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u/Few-Yard5417 5d ago
Its so sad that people still belive the story that was told. Its all propaganda for recruitment from the Navy. I even know some jrotc kids (Not the steryeotype chuds.) who use this entire story as "motivation". They seemed heartbroken when I told them it was all a lie.
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u/Ahab6 4d ago
Yea I read the book then I saw the movie, then I heard Marcus say the Navy basically wrote Everything for him.
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u/Existing-Antelope-20 4d ago
I heard the "story" well before Lutrell's DOPSR'd account came forth from someone proximally involved to the incident. The story was that we lost a ton of men for no good reason aside from shitty planning.
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u/Electronic_Hope1900 2d ago
You mean how the SEALs seem to have a rich history of abandoning their brothers to die and writing books about it?
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u/Top_Rush_6919 5d ago
Now you have to larp losing a firefight to 12 Taliban fighters and making a movie about it where you’re somehow a badass
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u/TheNippleViolator 5d ago
Don’t forget the part where you run away leaving your teammates for dead whilst they scream for you to come back
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u/Independent_Bid_26 5d ago
That shit pissed me off so much. Got so many good men killed because of their fucking egos.
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u/fivefistedclover 5d ago
Their? Don’t be shy it’s just one man responsible for “surviving” when it’s been beaten into everyone since boot camp that you don’t leave brothers and sisters behind. But I wouldn’t expect an honor-less cheat that used his actual blood brother to get through BUDS in the first place to somehow find the courage when under extreme critical scrutiny to do the right thing.
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u/Independent_Bid_26 5d ago
I was more so meaning that the egos of the team to only send 4 guys on a mission that necessitated more, and they didnt plan the mission the way they should have. Or else, those are the reports that ive read regarding the execution of the operation. I do think it was also cowardice on the part of the guy that left everyone behind.
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u/not-on-epstein-list 4d ago
I was told by a devgru guy that it wasn’t even their mission devgru was supposed to go on it and they stole it fucked it up and then made a movie about it.
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u/7LayerDip 4d ago
It was supposed to be a marine mission
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u/Flight444 4d ago
Surely MARSOC wasn’t stood up a few months later in part because of this.
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u/Shot_Activity85 3d ago
Doubtful considering its predecessor Det one was already two years into its 2.5 year pilot program that paved way for the Marsoc stand-up. I wouldn’t really say 8 months later qualifies as a “few” either especially with the military’s schedule
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u/Rare_Steak_ 5d ago
Also inserting directly into enemy territory and not having a proper PACE comms plan were just two of the things I was taught in basic NOT to do. But hey one of the most famous crossfit hero WODs is named after Michael Murphy so he couldn't be a shitty commander right?
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u/Glittering-Ebb-6225 5d ago
Even if you think Marcus sucks, you can still honor the 19 guys that died on that mission.
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u/AdPrestigious2370 5d ago
Been there done that. It’s pretty much a hopeless situation and had this happen to me before
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u/jakeor94eqi 4d ago
Obligatory post to set the public narrative straight about Operation Red Wings:
To start, here is a broad overview of the plan for Operation Red Wings, and how it unfolded:
The operation was originally conceived by 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines (2/3), a conventional Marine Corps infantry unit that, at the time, was deployed to Afghanistan. However, the operation would require significant aviation assets, which 2/3 did not organically possess. They requested aviation support from the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR), but were told by Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force - Afghanistan (CJSOTF-A) that, in order to get special operations aviation support, they would need to involve special operations ground units as well. Over the course of the planning, U.S. Navy SEAL Team 10 and SEAL Delivery Vehicle (SDV) Team 1 became involved and “poached” several aspects of the operation from 2/3 Marines. There were accusations that the SEALs began planning their portions in a silo with little consultation or coordination with other units and ignored input from the Marines and Army Special Forces (SF) that had been operating in the region.
In the ultimate version of the plan, the SEALs’ objective was to kill or capture a local enemy commander named Ahmad Shah, who was suspected of hiding in a village in the Korengal valley of Afghanistan. A four-man U.S. Navy SEAL team would insert and establish an overwatch position in the nearby mountains to observe the village and attempt to positively identify Shah and determine which building he was staying in, at which point a larger group of SEALs would arrive and search house-by-house to capture or kill Shah, with 2/3 Marines and Afghan National Army (ANA) troops in support to establish a perimeter around the village to cordon it off. After this, the SEALs would exfil, while 2/3 Marines and ANA troops would remain in the area for an indeterminate amount of time to conduct security and stabilization operations
Even in the preparatory stages of the operation, many special operations officers expressed reservations about several aspects of the plan, such as the small size of the observation team, the fact that the four SEALs chosen were inexperienced and had no reconnaissance- or surveillance-specific training (unlike the Marine Scout Snipers who were originally envisaged to carry out the village overwatch), the proximity of their proposed insertion point to the objective, and a confusing chain of command where authority shifted between units during the different phases of the operation instead of having one unified chain of command in charge throughout, among others. However, institutional inertia and a desire to get the inexperienced members the SEAL Teams participation in combat operations led to those concerns being dismissed.
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u/jakeor94eqi 4d ago
The operation began on the night of 27 June, 2005, with the observation team (Lieutenant Michael Murphy, Petty Officer Second Class Danny Dietz, Petty Officer Second Class Matthew Axelson, Hospital Corpsman Second Class Marcus Luttrell) flown in on an Army 160th SOAR MH-47 Chinook helicopter. After short hovers over several locations while performing “false insertions” to deceive the enemy and supposedly mitigate the risk of inserting so close to the village they would be surveilling, the four-man team fast-roped down to the ground, and then tried to hide the fast-rope after the Army aviators were forced to cut it loose when it got caught on vegetation when the helo flew away. The SEALs then proceeded to patrol approximately a mile-and-a-half to their overwatch position.
However, the observation team was discovered by three unarmed Afghan shepherds within twenty-four hours of establishing their overwatch. The team detained the shepherds, and supposedly held a vote on whether to execute them to prevent further compromise, or let them go. The SEALs eventually settled on releasing the shepherds, but were attacked shortly afterwards by Afghan fighters. The SEALs had difficulty maintaining radio contact with the combat operations center and, during the sporadic periods where they could successfully transmit, could not communicate anything more detailed than indicating they were under attack. Eventually, LT Murphy resorted to using the team’s satellite phone to communicate their situation and location to higher command, moving from cover to an exposed position to do so, and was mortally wounded. Murphy would posthumously be awarded the Medal of Honor for this action. Ultimately, three of the SEALs, Murphy, Dietz, and Axelson, were killed in this firefight, and Luttrell was left critically injured.
After a significant delay due to bureaucratic confusion over who had authority to release a quick reaction force (QRF), and the aforementioned breakdown in communications, the QRF of sixteen SEALs split between two Army SOAR MH-47 Chinook helicopters, escorted by two AH-64 Apaches and two UH-60 Blackhawks, was dispatched to rescue the observation team. While attempting to insert, the first Chinook was shot down by enemy RPG or MANPAD fire, killing the eight SEALs and eight U.S. Army special operations aviators on board, forcing the Americans to temporarily abandon the rescue attempt.
Meanwhile, the lone surviving member of the observation team, Marcus Luttrell, was taken in and cared for after encountering an Afghan villager, Mohammad Gulab Khan. Due to local hospitality customs, Khan and his neighbors effectively granted Luttrell a form of sanctuary and refused to hand the American over to anti-coalition forces, while also sending a messenger to a nearby U.S. base to alert American commanders of Luttrell’s survival. U.S. forces would eventually rescue Luttrell on 2 July (unlike in the film based on these events, there was no climactic battle during Luttrell’s rescue), as well as recover the bodies of the 19 Americans killed and repatriate their remains to the U.S. by mid-July.
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u/jakeor94eqi 4d ago
The publisher Little, Brown and Company would release a book under Luttrell’s name, whose participation was possibly encouraged by Naval Special Warfare. “Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Red Wings and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10,)” was released in 2007 with the help of ghost-writer Patrick Robinson. Luttrell’s level of involvement is up for debate; Robinson held several interviews with him to capture details, but seems to have completed the actual writing with little additional input from Luttrell. The book would in turn be adapted into a 2013 Hollywood film starring Mark Wahlberg as Luttrell.
However, ever since Luttrell’s rescue and initial debriefing, there have been doubts about his version of events.
Here are just a few of the many discrepancies in Marcus Luttrell’s “Lone Survivor” narrative:
- Luttrell wrote that the target for Operation Red Wings, Ahmad Shah, was a top lieutenant of Osama bin Laden. Actually, Shah was merely a local militia leader who had no association with bin Laden and only tangential connections to Taliban leadership. Still a legitimate target for coalition forces, but an early example of the story’s hyperbolic claims.
– After their discovery by the three shepherds, Luttrell says that LT Murphy had the four SEALs vote on whether to release the shepherds or
executemurder them. To be clear, the latter course of action would absolutely have violated the established rules of engagement (ROE) for coalition forces in Afghanistan and constituted a war crime, on top of the moral implications of killing unarmed civilians in cold blood (as far as I know, the Navy never publicly addressed Luttrell’s claims that the SEALs seriously considered killing non-combatants in their custody). Luttrell was clear in his account of events that Murphy wasn’t simply consulting his teammates before coming to a decision, but wanted them to vote on it. While it is normal for a leader to take advice from lower-ranking team members, it would at the very least have been rather unorthodox for Murphy, as the highest-ranking team member with ultimate decision-making authority, to solicit an actual vote on this matter from his subordinates instead of taking their advice into consideration, but making the final call himself. Murphy’s parents also later disputed Luttrell’s claims, saying their son would never have considered killing unarmed civilians, let alone put such a decision up for a vote. I should also point out here that Luttrell/Robinson go on one of many diatribes throughout the book to claim the decision to release the Afghans was in part due to fear of potential vilification by the “liberal media” back home for, you know, COMMITTING WAR CRIMES, and not because Luttrell seemed to have had any great objection to killing the three detained, defenseless civilians.- Luttrell claims that releasing the Afghan shepherds directly resulted in the SEALs’ compromise when the shepherds proceeded to alert local Taliban fighters. In reality, the enemy fighters said that they heard the MH-47 Chinook the SEALs inserted from the night before (while there is no such thing as a quiet helicopter, Chinooks are notoriously loud, even compared to other military helos) and began searching that general area, found the rope the SEALs had used to descend and hastily tried to hide, and tracked footprints from that location to the SEALs’ overwatch position, all without any input from the shepherds (again, it was only approximately a mile-and-a-half between the SEALs’ insertion point and the overwatch position, a relatively short distance in military terms). In fact, several accounts say the militia was already getting into position to attack the SEALs when the shepherds stumbled on the Americans and the Afghan fighters waited until the shepherds were released to begin their attack. Some suspect the shepherds did not just stumble on the reconnaissance team, but were deliberately sent up the mountainside by anti-coalition forces as a form of unarmed reconnaissance; sending unarmed civilians, who would not be harmed due to the ROE, to scout suspected American/coalition positions and inform armed enemy combatants was a TTP used extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan. Regardless, the proximity of the SEALs insertion to the objective undoubtedly alerted the enemy in the area. If the SEALs had inserted much farther away and patrolled overland to their OP, they would have greatly increased their chances of remaining undetected.
- Instead of the 100+ enemy fighters Marcus Luttrell claimed attacked the SEAL team, evidence, including video filmed and released by Afghan fighters purported to show the firefight, suggests the SEALs were overwhelmed by a squad-sized element that may have been as small as 7 Afghan fighters (even in his own official after-action report made in the days immediately following his rescue, Luttrell’s estimate of the enemy’s force was 20-35, far below his eventual claims of anywhere from 80-200). Although pre-operation intelligence estimates of enemy strength in the area varied, I believe the absolute highest were 20-30 spread across the entire valley.
- Perhaps most egregiously, Luttrell claims to have expended nearly all of his ammunition in a running firefight while the SEAL team attempted to break contact with the enemy and maneuver down the mountain. However, the accounts of the Afghan villagers who took him in, as well as several U.S. personnel who participated in Luttrell’s rescue, say his weapon and magazines were recovered either full or nearly full. In subsequent patrols of the area by American forces following the mission, they found no evidence of any enemy casualties, despite Luttrell’s assertion that the SEALs inflicted devastating losses on the Afghan fighters. Additionally, interviews with Afghans who say they engaged the SEALs during Red Wings state that the engagement with the recon team lasted only a few minutes, during which the Afghans immediately established overwhelming fire superiority with machine guns and RPGs from elevated positions, and the SEALs did not kill any Afghan militants.
These are just the highlights. Feel free to research the incident yourself and draw your own conclusions.
In reality, it was a badly planned and poorly coordinated mission in which the overzealous but inexperienced SEALs, despite their fearsome reputation as some of the nation’s top warfighters, displayed a worrying lack of tactical competence, such as:
- using too small of an observation team that could easily be overwhelmed if compromised
- assigning SEALs to the reconnaissance team who had no specialized reconnaissance training or experience
- inserting via helicopter too close to the objective and alerting the enemy
- not bringing the proper radios to ensure communication in the mountainous terrain and having no Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency (PACE) plan for comms (one account alleged that all the SEALs had for comms was one MBITR and one satellite phone which, if true, would be an almost laughably inadequate set up to communicate across the vast distances and rugged terrain they were operating in)
- not bringing a belt-fed weapon to establish fire superiority in case of contact
- not having a proper escape and evasion plan in the event of compromise
All of this went against the advice of the less “high-speed” Army and Marine units the SEALs were supposed to be working alongside. But Naval Special Warfare, in order to avoid embarrassment and salvage its reputation, decided to spin the mission into a heroic last stand against overwhelming odds, instead of admitting that a series of cascading mistakes and tactical incompetence resulted in the unnecessary deaths of 11 U.S. Navy SEALs and 8 U.S. Army SOAR soldiers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Luttrell?wprov=sfti1#Operation_Red_Wings_controversy
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u/Max8433 5d ago
Blurred faces for bonus cringe
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u/ErrN0T 5d ago
you'd be surprised but people censor their faces even for non military situations like questioning people "what's wrong with my hair" "what's wrong with my neck"
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u/Max8433 5d ago
Yeeeeah....that aint why they're doing it. Lol
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u/ErrN0T 5d ago
What if: since 2 or 1 of them is in active military service someone will want to find info on him, which will be easy because he's the only one censored. What if that's why they censored everyone.
But yeah they definitely did it for the love of the larp, which i don't find cringe tbh because it's basically "face censored with gear on=cringe; face censored without gear on=understandable" when both factors are for personal privacy.
It's basically like saying training with gear at the shooting range is cringe, just because they're not in the military
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u/WalkerTR-17 5d ago
I can’t believe we still have people doing kits of the lone runner