If asked to point out my heroes before today, I would have said cops and firefighters in general and my former runnin' and gunnin' cop partner, Ken Pierce, in specific. Ken's a brave and scrappy mo-fo who's finished fighting crooks and now wages a close up and personal battle with the debilitating effects of diabetes.
But today, I have a new hero. His name is Marcus Luttrell.
I met Marcus over lunch. He's a big, broad-shouldered, tough young man with a Texas twang and a horse wrangler's hard handshake. Passing him on the street, you might mistake him for a professional football player, his stiff gait that of a quarterback sacked once too often. He is attentive and polite when addressed directly. He is articulate. He answers most questions with a crisp, "Yes, sir." Yet, there is an aloofness to him, a wary caution, and his eyes are those of someone who has been physically and emotionally devastated and who has yet to fully climb back up from the abyss.
Marcus is a former Navy Seal who had his reconnisance team blown out from under him by the Taliban in Afghanistan. They died. So did sixteen other Spec Ops guys who headed in to rescue them.
Marcus documents his incredible saga of courage and loss in the book, Lone Survivor, The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of Seal Team 10. At lunch today, he told us that story with the same combination of wry humor and self-deprecation he'd probably use talking to buddies in a bar, mixed with the no-nonsense manner of an after-action report. Four men against a Taliban force of over 100. Multiple wounds from AK-47 and RPG fragments. Shrapnel in his legs. His tongue bitten half off. His team members, including his best friend, cut down.
He also offered respectful, but forceful, criticsm of those leaders who assign special ops teams to a theatre of war, yet hamstring them with rules of engagement that prevent them from properly carrying out the work the military has spent millions of dollars training them to do.
"Go on about your lives. Let us do our job," he told us. "Turn your backs if you must. Send us over, let us do our jobs and we'll come back and it will be done. Any war is winnable if you're willing to do what it takes."
His words echo those I hear from veteran street cops. The bad guys know the rules we have to follow and use them against us. They know what we can, and can't do. For God's sake, let us do what you pay us for.
Marcus' audience was a mix of business people and military personnel in uniform, including Navy recruits bussed in by the USO as well as a handful of members of Army and Navy special ops teams. There was no sign, as far as I could see, of any Navy brass. Plenty of enlisted came to listen. Plenty of recruits. No Navy brass, at least not in uniform. No Admirals. No Generals from the other services, either. I wonder why.
I wonder, too, how many of those upright business folks, some of whom probably have the numbers of their senators and congressmen on speed dial for cocktails and golf outings, gave real thought to his message and how many dismissed it as just another enjoyable luncheon speech and left with an autographed book to take home and put on a shelf.
Beats me.
All I know for sure is that Marcus wrote "Never forget" as the inscription in my copy of his book.
As if I could.
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