Real life 'Lone Survivor' Navy SEAL

Real life 'Lone Survivor' and Mark Wahlberg discuss the cost and depiction of war
Marcus Luttrell's story makes for a riveting account but is it an Oscar player?
HitFix
BY KRISTOPHER TAPLEY
THURSDAY, OCT 31, 2013

In June of 2005, during a firefight with Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan that would claim the lives of three of his fellow Navy SEALs, Petty Officer First Class Marcus Luttrell broke his back. He broke his pelvis. He tore out his shoulder, bit his tongue in half and crushed his hand. He sustained facial bone damage, he was shot "through and through" his quads and his calves, his body was riddled with shrapnel from his ankles to his eyes…and he lived to tell the tale.

That tale was captured on the page in his 2007 memoir "Lone Survivor" and it has now been captured on the big screen by director Peter Berg with Mark Wahlberg in the starring role as Luttrell. A riveting depiction of the mission, called Operation Red Wings, the film eschews traditional structure and launches its players into the heart of darkness quickly before tearing through a 33-minute recreation of the firefight itself that recalls such nail-biting sequences as those captured by Steven Spielberg in "Saving Private Ryan" or Ridley Scott in "Black Hawk Down."

At a post-screening Q and A tonight moderated by journalist Tina Brown, Luttrell, of course, received a standing ovation, his loyal golden retriever at his side. He told the audience matter-of-factly, completely unmoved by the Hollywood machine, about his ordeal and the toll it took. "I died up on that mountain," Wahlberg says in voiceover as the film's final moments flicker on the screen, and indeed, it was clear hearing Luttrell speak that he lost a bit of himself that day.

"The hardest part wasn't getting back on the horse, so to speak, and going back into combat," Luttrell, who after recuperating from his Afghanistan tour turned right around and re-deployed for Iraq, said. "That's what we're trained for. I didn't have any mental problems. The only problem I had was when they released me, when I couldn't do the job anymore. I think it was more along the lines of I was just bored. I missed the adrenaline and missed my buddies. That was the hardest hurdle to overcome. But my wife, I'm blessed to have her. She keeps me out of the shadows."

During the mission, Luttrell and four of his comrades (played by Taylor Kitsch, Ben Foster and Emile Hirsch in the film) were discovered during a reconnaissance mission by local Taliban-loyal goat herders. With a compromised mission and a moral conundrum, the decision was made to free the locals and fall back while trying to re-establish communications with their base at Bagram Airfield. And Luttrell has plainly said that if he had the whole thing to do over again, he would have made a different decision.

"He'd much rather have been Leavenworth [prison], with his brothers alive," Wahlberg said during the Q and A. That's in fact part of the moral territory the film is attempting to navigate. "'SEALs kill kids,' that's the CNN headline," Wahlberg's Luttrell pleads in the film. But war changes all the rules.
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