Isegoria

The Lone Survivor movie is one-third SEAL training, one-third grim Black Hawk Down-style firefight, and one-third Hollywood action.

The Lone Survivor book is one-third SEAL training, one-third grim Black Hawk Down-style firefight, and one-third not-at-all Hollywood inaction.

In that first third, Luttrell recalls Captain Joe Maguire speaking to his class of SEAL hopefuls:

First of all, I do not want you to give in to the pressure of the moment. Whenever you’re hurting bad, just hang in there. Finish the day. Then, if you’re still feeling bad, think about it long and hard before you decide to quit. Second, take it one day at a time. One evolution at a time.

Don’t let your thoughts run away with you, don’t start planning to bail out because you’re worried about the future and how much you can take. Don’t look ahead to the pain. Just get through the day, and there’s a wonderful career ahead of you.

I have to wonder if such troops, selected for zero neuroticism, are prone to a certain kind of hubris.

Also, I have to wonder if selecting elite troops based on their ability to withstand endless push-ups, pull-ups, log-carrying, and flutter-kicks in cold water is really selecting the right candidates and not filtering out good candidates.

As in the movie, the SEAL team clearly has no plan for dealing with semi-hostile civilians. Luttrell is disgusted by “liberal journalists” and seems to think that killing hostile civilians should be fine, but the lawyers back home would have them in prison for doing what they clearly had to do. Since they can’t kill the goatherds who stumble on their positions, they simply let them go.

How is there no standard operating procedure for this? No one has zip ties or paracord? And no one speaks the language?

The SEALs don’t seem so elite when they have no plan for this contingency. Luttrell in particular doesn’t seem so elite when he struggles on the mountain, when he’s amazed by how quiet the locals are, when he doesn’t understand why his local allies panic when he flashes the light on his watch in the pitch dark, when he doesn’t understand the local traditions about hospitality, etc.

The one thing the SEALs do seem to have is fortitude.

Mark Warren of Esquire considers C.J. Chivers the best war reporter in a generation:

The forces of Libyan president Muammar Qaddafi had been firing high-explosive ordnance into the city of Misurata for weeks — they’d been shooting tank rounds and they’d been firing rockets. Barrage after barrage. And lots of mortars. And among the 120mm mortars they had been firing were Spanish-made rounds that were a clustering munition that had never been seen in combat before. This was a serious problem, because we now know that the Spaniards had sold the mortars to the Qaddafi government just as Spain was preparing to join the international convention that banned them.

We know this because of the work of C.?J. Chivers of The New York Times, also a frequent contributor to Esquire, whose expertise in ballistics and battlefield tactics — and nearly unprecedented experience reporting from war zones — has made him the most important war correspondent of his time. Chivers suspected that Qaddafi was using the Spanish mortars, and it was when he went to prove it that a NATO jet on a bombing run tried to kill him.

There’s much more, including these nuggets:

Chivers is disciplined about when and why he won’t wear his gear. Besides his desire to live, he also feels ethically bound to protect himself because being wounded meant that, as he says, a doctor or a bunch of nurses and an ambulance driver were all helping you instead of helping someone else. It is a rule when you’re covering a war zone, you try to not go into the casualty stream and further clog it up.

Another rule is that if you’re with someone who wants to leave, then you leave. If you’re with another journalist and you’re getting shot at, and he feels in his gut that it’s time to get out of there, you go.