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A review by larry1138
Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 by Marcus Luttrell
adventurous
emotional
tense
slow-paced
3.5
Extra note: this particular copy of the book had a misprint error starting from page 301 to page 332. These pages were instead reprints of pages 269 to page 300, which essentially meant I was missing 33 pages of the book due to what must have been a massive misprinting error. My friend has told me that the nature of this error may mean that there is another book out there with a copy of pages 300 to 332 in the 269-300 section. I'd be curious to see if anyone else has this copy! But I do find it incredible. This is genuinely the worst misprinting error I've ever seen in a book in my life.
Lone Survivor is probably my favorite war movie of all time, so this was going to be a spectacular challenge to see if the book could be better than the movie. The unsatisfying answer is that in some ways it is and in some ways it isn't.
What this book is is a heart wrenching and deeply personal memoir by Marcus Luttrell as he recounts a mission in the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan gone horribly wrong. Half the book is actually spent on his life growing up in East Texas and training to become a Navy SEAL, with particular emphasis on the difficulty of the notorious BUD/S course. He explains his background and a little bit of his personal philosophy. He's a patriotic veteran from Texas, you're gonna get some politics in here for sure.
The failed mission and subsequent rescue by local Afghan villagers were of course the most impactful parts of the book for me. The combat scenes of the movie seem to be lifted nearly identically from the pages. But the tale of how Luttrell survived with the help of Mohammad Gulab and his village is much more explored in detail here.
You can feel the deep appreciation Luttrell feels for these people as they genuinely risk everything to help him. This was the most inspiring part of the entire Lone Survivor story. It showed how Americans and Afghans could help each other. I think it's a message the world needs to hear more often: different people from different cultures can absolutely get along and become friends if they only take the chance to engage in person. Back in 2013 when the movie came out, I saw this as an incredibly important story to hold on to, especially in light of the quagmire that Afghanistan had become and the threat of a relatively new terror group called ISIS.
As the years have gone on and I've researched the background information of this story, certain inconsistencies and controversies have popped up. The friendship I thought Gulab and Luttrell would have maintained forever seems to have unfortunately disintegrated. There are disputes on the amount of Taliban fighters the SEALs of Operation Redwing faced.
Your own opinion of Luttrell may be colored due to his political leanings. Hell, right in the book he plainly lambasts the liberal media for betraying American war support and politicians for foisting rules of engagement that get soldiers killed. Some of this sentiment I agree with, some of it not so much. This kind of personal politics is something that can color a writer's view of past events, and in our polarized world now can color a reader's entire view of a book. It's part of the reason I don't usually like memoirs despite the fact I've read five or six of them in the last year. I believe my personal experience of learning about Operation Redwing may have been served better as a third person researched narrative rather than a memoir. But Luttrell's story demonstrates, like any good memoir should, that people are complex individuals with their own viewpoints and opinions. Readers cannot expect to find perfect objectivity in memoirs.
What is undeniable is that this memoir is a powerful and emotional story that Luttrell had to tell in order to honor his fallen comrades. You can tell when he is speaking truly from the heart: when he talks about his teammates, his training, and his experiences in the Afghan village that saved him. I found those parts to be the most emotional, compelling, detailed, and honest.
But is it better than the movie? Well, I think it does a better job at conveying the experience of becoming a SEAL, of the deep relationships that SEAL teams develop, and of the huge risks the Afghan villagers under Muhammad Gulab were taking to protect him. There was more humanization of the Afghans in this book than there was in the movie, which was very interesting to see because I thought the movie did a great job of showing the Gulab helping Luttrell. The book tells of how he bonded with specific individuals in the village and helped the kids whenever they got hurt.
The movie is more of an action war movie than anything else. It's got some of the greatest firefight scenes ever put to film. The viewer feels each bullet and explosion that Luttrell goes through and feels his relief when he's rescued by the Afghans and then Americans. It's difficult to see what it was trying to do. Certainly, it was lionizing the four SEALs who went into Operation Redwing. But it was perhaps the movie that most showed me how much war sucked. If it was supposed to be pro-war, pro-America propaganda, it had the opposite affect on me. I remember coming out of that theater both pumped from watching the best war movie I'd seen in my life and incredibly sad at the fate of Axe, Danny, and Mikey, and questioning how things could have gone so wrong and why we were still struggling to handle Afghanistan at the time in 2013. It's over a decade later and the unsatisfying answer is I'm not sure we were ever going to be able to "handle" Afghanistan.
A recommend from me for anyone who enjoyed the movie for what it was. I do think the book gives some interesting detail and insight into Luttrell's experience.
Lone Survivor is probably my favorite war movie of all time, so this was going to be a spectacular challenge to see if the book could be better than the movie. The unsatisfying answer is that in some ways it is and in some ways it isn't.
What this book is is a heart wrenching and deeply personal memoir by Marcus Luttrell as he recounts a mission in the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan gone horribly wrong. Half the book is actually spent on his life growing up in East Texas and training to become a Navy SEAL, with particular emphasis on the difficulty of the notorious BUD/S course. He explains his background and a little bit of his personal philosophy. He's a patriotic veteran from Texas, you're gonna get some politics in here for sure.
The failed mission and subsequent rescue by local Afghan villagers were of course the most impactful parts of the book for me. The combat scenes of the movie seem to be lifted nearly identically from the pages. But the tale of how Luttrell survived with the help of Mohammad Gulab and his village is much more explored in detail here.
You can feel the deep appreciation Luttrell feels for these people as they genuinely risk everything to help him. This was the most inspiring part of the entire Lone Survivor story. It showed how Americans and Afghans could help each other. I think it's a message the world needs to hear more often: different people from different cultures can absolutely get along and become friends if they only take the chance to engage in person. Back in 2013 when the movie came out, I saw this as an incredibly important story to hold on to, especially in light of the quagmire that Afghanistan had become and the threat of a relatively new terror group called ISIS.
As the years have gone on and I've researched the background information of this story, certain inconsistencies and controversies have popped up. The friendship I thought Gulab and Luttrell would have maintained forever seems to have unfortunately disintegrated. There are disputes on the amount of Taliban fighters the SEALs of Operation Redwing faced.
Your own opinion of Luttrell may be colored due to his political leanings. Hell, right in the book he plainly lambasts the liberal media for betraying American war support and politicians for foisting rules of engagement that get soldiers killed. Some of this sentiment I agree with, some of it not so much. This kind of personal politics is something that can color a writer's view of past events, and in our polarized world now can color a reader's entire view of a book. It's part of the reason I don't usually like memoirs despite the fact I've read five or six of them in the last year. I believe my personal experience of learning about Operation Redwing may have been served better as a third person researched narrative rather than a memoir. But Luttrell's story demonstrates, like any good memoir should, that people are complex individuals with their own viewpoints and opinions. Readers cannot expect to find perfect objectivity in memoirs.
What is undeniable is that this memoir is a powerful and emotional story that Luttrell had to tell in order to honor his fallen comrades. You can tell when he is speaking truly from the heart: when he talks about his teammates, his training, and his experiences in the Afghan village that saved him. I found those parts to be the most emotional, compelling, detailed, and honest.
But is it better than the movie? Well, I think it does a better job at conveying the experience of becoming a SEAL, of the deep relationships that SEAL teams develop, and of the huge risks the Afghan villagers under Muhammad Gulab were taking to protect him. There was more humanization of the Afghans in this book than there was in the movie, which was very interesting to see because I thought the movie did a great job of showing the Gulab helping Luttrell. The book tells of how he bonded with specific individuals in the village and helped the kids whenever they got hurt.
The movie is more of an action war movie than anything else. It's got some of the greatest firefight scenes ever put to film. The viewer feels each bullet and explosion that Luttrell goes through and feels his relief when he's rescued by the Afghans and then Americans. It's difficult to see what it was trying to do. Certainly, it was lionizing the four SEALs who went into Operation Redwing. But it was perhaps the movie that most showed me how much war sucked. If it was supposed to be pro-war, pro-America propaganda, it had the opposite affect on me. I remember coming out of that theater both pumped from watching the best war movie I'd seen in my life and incredibly sad at the fate of Axe, Danny, and Mikey, and questioning how things could have gone so wrong and why we were still struggling to handle Afghanistan at the time in 2013. It's over a decade later and the unsatisfying answer is I'm not sure we were ever going to be able to "handle" Afghanistan.
A recommend from me for anyone who enjoyed the movie for what it was. I do think the book gives some interesting detail and insight into Luttrell's experience.