Marcus Luttrell comes clean about Lone Survivor
Who ordered what the author of the #1 best-seller called "an assignment?"
Update: After this story was published, I heard back from the lawyer who represented Marcus Luttrell on his book and movie deals, who provided a different version of events of how Lone Survivor came to be. I’ve appended his comments at the end of the article.
There was always something off about Lone Survivor.
From the outset, people started calling out the lies, half-truths, and exaggerations in Marcus Luttrell’s best-selling account of the disastrous 2005 mission that claimed the lives of 11 SEALs and eight Army aviators.
Now, the retired Navy SEAL has revealed that even the story of how the book came to be was a lie.
When Lone Survivor was published in 2007, Luttrell insisted it had been his idea, and his superiors gave him their blessing.
Over time, however, he told a different story.
In Service, Luttrell’s follow-up book to Lone Survivor, he revealed that his bosses at Naval Special Warfare Command “decided” he should tell the story of what happened in the mountains of Afghanistan.
Luttrell went further on a recent episode of his Team Never Quit podcast:
They gave me some freaking media training and started sending me through all these schools to get me ready to start going on TV. And then they sent my ass to New York in a suit. Pulled me out my uniform like, ‘Hey here's your new uniform. Put the suit on. Here’s your agents.’ They gave me my lawyers, all my publishing, everything. They facilitated all of that. It was an assignment, which I didn't know what to do. I never even heard of anybody having to do that. But then someone's like, ‘Hey, you know, independent operator SEAL. You all do everything, so this is part of it.’ And then they just put me on the road, and that was my new job.
These comments upset some in the military/special operations world for a good reason: Lone Survivor defied what the Navy SEALs were supposed to be about.
A famous SEAL is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. SEALs are supposed to be “quiet professionals” who work in the shadows. The SEAL Ethos says you don’t advertise the nature of your work, and you don’t seek recognition for your actions. It goes without saying that you don’t profit from your actions, either. The code is supposed to continue after you leave the Navy.
That changed when the SEAL command in Coronado, California, quietly engineered Lone Survivor, which earned Luttrell a reported seven-figure advance.
The book touched off the gold rush of former SEALs who sought to cash in on their military careers by writing books, starring in movies, distributing podcasts, selling supplements and energy drinks, and running for political office.
“According to a source within NSW, the point at which the current generation of SEALs first saw the lucrative nature of selling their stories was with NSWC’s endorsement of the book Lone Survivor,” SEAL Cmdr. Forrest S. Crowell wrote in his 2015 master’s thesis, Navy SEALs Gone Wild: Publicity, Fame, and the Loss of the Quiet Professional.
Looking back over the past 17 years, you can trace the impact of Lone Survivor on the post-military lives of famous former SEALs. It’s perhaps not surprising that Luttrell made his revelations in a podcast with Rob O’Neill, whose published account of shooting Osama bin Laden has also been heavily criticized as both inaccurate and unethical. There’s a direct line from Lone Survivor to Chris Kyle’s 2012 book American Sniper, which emerged out of the fiasco of Task Unit Bruiser in Ramadi, Iraq. Kyle’s commanding officer, Jocko Willink, is now a leadership guru, podcaster, children’s book author, and energy drink salesman.
“It is that toxic Bro-vet community that has decided to trade in their values for money and fame,” Brent Taylor, a former Army Delta Force operator who has called out Luttrell and others in the special operations world, said on his own show, The AntiHero Podcast. “And they all run in the same circles. They all promote each other.”
In retrospect, it seems clear that Lone Survivor would never have happened without retired Vice Admiral Joe Maguire, the head of Naval Special Warfare Command from 2004 to 2007. “He was my shadow, my top cover,” Luttrell said on his podcast.
You don’t have to squint too hard to see that Maguire was worried about his own reputation. As the head of Naval Special Warfare when 11 SEALs were killed, Maguire presided over what was then the single largest loss of life for Naval Special Warfare since World War II. (Maguire did not respond to a message left seeking comment.)
When reporters started poking around, Luttrell says Maguire and other senior SEAL leaders grew nervous. “The Navy seemed unmoved until the media started doing its thing. When stories, many of them inaccurate, began to surface, my command decided the NSW community needed to get out in front of it,” Luttrell wrote in Service. “They decided I should write a book about the mission.”
Maguire and the Naval Special Warfare leadership knew it was a bad look for an active-duty SEAL to become an author with his blessing. “I was told to keep it Top Secret,” Luttrell said on his podcast.
Fortunately for Maguire and Luttrell, few noticed the last paragraph of an April 2006 Newsweek report about the Afghan timber worker who hid Luttrell until he could be rescued. The article revealed that the active-duty SEAL was represented by Alan U. Schwartz, a Hollywood superlawyer with clients like Mel Brooks, who cast Schwartz in his films.
Schwartz, who did not respond to my email seeking comment, found Luttrell a literary agent and, through the agent, a co-author. That summer, Luttrell left a pre-deployment workup for several weeks to tell his story to his co-author, Patrick Robinson. “Back in Coronado, the head shed did a good job of keeping my absence inconspicuous,” Luttrell wrote in Service.
Luttrell said he found the process of writing a book “cathartic—painful but necessary. And also strange: as SEALs, we’d been taught to hold our stories close, to say nothing to outsiders, especially the press. But we also knew how to get something done when the chain of command spoke.”
Five days after Luttrell left the Navy in June 2007, he appeared with Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today show, and the book was fast on its way to becoming a No. 1 best-seller. In 2013, Lone Survivor became a hit film starring Mark Wahlberg.
A different SEAL commander might have demanded accountability and a just-the-facts internal report on what happened, not a book full of lies, half-truths, and exaggerations. Operation Red Wings, the name of the mission Luttrell survived in Afghanistan, was marked by failures in training, planning, and execution that became a huge liability when things went wrong. (Read more here.) Holding people responsible for these failures is a crucial part of how the military learns from its mistakes and saves lives in the future.
According to journalist Matthew Cole, Maguire believed an after-action report about the failures of Operation Red Wings would be “insensitive” to the families of the dead. “Maguire sold it to our community as a way to preserve their dignity,” said a retired SEAL officer that Cole quoted in his book, Code Over Country.
“They handed out a bunch of awards—just like Roberts Ridge—and swept it under the rug,” the SEAL officer told Cole. Luttrell received the Navy Cross, and Lt. Mike Murphy was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the first for action in Afghanistan. “There was never any accountability.”
Instead of telling the families hard truths, Lone Survivor sold the American public an officially sanctioned myth that turned a disaster into a story of courage and heroism.
Maguire has always been a savvy political operator. Early in his career, in 1979, Maguire reportedly survived a shocking SEAL scandal by doing nothing about it. As Cole revealed in Code Over Country, a young ensign in Maguire’s platoon was sexually assaulted in an act of hazing so cruel that the ensign took his own life. Years later, Maguire denied knowing about the hazing.
The same playbook is at work in Lone Survivor: protect the SEAL brand, save your career. Maguire retired in 2010 as a three-star admiral and became acting Director of National Intelligence in the first Trump administration. He now teaches national security at the University of Texas.
Meanwhile, the retired SEAL gold rush Maguire helped inspire continues. It won’t stop until the SEAL community decides that Ethos matters more than Brand.
After this story was published, Luttrell’s lawyer, Alan Schwartz, responded to my request for comment:
Marcus Luttrell was put in touch with me through a mutual (non-military) contact as he was looking for representation on a book project. Once Marcus and I agreed that I would represent him on the book that became Lone Survivor, I sought and received sign-off from the SEALS on the basic parameters of the project. This initial approval was the extent of my involvement with the SEALS, the U.S. Navy, and any government organization.
Schwartz’s response clarifies that the Navy didn’t “give” Luttrell his lawyer, as he maintained on his podcast. He actively sought representation for a book while still an active-duty SEAL.
Was Luttrell “ordered” to write the book? Schwartz wouldn’t say. I’ve asked Naval Special Warfare if they can help me get to the bottom of this.
A Delta Operator, Green Beret and Navy SEAL walk into a bar...
and the SEAL writes a book about it.
[Unfortunately, this is now an old joke.]
Surely everyone should know American films and books about special operations are, at best, political propoganda.
To my knowledge, very little about British SF actions has ever been made a political tool, thank heavens.
That's not just better, but should be the rule.
We elect politicians to make decisions.
We elect politicians based upon media.
If there is a problem, it's those in charge of the narrative who should be held accountable.
Ultimately, it's us, who are accountable.
We choose to be informed, or not.
If we vote for people on the basis of B.S, that's a lot of us.
If those politicians make decisions, that are wrong, that's on us. Not the enforcers of those decisions. Especially in the case, ideally, (yes I know,) of national security.
If you care passionately about what your service men and women do, it is incumbent upon you to get off commercial media, and read up on what's going on. As best you can.