MARCUS LUTTRELL – THE THREE NAVY SEALS

Awoke this morning to the voice of Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell who was talking to Glenn Beck on Beck’s radio program about the three Navy SEALS  accused of roughing up one of the most wanted terrorists, the guy who was responsible for hanging the Blackwater guys and burning their bodies and hanging them off a bridge. The Navy SEALs captured this dirt bag, and are accused of giving him a fat lip. They are now being court martialed because he claimed abuse.    Here’s the part where I came in — you can read the entire transcript at the link above.

GLENN:  “… we were supposed to learn our lesson from Vietnam that you let the Pentagon fight the war. You don’t let Washington fight the war. And that’s what’s happening again. It happened for a little while under George W. Bush and now it’s happening on a grand scale with Barack Obama. And I mean, there is a difference there. You can’t just throw lives away for political reasons. You can’t just throw lives away and say, well, okay, we’re going to do this halfway. No, it’s war, it’s killing. You either do it or you don’t.

LUTTRELL: Right. If you didn’t want that to happen, then you shouldn’t have sent us over there.

GLENN: Right. Or you should pull them back. Right now you should pull them back.

LUTTRELL: Exactly. I mean, if you are not going to jerk the chains off and let us get after it and do what, basically what you pay millions and millions of dollars for us to do, then yeah, jerk us back, man. Don’t just sit there and tack us to the ground and tell us, you know, what we can and can’t do from a desk in a $2,000 suit because you don’t have any idea what’s going on over there.

I mean, it’s so dynamic that, you know like I don’t even know what’s going on in the war anymore. I couldn’t tell you from my perspective as a former gun fighter, you know, as a SEAL over there, I don’t have any idea what’s going on. So I can’t make any assumptions because the war changes probably just about every three days. And, you know, it’s impossible, you know, to keep up with it unless you are over there in the mix.

And if someone in a head shed over there says we need more help, that means we need more help, if you want to and there’s only one thing that’s going on over there and that’s the win. We’re going to win. We don’t go in to, you know, to piss everybody off over there and I don’t know what else.

I mean, I’ve heard a million different explanations. I sat there and watched somebody on the news. I don’t name drop but they are just like, you know, there’s two ways to do this war. If we want to win it, we do it this way and if we want to politically, politically what in Afghanistan? You’re going to have to run a telephone line and a TV line to every frickin’ village out there in the mountain. You think you can get that done? Because them villagers know what’s going on. Those people one side of the mountain have never even met the people on the other side of the mountain. You are like, all right.

…

GLENN: If I were the king of the world today, here’s what I would be doing: Hey, SEALs and everybody else, go over and kill the bad guys. Get the terrorists. Kill them, in a cave, I don’t care where you find them, kill them. And then come back home. Just…

LUTTRELL: You don’t even have to put it like that. Just say go do your job and this is the country you need to do it in and that’s it. We know what that’s all you have to say, period.

Thank God for men like Luttrell.  I had the good fortune to interview him in June 2007 on my Sunday night radio program at WDBO (Orlando) when Lone Survivor came out.  Here’s the post I wrote about it on June 22, 2007:

LONE SURVIVOR

In June of 2005, the U.S. Navy dropped an elite four-man SEAL team into the high country of the Hindu Kush in northeastern Afghanistan, deep al Qaeda territory.

Their mission was Operation Redwing; its aim — to capture or kill the Taliban warrior who commanded the burgeoning new force of Osama bin Laden’s army.

But more than ten thousand feet up in the mountains, on a barren hillside, the mission was compromised.

The SEALs made a fateful decision and it led to a massive Taliban ambush in which 150 mountain fighters, al Qaeda and Taliban combined, attacked the four SEALs. The battle was brutal. The tiny but brilliantly trained U.S. combat team fought for nearly three hours under murderous gunfire and rocket attack. At the end of it, almost a hundred of the Taliban warriors lay dead on the mountain, but Lt. Michael Murphy and Petty Officers Matthew Axelson and Danny Dietz also had been killed. Lt. Murphy’s last call to the base did bring reinforcements, but that rescue helicopter and all sixteen occupants were blasted out of the sky by a Taliban rocket. It was the worst day in the history of the Navy SEALs.

Only one SEAL survived. Only one man lived to tell the tale…  NAVY CROSS recipient Marcus Luttrell, The Lone Survivor.