances with Matt Lauer on NBC's "Today" program, with Glenn Beck on the radio and on CNN Headline News, "Lone Survivor," with its action-packed narrative and patriotic tone, has emerged as one of the summer's biggest publishing success stories. On Sunday the book, which hit No. 1 on The New York Times's nonfiction hardcover best-seller list two weeks ago, will be back in that slot after slipping to No. 2 for one week. The publisher, Little, Brown & Company, initially printed 75,000 copies; there are now 275,000 copies in print. According to figures from Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of sales, "Lone Survivor" has already outsold books about Mr. Tillman or Ms. Lynch, as well as several other soldiers' memoirs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The immediate success of "Lone Survivor," which Mr. Luttrell wrote with the novelist and ghostwriter Patrick Robinson, can be traced to a combination of factors. Mr. Luttrell's story, involving a failed mission to capture or kill a Taliban leader in the mountains of Afghanistan, is unusually dramatic: Mr. Luttrell was the only one of four men on the mission to survive after a violent clash with dozens of Taliban fighters. Eight members of the Seals and eight Army special operations soldiers who came by helicopter to rescue the original four were shot down, and all aboard were killed.

Mr. Luttrell was then rescued by a group of Afghan Pashtun villagers who harbored him in their homes for several days, protecting him from the Taliban and ultimately helping him to safety.

Along with the tragic story about how Mr. Luttrell lost his comrades, the book is spiked with unabashed braggadocio and patriotism, as well as several polemical passages lashing out at the "liberal media" for its role in sustaining military rules of engagement that prevent soldiers from killing unarmed civilians who may also be scouts or informers for terrorists.

The book was embraced by many military buffs and conservatives. And the baby-faced Mr. Luttrell, with his commanding physical presence and soft-spoken delivery, made for an intriguing presence in his television interviews.

Michelle Giele, a former engineer and stay-at-home mother in Westwood Hills, a suburb of Kansas City, Kan., said she was captivated when she saw Mr. Luttrell on "Today." Although she normally isn't drawn to military memoirs, she said, "he kind of spoke from his heart. It was very compelling, and I wanted to read about it."

While military history fans and others with ties to the Seals or the war are driving a lot of sales, less conventional readers like Ms. Giele have helped sustain the book as a best seller. "It's obvious that there are some people reading it who aren't traditional military readers," said Mary McCarthy, director of merchandising at Ingram Book Group, a book wholesaler.

Mr. Luttrell, 31, first started thinking of writing a book because he was frustrated by media accounts of the battle. "People were writing these stories, and anything they didn't know how it happened, they just made up," he said in a telephone interview from the horse ranch he runs with his twin brother near Houston.

So he talked to his Navy superiors, hired a lawyer and searched for a writer. His lawyer connected him with a literary agent, Ed Victor, who had a client, Mr. Robinson, an Englishman who had written several novels about Navy Seals.

Mr. Victor called Mr. Robinson and told him, "This is the story you've been waiting to write all your life."

Mr. Robinson agreed, and early last spring he flew to meet Mr. Luttrell, who was on leave at the ranch. The two hit it off, and after Mr. Robinson wrote a few pages that Mr. Luttrell liked, they agreed to work together.

The pair met four more times, for a little more than a week each time, at Mr. Robinson's summer house on Cape Cod.

Between visits Mr. Robinson, who never used a taped recorder, typed chapters on his computer, adding researched material and filling in facts that Mr. Luttrell couldn't remember but that could be corroborated from other sources. The core of the book —the battle and the rescue — relied entirely on Mr. Luttrell's memory.

Mr. Luttrell said he would occasionally nudge Mr. Robinson toward accuracy. "You know, he's English, so he'd have stuff like 'bloody hell' or 'mate,' and I'm like, 'Sorry, I don't talk like that, and neither do all the frogs I work with,' " Mr. Luttrell recalled.

Mr. Robinson said he eventually got to be a better mimic and ended up producing a 135,000-word manuscript in less than four months. Perhaps it was the uncanny connection between Mr. Luttrell, who is 6 feet 5 inches, 230 pounds and the son of horse ranchers from Texas, and one of Mr. Robinson's recurring fictional characters, Rick Hunter, a 6-foot-5, 230-pound Navy Seal team leader who grew up on a horse ranch in Kentucky.

Last September Mr. Robinson and Mr. Luttrell visited five publishers in New York to pitch the book. Little, Brown won it in an auction for a seven-figure advance and sprang into action to get the title on booksellers' June lists. Meanwhile Mr. Luttrell shipped out to Iraq.

"I'm sure they were white-knuckling it every day I was over there," he said. "I would check my e-mail, and there were tons of messages from my publisher saying, 'Please check in and say you're O.K. '"

Michael Pietsch, publisher of Little, Brown, said that Mr. Luttrell's active service certainly made it difficult to position the book before it went on sale. "Had he not been stationed in Iraq in the months preceding the book, we could have had an ' Oprah' or a '60 Minutes,' " Mr. Pietsch said.

But even without any media guarantees, Mr. Pietsch said, he "dared to hope" for a best seller. "There's such a hunger for stories about this kind of extreme experience and this kind of patriotic view," he added.

Mr. Luttrell said that his main goal was to tell the story of his comrades who did not make it out alive. "Now I think the American public knows who they are, and now they are forever immortalized," said Mr. Luttrell, who added that he has set up a trust with all the proceeds from the book to help the families of the dead and to donate to military charities. "Their memory will never die out, and that's what I wanted."

Just finished the book today. It was excellent!
In some parts it was such an amazing story that it felt like I was watching a Hollywood film.


A few questions came to mind while reading this.
First he says it is very much frowned upon in the military to replace your pin in your grenade. Why is that?
Also, why was Murphy not granted the Navy Cross as the other three were? I saw on some websites that he is being considered for the Medal of Honor. Is that given in place of the Navy Cross?

Overall it was an excellent and inspiring book.

It is by far one of the best books I have ever read.
Shane- about the pin, I think he said it would be frowned upon because he left himself very vulnerable. If the villagers were in fact Taliban, he could take them out almost instantly. Also, if they were going to execute him, he could just drop the grenade and take them all with him. I'm not sure about your question about Murphy.

Without a doubt this is the best SEAL related book I have ever read and probably the best book in general that I have ever read. He gives a very detailed account of everything pertaining to the operation discussed. This book is a must have for any future BUD/s student in my opinion.