The "Lone Survivor" Myth

Why the truth about one of the darkest days in Naval Special Warfare history still matters

I recently spoke with Eric Deming, a retired Navy SEAL who spent some time walking me through Operation Red Wings, better known to the American public as the events depicted in Lone Survivor, a No. 1 New York Times best-selling book that became a blockbuster movie starring Mark Wahlberg.

Lone Survivor tells the story of former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, the only surviving member of a group of four Frogmen who were ambushed in 2005 in the mountains of Afghanistan. Eight more SEALs and eight Army aviators who rushed to rescue Luttrell and his teammates were killed when their helicopter was shot down. At the time, Operation Red Wings was the single largest loss of life for Naval Special Warfare since World War II.

Interest in Operation Red Wings has spiked since Deming appeared in March on The Antihero Podcast, which is popular in law enforcement and military circles, and raised questions about Luttrell’s account. Clips of the podcast have gone viral on TikTok, which has come as a welcome surprise to the 56-year-old Deming, who retired as senior chief after 19 years in the SEALs and now flips houses in the Tampa area.

Spend some time talking to Deming, and you’ll come away with a very different—and disturbing—perception of the Navy SEALs than the one the public sees. Deming told me that many of the former SEALs behind most of the best-selling books and popular movies and podcasts were poor performers or bad leaders who lie about their service. And Exhibit A is Marcus Luttrell.

Published in 2007, Lone Survivor told a story of extraordinary courage under fire. Inside the SEAL community, however, no one is holding up Luttrell as a role model. Deming says many SEALs harbor serious doubts about how brave Luttrell really was in the mountains of Afghanistan. Whatever he did or didn’t do on the battlefield, it’s Luttrell’s post-Navy career that his former teammates can’t forgive. He spun a web of exaggerations, half-truths, and lies to sell the American public a myth—an officially sanctioned myth—about what happened to him and his fallen teammates.

­­Deming isn’t speaking out to quibble with the facts or shame Luttrell. His concern is that Operation Red Wings is part of what Deming described as a pattern of corruption inside Naval Special Warfare. Luttrell and his teammates were not qualified for a poorly planned mission that was doomed from the start and got people killed unnecessarily. The SEALs were embarrassed, so the problems were hushed up. And so the pattern has repeated itself, most recently in January when two SEALs were lost at sea during a nighttime raid near Somalia.

Luttrell did not respond to messages seeking comment, and a representative of Naval Special Warfare Command declined to comment on this article.

The unmaking of a legend

Deming isn’t the first to call bullshit on Lone Survivor. Numerous books and articles have pointed out the errors in Luttrell’s self-serving account over the years. Luttrell and his teammates didn’t face 80 to 200 Taliban fighters, as he claimed in Lone Survivor. The official number cited in multiple documents is 30 to 40 enemy combatants, but even that may be high. According to Ed Darack, a journalist who was embedded with Marines in the area, the true number may be as low as seven.

The fighters were led by Ahmad Shah, who is described in Lone Survivor as “one of Osama bin Laden’s closest associates.” That’s yet another myth created to sell books and movie tickets. Shah was a local insurgent and wannabe warlord. Intelligence gathered by the Marines indicated he commanded a band of around 10 to 20 gunmen based high up on Sawtalo Sar, a 10,000-foot peak in the Hindu Kush. Shah was a guerrilla, not an al Qaeda operative. Victory Point, Ed Darack’s 2009 book on Operation Red Wings and its aftermath, reported that Afghan villagers told the Marines that Shah sold opium to finance his roadside bomb attacks on Coalition forces and the Afghani government.

Luttrell’s claim in Lone Survivor that his teammates killed 50 or more of Shah’s men is almost certainly untrue. U.S. Army Rangers spent two weeks combing the battlefield, searching for the bodies of Luttrell’s teammates. Former Ranger Nicholas Moore wrote in his 2018 book, Run to the Sound of the Guns, that they found no Afghan bodies and no forensic evidence of a large-scale fight. Moore says they did find a lot of 7.62mm shells expended by the AK-47s the Afghans used but “only a handful” of the 5.56mm casings fired by the SEALs. The Marines also confirmed there were no reports of enemy casualties, Darack told me.

Deming and others wonder whether Luttrell ever fired a single shot. In his book, Luttrell said he took 11 magazines of ammunition on the mission, three more than normal. In 2016, Newsweek’s Ross Schneiderman published the revealing story of Mohammad Gulab, the Afghan timber worker who hid Luttrell from Shah’s men. Gulab told Schneiderman that the SEAL still had 11 magazines of ammunition when he found him—and they appeared to be full. Today, Gulab, who resettled in Texas to escape a Taliban bounty on his head, calls Luttrell a “dishonorable person" who did not tell the truth about what happened on Sawtalo Sar.

Luttrell claimed he was shot 11 times, broke his back and his pelvis, tore his shoulder, destroyed his knees, suffered severe facial damage, and bit his tongue in half. According to former Ranger Nicholas Moore, Army medics assessed that Luttrell had a bullet wound in his butt and assorted cuts, bumps, and bruises from falling down the mountain in panic. He could move slowly under his own power and walked onto the helicopter that medevacked him off Sawtalo Sar. “He got a shot in the ass or fragged in the ass,” Deming says. “That’s all that happened to him. He was beat up from falling down the mountain, but he was nowhere as messed up like he portrays.”

Failing to prepare

Why did Luttrell lie and exaggerate? Because the truth would have revealed that Luttrell should never have been on the mountain in the first place.

The disaster of Operation Red Wings started with failures in training. Before arriving in Afghanistan, the four SEALs were assigned to Seal Delivery Vehicle (SDV) teams, which specialize in underwater infiltrations and operations. “They’re great at diving, and they understand maritime operations at sea level,” Deming says. “But their training pipeline might not have adequately prepared them for land warfare in the high altitudes of Afghanistan. Luttrell and some on his team exhibited problems with basic land warfare tactics, like even prepping a grenade.  There’s just some basic stuff that they're were not getting right.”

Assigned to SEAL Team 10 in Virginia Beach, Luttrell and his team failed a critical pre-deployment test known as a Final Training Exercise (FTX). Kent Paro, the commander of Team 10 at the time, told me that he learned after the fact that Luttrell and others did have to redo the FTX but noted that it’s wrong to say Luttrell failed it. It was a group exercise, and in the end, the group was certified for deployment. Deming says it should have been a red flag to leadership that they probably were not ready for a mission in the mountains of Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan, platoon leaders tried to get Luttrell up to speed, but his attention was elsewhere. In his book, he says he “volunteered” in the emergency room of a U.S. military hospital in Bagram; Deming said the senior leadership of Luttrell's platoon told him the 6-foot-5 Texan was wooing a nurse who worked there.

President George Bush pins the Navy Cross on Marcus Luttrell in 2006. Credit: White House photo by Eric Draper

Luttrell’s lack of training became a huge liability when things went wrong in Operation Red Wings. For one, it hindered the recovery of his teammates’ bodies. Identifying landmarks is an essential reconnaissance skill. However, Luttrell could not recall “a single terrain feature or identifying landscape that could have helped track down his comrades,” former Ranger Nicholas Moore wrote. “We struggled to understand how he didn’t even know the general area of his patrol.”

According to Moore, when the Rangers located Luttrell, he told them that his teammates were all dead somewhere on the mountain. Without any landmarks to guide them, Moore's 75th Ranger Regiment spent two weeks clambering up and down the steep slopes of the mountain where the gunfight had taken place, searching for the bodies. The rescue and recovery effort began on June 28, 2005, the day of the firefight. Luttrell was located on July 2—the same day Rangers found the bodies of Lt. Mike Murphy and Danny Dietz. A SEAL unit based in Germany found Matthew Axelson’s body on July 10, two weeks after the gunfight.

One reason why it took so long to find Axelson's body was that he was a mile or so from the scene of the gunfight. How he got there is one of the remaining mysteries of Operation Red Wings. Axelson either traversed a steep slope strewn with boulders and downed trees while suffering from a traumatic head wound, or someone moved his body.

Deming believes that Axelson survived the ambush and could have been saved. One member of the SEAL platoon that found Axelson told Deming that it looked like the 29-year-old had been dead a day or two. Luttrell apparently heard the same thing. "That SOB lived for two more weeks out there with those injuries,” he told an audience at the Army and Navy Club in 2008. “True testament to a warrior.” Luttrell later conceded that he misspoke, saying that no one is sure how long Axelson lived.

Why does this matter? Because if Axelson survived—and it’s a big if—then Luttrell’s information that his teammates were all dead doomed any chance of finding him in time. The time-sensitive combat search and rescue mission switched to a personnel recovery effort that proceeded more safely and deliberately.

Lone Survivor, not surprisingly, tells a different story. Luttrell says he grew worried when Axelson’s body could not be found. “I knew to the inch where he was last time I saw him,” Luttrell wrote. He had “pinpointed that hollow” where he last saw Axelson before a rocket-propelled grenade blasted Luttrell down the mountain. Luttrell was surprised to learn that “Axe was in a different place from where I thought … a few hundred yards even further away,” he wrote. “Nobody knows how he got there.”

Fast-roping into danger

Time has revealed telling omissions in Lone Survivor. The book does not mention that Operation Red Wings was a Marine operation that the SEALs commandeered. The original plan was for a Marine recon team to scout Shah’s hideout on Sawtalo Sar. The second phase of the operation called for a larger Marine force to arrive on the mountain by helicopters flying at night. Flying in the dark was the specialty of the Army’s elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the Night Stalkers. According to Ed Darack’s reporting, commanders at the Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan agreed that the Night Stalkers could fly in Operation Red Wings, but only if the SEALs got full operational command of the recon phase of the mission.

The SEALs took the Marine mission plan and made it far riskier. The Marines had planned to have a six-man recon team hike up Sawtalo Sar to get eyes on Shah and his men; the SEALs decided to land a four-man team on the mountain by MH-47 Chinook helicopter. In military terms, it’s known as “landing on the X,” a tactic that sacrifices surprise for speed but carries a high degree of difficulty and risk. Marine commanders and Army Capt. Matt Brady, the air mission commander for the operation, believed the SEALs were courting danger. The sound of the Chinook’s twin rotors would be heard for miles, announcing that American forces were in the area.

Poor planning led to mistakes. At the landing site, the SEALs fast-roped onto a mountain ridge. Capt. Brady told Coffee or Die’s Joshua Skovlund that the rope became entangled in the trees below, and the helicopter crew chief decided to cut it. The SEALs did their best to hide the thick rope with brush, but their tracks were easy to follow. In the book, Luttrell says the rope was “positioned expertly,” and the SEALs descended it without issue. (An early version of the Lone Survivor film script got this detail right, but it was removed after the Navy objected.)

Within a few hours, the four-man SEAL team was compromised by three unarmed goat herders. They may have been enemy scouts; even if they weren’t, the mission should have been aborted. Deming says the standard operating procedure would be to flex cuff the goat herders to a tree or keep them in custody until the SEALs could be quickly evacuated. “We’re not just murderers,” Deming says. “Some people might do it. Not the norm.” Luttrell, however, says tying up the goat herders wasn’t an option for reasons that aren’t clear. So, the team had to choose whether to shoot the trio, which included a teenage boy, and face charges of war crimes or let them go and face “military suicide.” They decided to let them go. Luttrell would regret this decision for the rest of his life.

It wasn’t long before Shah and his men took the high ground and ambushed Luttrell and his teammates. All four SEALs were wounded, and no one was answering the team’s radio distress calls back to base. The SEALs tried to escape by taking 20 to 30-foot leaps down the mountain. Outpositioned and pinned down, Lt. Murphy moved into open terrain to get a clear signal and place a satellite phone call for help. His message got through but at the cost of his life.

Lt. Michael Murphy, left, and Matthew Axelson. (Navy photo)

In an interview with Anderson Cooper on TV’s 60 Minutes in 2013—years after the book came out—Luttrell recalled Lt. Murphy’s final moments:

“I was trying with everything I had to get to him, and he-- he started screaming my name. He was like, "Marcus, man, you gotta help me. I need help, Marcus." That it got so intense that I actually put my weapon down and covered my ears, 'cause I couldn't stand to hear him die. All I wanted him to do was stop screaming my name. And-- they killed him. And I-- and I put my weapon down in a gunfight while my best friend was getting killed, so that pretty much makes me a coward.

Murphy was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the first for action in Afghanistan. Murphy’s Medal of Honor was based heavily on Luttrell’s account. No one doubts Murphy was a hero, but the summary of action accompanying the Medal of Honor is replete with Luttrell’s exaggerations: the four SEALs faced “more than 50 anti-coalition militia” and killed “an estimated 35 Taliban.” In official reports, Luttrell is credited with three enemy kills. The evidence says otherwise.

Lone Survivor is what the SEALs call a “bullshit book,” but it served its purpose. It transformed Operation Red Wings from the fiasco it was into the story of courage it became. The SEALs were restored as the heroes the public expects them to be. The book’s success helped ensure that no one asked too many questions about what really happened on that mountain.

It made Luttrell a wealthy man. The book sold at auction for a seven-figure advance, and the movie rights cost a reported $2 million, plus 5 percent against adjusted gross, along with other payments. Luttrell became a popular speaker, charging $50,000 or more to tell his version of what happened on Sawtalo Sar. He gave a prime-time address at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

Marcus Luttrell speaking at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

Today, the man who says he quit in the mountains of Afghanistan is the face of Team Never Quit, a podcast and not-for-profit organization helping veterans and the families of fallen warriors.

“Can you imagine? Here’s the guy who quit on the battlefield, who left his buddies behind, and did exactly what a Navy Seal should never do,” Deming said. “What a slap in the face of the guys that died on the mountain that day that went in to rescue him and the guys that he left behind personally.”

Update: Luttrell’s training failures go back to the very beginning of his SEAL career. He and his twin brother cooked up an audacious plot that allowed Luttrell to cheat his way through Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training in 2000: