Marcus Luttrell and the BUD/S "Switch"

How a Texas congressman helped his twin brother cheat his way through SEAL training

There’s another story about flawed training that didn’t make it into my article last week about the myths of “Lone Survivor,” former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell’s account of a 2005 ambush in the mountains of northeast Afghanistan. This one involves his identical twin brother, Rep. Morgan Luttrell, R-Texas.

The Luttrell brothers

Long before he emerged from a crowded GOP primary field and won a three-way race in the 2022 general election to represent the Houston suburbs, Rep. Luttrell helped his twin cheat his way through SEAL training. The caper the Luttrell brothers pulled off is legendary in Naval Special Warfare. At the same time, it raises more questions about whether Marcus Luttrell should ever have been on the mountain in Afghanistan.

It doesn’t take a feat of investigative reporting to find out what happened. Marcus Luttrell has told the story publicly more than once. His brother, Morgan, confirmed it in a 2021 video posted on his brother’s nonprofit, Team Never Quit. (Rep. Morgan Luttrell’s press representative didn’t respond to a message left seeking comment.)

By his own account, Marcus struggled when he went through Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training in 2000. BUD/S is the grueling selection process that all SEALs must go through to wear the Trident. Everyone struggles during BUD/S, which is known as one of the world’s most difficult entrance exams. But the 6-foot-5-inch Texan struggled more than most. He says he was in the back of the pack with the laggards in the “Goon Squad.”

SEAL trainees run for miles and miles on the beaches of Naval Special Warfare Command in Coronado, California, and Marcus was not a strong runner. He called himself the class “anchor man,” holding everyone back because he was so slow.

Ahead of a timed four-mile run, Marcus worried that he was not going to make the cutoff and might get dropped from BUD/S. (Marcus says he was suffering from stress fractures in his legs, a common injury seen in SEAL training.)

Enter Marcus’ identical twin, Morgan, who happened to be visiting from college. Morgan switched places with Marcus and completed the four-mile run in time. Morgan then spent four days training in BUD/S in Marcus’ place while his brother rested and recuperated. None of the instructors knew what was happening.

Morgan went through BUD/S the following year and spent 14 years in the SEAL teams, but at the time he pulled off the switch, he was a civilian.

Word about the switch eventually reached SEAL instructors and commanders. Marcus says he was grilled by senior officers: What if your brother got hurt? What if he quit? In the end, they let Marcus graduate with BUD/S class 228 in April 2000.

There’s an attitude in BUD/S of “if you're not cheating, you're not trying.” The idea is to encourage creative thinking, but it often goes too far. Some trainees take steroids to give them an extra edge, as I wrote in my Rolling Stone piece on Kyle Mullen, who died in 2022 hours after completing Hell Week “Whatever you do, don’t get caught with them in your barracks,” an instructor told Mullen and his class.

The problem is that if you condone cheating, you end up with a bunch of cheaters wearing a Trident they didn’t really earn.

When Marcus tells the story of the BUD/S switch, he sounds like a frat brother talking about a prank he pulled. Can you believe we got away with that? But when viewed through the lens of a mission that saw 11 SEALs die in Afghanistan, the story isn’t so funny.

Without his brother’s help, Marcus Luttrell probably never would have made it as a SEAL. Then again, maybe he would have found some hidden internal reservoir of strength and passed on his own merits. But he never found out because he cheated. And the SEALs let him through regardless.

You can’t help but wonder whether things would have turned out differently in the mountains of Afghanistan if the SEALs had enforced their own training standards.