Troop of the Week (Lone Survivor)

Personal Story, there's a place in the far east called N.T.A. (Northern Training Area) and has a jungle obstacle course designed by Lt.Col. (Ret.) Oliver North when he was a Captain in the USMC. This course was for those American badasses that wanted to put their muscle where their mouth was..... and of course, to put their jungle training to the test. I'm not sure how I got dragged into it, but being athletic, does have it downside sometimes. This course had MUD, more mud, water, snakes, leaches, rope bridges, rivers, fast roping down huge cliffs face first, rappelling down sheer mountainside's, upside down, backwards, tubes 50 yards filled with murky snake infested mud water that you had to swim underwater in, a zip line that lasted the length of the Mackinaw bridge, till you landed and your ass cheeks became part of your chest. Every special forces wanted to do it, and try to beat the time. While I was there, we completed the time around 9 hours and 11 minutes. Don't ask me the seconds, I know they keep track of that, those good-ole Marines, but I can't remember. However, we were considered really fast, and executed very well on every maneuver through that jungle course as a team. However, the best time as it was when I was there, was by the SEALS, 8 hours 32 minutes. That's superhuman speed, we were all marathoners, none of them were, but then again, they were SEALS. Average time for most teams for N.T.A. was 12 hours, imagine that.

Seal's in themselves are a breed of men that commands a nature of "shock and awe" that the average citizen could only ponder........till now.... Marcus Luttrell takes you on a voyage where the seas demand you be the best, always focused on what lies ahead, and to suffer the physical and mental wrath that is unheard of. Without getting into too much detail, If you wanna know what it takes to become one of the world's finest badasses.

Marcus takes you there, from Naval boot camp at Great Lakes, Ill., to getting orders to just take a Indoctrination course to be accepted to even go to BUDS (Seal School). If the 450 pushups in one hour were not enough to persuade you to ring the bell, the frigid water of the Pacific Ocean would definitely get your attention. Then after the two week indoctrination course of physical torture, then you find yourself in BUDS school and a week famously named as Hell Week. His memory is of the greatest detail for every week of his training to have that Trident (Seal Insignia) pinned on his uniform and is clearly expressed in this book.

Marcus Luttrell on the far right ready for the next mission.

Operation Redwing starts out like any other mission, detailed maps, surrounding agriculture, a objective/target, preparation and very little support. Marcus, along with his teammates, Axe, Mikey, and Danny take on a platoon sized heavily armed Taliban insurgent force across enemy lines. Without going into much detail, because I really want you all to read this book, I will however give you some tidbits.

Like I said before, this book made me cry. Why you ask? It wasn't the pure focus of every detail of how they crossed over mountains in torrential downpours, canvassing across boulders the size of a Volkswagen, or low-crawling between enemy camps and huts in freezing temperatures. It also wasn't the fact that you just saw some of your closest buddies shot and blood streaming out from every orifice of their body. Neither was it when you seen them physically drained but somehow fought on...without taking a moment to address their own wounds. It wasn't even the fact one of your buddies was blown apart next to you, or a bullet split your other buddies head apart, or the screams, yes the screams of your buddies screaming for your help. It wasn't the fact that you made a choice from political ramifications that put you into this situation. That the Democrats of our own American government have blood on their hands for putting these guys into this situation. Nope it wasn't the eleven lives on top of the three buddies that Marcus went up their that also died that let the tears come streaming. It was the way, and this could be the way Patrick Robinson helped write it, but the way the pages of the text went from a heated battle to the emotions of Marcus's family and what his parents were thinking. It's what you can't control in the military is what will get you all balled up with emotion in a heartbeat. This back-and-forth of emotions from the home-front to the actual harrowing battle high up in the mountains of the Hindu Kush. Then you realize Marcus Luttrell will play a game of "what if's" for the rest of his life for letting some of the Democrat liberal weenies in our government allow him to make a military tactical judgment that killed fourteen of his closest friends. Go get it, I can't begin to tell you all the detail and how well it was written, you'll be flipping pages faster than a one-legged man in a butt kicking contest.