Lone Survivor

The crisis arrived on foot and unarmed. Around midday, three Afghan goatherds — an older man and two teenage boys, one of them perhaps fourteen — walked directly into the SEALs' hidden position, driving a herd of goats up the slope. There was no gunfire, no ambush, just civilians who had stumbled onto four heavily armed Americans hiding in their mountains. The men took them, held them at gunpoint, and then faced the question that the rest of the book circles back to again and again: what do you do with them now?

Luttrell lays out the options as the team saw them, plainly and without flinching. They could kill the goatherds and bury the problem, protecting the mission and their own lives. They could tie them up and leave them, though the cold and the wildlife made that close to a death sentence, and there was nothing to bind them with. Or they could let them go, knowing that if any of the three was sympathetic to the Taliban, word of four SEALs on the ridge would reach Ahmad Shah's fighters within the hour. Each choice carried a price, and there was no clean one.

The ambush came from above, which in mountain warfare is the worst place for it to come from. Dozens of Taliban fighters — Luttrell estimates a large force, far outnumbering the four of them — poured down the slope, firing rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. The SEALs fought back with everything they had and began a fighting retreat, throwing themselves down the near-vertical mountainside, over cliffs and through rock, taking falls that broke bones and tore skin. Each of them was hit, more than once, and each kept firing.

The book's most harrowing pages are here. Danny Dietz was wounded again and again while trying to work the radio, and died in the fight. Matthew Axelson fought on with catastrophic wounds, refusing to stop. Michael Murphy, realizing that the mountains were blocking every attempt to call for help, deliberately moved into open ground — exposing himself to enemy fire — to get a clear signal on a satellite phone and request rescue. He made the call, was shot as he did it, finished it, and kept fighting. That act would later earn him the Medal of Honor, the first awarded for the war in Afghanistan.

Luttrell might have died on that mountain if a man named Mohammad Gulab had not found him and made a decision as consequential, in its way, as the one the SEALs made about the goatherds. Gulab was from a Pashtun village called Sabray, and he chose to take the wounded American home. In doing so he invoked lokhay warkawal, an element of the ancient tribal code known as Pashtunwali: the obligation to shelter and protect a guest, even a stranger, even at mortal risk to yourself and your entire village. Having taken Luttrell in, the villagers were bound by their own law to defend him against the Taliban fighters who came demanding he be handed over.

This is where the book's argument opens outward, and it does so without leaving the mountain behind. "Lone Survivor" is, on its surface, a story about the American warrior code — the loyalty of SEALs, the refusal to leave a man behind, the willingness of sixteen men to fly into a firefight to save four. But its most surprising claim is that this code met its match in a code that was older, foreign, and had nothing to do with the American military at all. The Pashtun villagers owed Luttrell nothing. Their tradition told them otherwise, and they honored it while armed men threatened their homes.

Marcus Luttrell came home the only member of his team to walk off that mountain alive, carrying wounds that would take years to heal and a story he felt obligated to tell. He wrote "Lone Survivor" so that Murphy, Dietz, Axelson, and the sixteen men who died in the helicopter would not be reduced to a casualty figure, and so that the choices made on that ridge — the vote over the goatherds, Murphy's walk into open fire, the village that said no to the Taliban — would be remembered as choices, made by named men, with everything at stake.