Code Over Country: The Tragedy and Corruption of SEAL Team Six by Matthew Cole

Author:Matthew Cole [Cole, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Published: 2022-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

June 12, 2007—New York, New York

Five days after he was discharged from the Navy, Marcus Luttrell sat on an upholstered chair across from Matt Lauer in the Today Show studio in Rockefeller Center. Luttrell was there to promote Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10, his account of Operation Red Wings. He’d received the Navy Cross for his heroism two years earlier from President George W. Bush, a fellow Texan. Now he was ready for a media blitz to sell the book.

The book was almost an immediate success, becoming that summer’s blockbuster nonfiction title: it remained number one on the New York Times bestseller list for much of the summer and would spend twenty-five weeks on the list that year. In the midst of two unwinnable wars, Luttrell and his coauthor, novelist Patrick Robinson, had delivered to the public what they wanted: an unambiguous story of survival and heroics. During the promotional campaign, Luttrell told the New York Times that he wrote the book because “[p]eople were writing these stories, and anything they didn’t know how it happened, they just made it up.”17

The book wasn’t just a bestseller, it redefined a genre. Part tragedy and part political rant, it would serve as a template for future SEAL bestsellers. It painted the War on Terror in stark black-and-white terms, decrying the Geneva Conventions and the uproar over the torture of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 as nothing more than humiliation, which did “not ring my personal alarm bell.”18 But the book was wildly misleading and inaccurate, a nearly fictionalized version of what transpired near the top of Sawtalo Sar (Luttrell’s coauthor was a novelist who wrote war fiction). Luttrell described Ahmad Shah as “one of Osama bin Laden’s closest associates,” and “the kind of terrorist who would like nothing better than to mastermind a new attack on the US mainland,” despite any evidence the Afghan had any connections to al Qaeda, let alone to its leader.19 When Shah’s men started their attack, Luttrell wrote, the SEAL spotted “between eighty and a hundred heavily armed Taliban warriors, each one of them with an AK-47 pointing downward.”20 Luttrell’s account described “140 men minimum” overwhelming his four-man reconnaissance team, a claim he would repeat over and over again in public interviews and speeches.21 The number fluctuated between 80 and 200 fighters, numbers that appeared to add to the miraculous nature of his escape and survival. In Luttrell’s account, the SEALs had killed “fifty or more” of Shah’s men.22 A gleaming gold Navy SEAL Trident emblazoned the book’s cover. The public could be forgiven for believing that the Navy had certified Luttrell’s account. Indeed, Naval Special Warfare Command said next to nothing, their silence a tacit confirmation of Luttrell’s story.

The men from Red Squadron and the rest of SEAL Team 6, however, knew different. “It was very clear that it was bullshit,” said the former Red operator who helped search for Luttrell in the Korengal Valley.

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