Service: A Navy SEAL at War

by Marcus Luttrell

  I give the same kind of grief to my brother, because he became a SEAL just fifteen months after me. In truth, because my sins preceded him there, he had a harder time at Coronado than I did. When he showed up to begin BUD/S, he was standing on the sidewalk when a black Chevy Suburban screeched to a halt next to him. A bunch of instructors piled out, and one of them asked, “Are you the other Luttrell?” His affirmative reply brought dark promises of misery and hellfire ahead, and they pretty much made good on them during his twenty-one weeks on the Strand.

  No matter how good a SEAL might become, there’s always someone with more seniority, experience, or skill nearby to bring him back to earth. At the SEAL reunions I go to, the World War II UDT swimmers will tell the Korean War veterans, “Hey, new guy, go get me a beer.” The Korean War guys say the same to the Vietnam guys, all the way down the line. Once I was pushing through a crowded hospitality room when I bumped into a frog who was a lot shorter than me—because he was seated in a wheelchair. The first two syllables of an apology weren’t out of my mouth before he was laying into me with You mother this and I’ll whip your sorry that. I noticed he was wearing a T-shirt printed with the words BUD/S CLASS 1. This man was nobody’s pushover. He was having a load of fun with me. Everyone around him was howling in appreciation. In the teams, you’re always a new guy to somebody. That’s how we keep each other honest. And if you stick around the teams long enough, well, you’re asking for a lesson in humility, because at some point, in some school, or a new command you’re going to be nobody all over again.

  On Flag Day of 2011, I visited Mr. Burgin at his house in Lancaster, south of Dallas. The town’s tree-shaded streets were lined with red, white, and blue. He greeted me at the door of the home he’s occupied since 1965. On the wall of his living room, he showed me a photo of his brother, J. D., killed by German artillery fire in Alsace-Lorraine in 1944, when he was eighteen. There was that photo from Peleliu, too, showing eighty-five weathered veterans of that battle, including Mr. Burgin, shirtless and forty pounds lighter than when he arrived. He shook his last bout of malaria in 1947, after he came home, and was happy never to talk about it again. The media in his day had little interest in Peleliu. Everyone expected it to be a sideshow, so it took a while for history to give it its due. That suited Mr. Burgin. He was strong and silent about it, kind of like his hero, John Wayne, who has a photographic shrine of his own farther down the hallway.

  Mr. Burgin didn’t talk about his service until 1980, when his First Marine Division buddies found him and made sure he went to Indianapolis that year. Twenty men from the K/3/5 were there. He knew them all, and had done foxhole duty with a few of them. “Hey, Burgin, do you remember…” they would ask. At first, he usually didn’t. “Well, hell, you ought to. You were there,” they would say. And gradually, and then faster, the memories returned. Soon he was talking freely, and reconnecting with everything he went through in the Pacific.

  In 1991, at a reunion in Minneapolis, he decided to take part in a documentary project on the battle for Peleliu. The experience convinced him that the story should be remembered more widely. He feels to this day that history isn’t taught anymore; how else to explain why a fight that took eighteen hundred American lives remains so obscure?

  Mr. Burgin’s effort to reverse that state of affairs led to his involvement in the HBO miniseries The Pacific, in which his story is told over the course of several episodes. The filmmakers changed some of the characters (and some history), but he says they got the big things right. The only mistake that bothers him is seeing the actor playing him wearing the wrong rank insignia on his shoulder. He’s shown as a private first class. There’s only one man in the world, of course, who can appreciate what he had to go through to get his corporal’s second stripe.

  He went through it the night he killed his first enemy soldier. On Cape Gloucester, he faced a banzai charge without a rifle. Since he was a mortarman, his main job was hauling around a heavy baseplate for the mortar. As a Japanese soldier rushed him, he pulled his .45 and caught him in the chest from ten strides away. Only one or two of the enemy escaped. “That attack broke me in right away,” he said.

  He went through it on another night, on Peleliu, when he heard scuffling a short distance away, a few men down the line. An enemy soldier had jumped on top of one of his teammates while he was sleeping. There was grunting, and then a drawn-out scream. The awakened Marine had reached up, gouged the eyes of the Japanese soldier, and as that soldier fell back, the Marine rose, grabbed him by the neck and seat of the pants, and flung him off a cliff. “I heard that Jap screaming all the way down, from the second his eyes were gouged till he hit bottom,” Mr. Burgin said. “I’ve never heard such a bloodcurdling sound in my life,” he said.

  He went through it again a few days later, while assaulting a cluster of craggy hillocks known as the Five Sisters. Mr. Burgin was sickened to find the bodies of a four-man Marine recon team wedged in among some rocks.

  These were the things—among many—that pushed him up the ranks. And these were the things that closed up the years between us. When he told the Five Sisters story, I couldn’t help but think of my teammates from Operation Redwing. He and I share much in common, including the experience of fighting in confined spaces and harsh terrain. Later on, the death of his skipper, Captain Andrew A. “Ack-Ack” Haldane, and his platoon leader, a popular, soft-spoken mustang first lieutenant named Edward A. “Hillbilly” Jones, hit home with me as well. In life-or-death situations, Mr. Burgin faced moments of moral compromise that I could relate to. Things you can’t imagine happen to you under fire in the dark. I read about a few of them in his book, Islands of the Damned, and I didn’t need him to explain the details. His war ran on amphibious tractors and DUKWs; mine ran on Black Hawks and Humvees. But the sensations, the shocks to the system, and the screams don’t change. The big things never do. “It’s impossible to imagine the look and smell of a battlefield if you’ve never been on one, and impossible to forget if you have,” he said. Any soldier of any war knows this.

  In San Antonio, in 2010, I joined R. V. Burgin in the proud company of his unit. I saw the continuous thread of gallantry that runs from his day to the present. The Fifth Marines have a glittering battle history, and K Company’s contribution to it was significant. In 1967, the K/3/5 was deployed to the Que Son Valley in Vietnam, thirty miles south of Da Nang. From April through September, they and other outfits from the Fifth Marines took on North Vietnamese Army forces holding fortified positions along a highway known as Route 534. In May, during the first Operation Union, they assaulted a well-defended hill and became pinned down by heavy fire. The gunnery sergeant was killed, and K Company’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Robert O. Tilley, was badly wounded. A lance corporal attached as a forward air controller, Christopher K. Mosher, ran toward the front and put himself in an exposed position for five hours, directing air strikes. Finally wounded in the back by mortar shrapnel, he was evacuated, never to walk again. He was awarded the Navy Cross for his valor.

  Three times during those brutal months, K Company took casualties bad enough to knock it off the line. Each time, it came back from combat-ineffective status. In Operation Adair, a five-day operation fought in June, it suffered nine KIA from just two platoons, which have about forty men apiece. The officer who replaced Lieutenant Tilley, Captain Joseph Tenney, was hit in back of the head and evacuated. Declared combat-ineffective once again, the K/3/5 returned in September to take part in another major operation. Back in command, Captain Tenney earned a Silver Star.

  By the end of those six months, the Marines in the valley, though outnumbered in every fight, had destroyed most of the NVA division facing them. Six members of the K/3/5 received Silver Stars. But the triumph came at a high price: from April to December of 1967, the North Vietnamese boasted of killing more Americans in the Que Son Valley than anywhere else. The Marines soon began calling Road 534 the Road of Ten Thousand Pains, a phrase taken from Homer’s Iliad.

&
nbsp; At the Rio Rio Cantina in San Antonio the night I met up with him and his unit, R. V. Burgin, the anchor of the Old Breed, held court and served as emcee. He had been the group’s treasurer for twenty-one years, taking care of the funds that paid for Marine Corps monuments that stand today on Peleliu and Okinawa. Just as Mr. Burgin looked up to his senior enlisted leadership—hard veterans of Guadalcanal, such as his first sergeant, Mo Darsey, or his sergeant, Johnny Marmet—the Vietnam generation looked up to him. The Marines who enlisted to fight in Vietnam didn’t need a history book to tell them what they’re all about. They had the World War II generation to look back to—and they did. “We never qualified to carry these guys’ mess gear,” said Harvey Newton, who served in the K/3/5 as a nineteen-year-old lance corporal in Vietnam.

  I don’t endorse Mr. Newton’s modesty, because the legacy of K Company’s valor got a new chapter in Vietnam, and it’s gotten one in our time as well. A Marine of my generation who served with the K/3/5, my friend Jeremiah Workman—a mortarman just like Mr. Burgin—received a Navy Cross for his actions during the Battle of Fallujah in December 2004. In April 2011, when Third Battalion returned from Helmand Province, Afghanistan, Jeremiah’s company had taken record casualties for a Marine Corps unit its size on a single deployment in the modern era: twenty-five KIA and another 140 wounded, including more than a dozen amputees. In spite of that bloody record, its instances of post-traumatic stress have been almost nil, largely thanks to the way the families of the veterans have circled up and looked after each other back at Camp Pendleton.

  It takes that kind of close brotherhood to get by. I’ll never forget how the brotherhood circled around the Tumilson family in Rockford, Iowa. The SEAL family held close to them, ensuring JT isn’t forgotten. At the funeral, the presiding pastor recited from Psalm 18:

  He made my feet like the feet of a deer and set me secure on the heights.

  He trains my hands for war, so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze.

  You have given me the shield of your salvation, and your right hand supported me, and your gentleness made me great.

  You gave a wide place for my steps under me, and my feet did not slip.

  I pursued my enemies and overtook them, and did not turn back till they were consumed.

  This might be the Bible’s most powerful call to military service. Those of us who are forged in that vision can relate to the way R. V. Burgin sums up his service: “What sticks with me now is not so much the pain and terror and sorrow of the war, though I remember that well enough. What really sticks with me is the honor I had of defending my country, and of serving in the company of these men.”

  I see it all as a single piece of fabric. Americans should never forget that the founders of this country, like all who have served her in uniform, were willing to die defending everything its flag represents. It’s so easy to get lost in the controversies that divide us. But I believe, no matter what our race, religion, or beliefs may be, that Americans should be able to come together to keep our country rooted in what made it great: a land of opportunity, a place where people can make something of themselves, limited only by their imaginations and willingness to work hard; a country where we all can come together, whatever our differences, for the greater good; a country of hands up, not handouts, where we try to live by the meaning of the words “Love thy neighbor,” and put as much effort into helping others as we do helping ourselves. By doing those things, we can continue to live up to the idea of One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

  Epilogue

  The Flaming Ferris Wheel Spins

  Today, Boss is still working in a classified capacity on a team that will be bringing hell to terrorists worldwide. He recently got hold of the original drawings that JT had used as a model for the elaborate Oriental carp design he had on his right arm. As I write this, Boss is finishing the last installment of the painful, eighteen-hour process to inscribe this work of everlasting art into his left arm. “Art, life, and remembrance of living through pain and loss,” Boss calls it. The ultimate tribute to a brother, fallen but not forgotten.

  Prior to August 6, 2011, I was looking forward to nothing more than seeing Morgan return to Texas. His bags were just about packed in Virginia Beach as he finished his med boards. He was playing out time, waiting for his exit letter from the Navy. He was planning to shift gears, maybe go to graduate school, or even run for political office. He was also going to get busy working with me on the Lone Survivor Foundation.

  But when JT, Matt Mills, Trey Vaughn and all the others went down, Morgan had a change of heart. It was an immediate decision on his part, though he didn’t tell me about it for a few weeks. He didn’t want to give me any distractions as we prepared to celebrate JT’s life in Iowa. Morgan knew right away what he needed to do: he was staying in the teams and going back for another deployment, in honor of his fallen brothers.

  Morgan went to his command, pulled his retirement papers, and told them he wanted to become operational again. He’s in the training cycle now and will be serving back in the Sandbox by the time this book is published. It will be his tenth combat tour. And he wasn’t the only frog to walk that path after this latest tragedy hit our community.

  The war in Afghanistan may end someday, as the war in Iraq officially has. We’ll see headlines about the drawdown of conventional forces, leaving all the problems to the locals to deal with. For our special operations forces, however, employment opportunities downrange will continue to be plentiful—and more dangerous, after the Army and Marine Corps aren’t around to secure the areas we operate in.

  It’s hard for me to express what all this means to me. Maybe words just can’t say the things that come so deeply from the heart. It’s a feeling that comes from experience, from blood, sweat, and mourning. There are many reasons why my military service has meant so much to me—and to those who have come before me and those who are yet to deploy. It isn’t the danger by itself. It’s the brotherhood, the bonds you form with people who, like you, are willing to give everything away for a greater good. The brotherhood carries on, and in this way, and in ways you’ll never read about, the flaming Ferris wheel really does continue to spin.

  The urge to serve something larger than myself drew me into the military, and serving for nine years has taught me a few things. But service in the military isn’t the only way to go. Now that I’m out of uniform, I see that my deployments were only the beginning, a workup for whatever the rest of my years call me to do. You can serve your family, and put their needs in front of yours. You can do the same thing in your community, your town, and your city. I think all of us who serve—in any type of uniform—can arrive at this broader view of service faster than most other people, because of what we go through.

  Service is selflessness—the opposite of the lifestyle that we see so much of in America today. The things that entertain us don’t often lift us up, or show us as the people we can rise up to become. The people who appear in this book—and others who did things I can’t talk about—are my role models. They quietly live out the idea expressed in the Bible (John 15:13): “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

  But you don’t have to be a Christian, or even particularly religious, to serve. You just have to be willing to understand your place and put yourself at the end of the line. Still, my faith has helped me toward a deeper understanding of what service really means. You do what’s expected of you, and more. You look after others, and put their welfare ahead of your own. You don’t worry about the big purpose of it all—it’s beyond your pay grade. But if you do the small things right long enough, you might find yourself coming out the other side having done something important.

  It’s an evolution you follow, a tour on the great Ferris wheel, which doesn’t have to burn. It never stops turning until the day you take your last breath. And you hope that by the time you leave this earth, it will be a better place than it was when you got here
. The causes you’ve served in your life will have meant something. Someone will have picked up on your work, run with a legacy you left behind, and used it to put his or her own stamp on the world.

  All I can really tell you after walking this particular path is that I’m proud to have served my country. I know that part of me will always bleed with the teams, and that my time in uniform, which at the moment seems so long, has been just a short chapter in a far longer book, and brief preparation for what the future holds.

  Thank you, God, for all these days.

  SEALs and Underwater

  Demolition Team Members

  Killed in Action, 1943–Present

  Pirro, Carmon F. December 30, 1943 Anzio

  Donnell, John Gerald January 30, 1944 Anzio

  Olson, Richard Roderick February 4, 1944 Unknown

  Tascillo, Matteo February 17, 1944 Marshall Islands

  Abbott, George L. June 6, 1944 Normandy

  Alexander, Henry Richard June 6, 1944 Normandy

  Bussell, John Edward June 6, 1944 Normandy

  Cook, John William June 6, 1944 Normandy

  DeGregorio, Carmine June 6, 1944 Normandy

  Demmer, Peter Mathew June 6, 1944 Normandy

  Dillon, Thomas Justin June 6, 1944 Normandy

  Dombek, Walter Joseph June 6, 1944 Normandy

  Doran, William Robert June 6, 1944 Normandy

  Drew, Elmer Malcolm June 6, 1944 Normandy

  Duncan, Harold E. June 6, 1944 Normandy

  Fabich, Henry Samuel June 6, 1944 Normandy