Lone Survivor_ The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 ( PDFDrive )

by Patrick Robinson
In the fall of 2006, Marcus Luttrell was redeployed with SEAL Team 5 in Iraq.
At 0900 on Friday, October 6, thirty-six of them took off in a military Boeing C-
17 from North Air Station, Coronado, bound for Ar Ramadi, the U.S. base which
lies sixty miles west of Baghdad — a notorious trouble spot, of course. That’s
why the SEALs were going.
The fact that the navy had deployed their wounded, decorated hero of the
Afghan mountains was a considerable surprise to many people, most of whom
thought he would leave SPECWARCOM for the less dangerous life of a civilian.
Because even after more than a year, his back was still painful, his battered wrist
was less than perfect, and he still suffered from that confounded Afghan stomach
bug he had contracted from the Pepsi bottle.
But the deployment of Marcus Luttrell was a personal matter. He alone
called the shots, not the navy. His contract with the SEALs still had many
months to run, and there was no way he was going to quit. I think we mentioned,
there ain’t no quit in him. Marcus wanted to stay, to fulfill his new obligations as
leading petty officer (Alfa Platoon), a position which carries heavy
responsibilities.
To me, he said, “I don’t want my guys to go without me. Because if anything
happened to them and I wasn’t there, I guess I would not forgive myself.”
And so Marcus Luttrell went back to war. The C-17 was packed with all the
worldly goods of SEAL Team 5, from machine guns to hand grenades. On board
the flight was Petty Officer Morgan Luttrell (Bravo Platoon), a new posting not
absolutely guaranteed to delight their mother.
Marcus had a new patch on his chest, identical to the one on the president’s
desk in the Oval Office. “That’s who I’m fighting for, boy,” he told me. “My
country, and the Lone Star State.”
The last words to me from this consummate Navy SEAL were “I’m outta
here with my guys for a few months. God help the enemy, and God bless Texas.”