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

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. Racehorses, beautiful.
Give me six. Six fast ones, Mr. Luttrell. That way I’ll win some races.
That oil money just washed right off, and people were making fortunes in
anything that smacked of luxury, anything to feed the egos of the oil guys, who
were spending and borrowing money at a rate never seen before or since.
It wasn’t anything for banks to make loans of more than $100 million to oil
explorers and producers. At one time there were 4,500 oil rigs running in the
U.S.A., most of them in Texas. Credit? That was easy. Banks would lend you a
million bucks without batting an eye.
Listen, I was only a kid at the time, but my family and I lived through the
trauma to come, and, boy, I’ve done some serious reading about it since. And in