Operation Red Wings, Fact or Propaganda?

Truth is the Lone Survivor

June 2005, Afghanistan

Marcus Luttrell and three other SEALs are on a recon mission to locate a target in a mountain village. When they are dropped off, the rope from the helicopter is dropped along with them but was improperly disposed of and later found by Taliban living in the village. With the Taliban aware that US forces were in the area search teams were sent into the mountains including goat herders because of the Rules of Engagement making it illegal to shoot locals that are unarmed. The four SEALs are discovered and eventually let the goat herders go who report the SEALs location when they return to the village.

What happens afterwards is questionable although there is video footage of the encounter from the Taliban. The number of Taliban in the area ranges from 8- 200 depending on the source. During the mission Luttrell was separated from his men after falling down the mountain and was severely injured, allegedly. Rescued by a farmer, Luttrell was hidden from the Taliban until he was later rescued by US Army Rangers.

During the initial firefight with the Taliban members of SEAL team 6, later referred to as SEAL team 10, boarded a Chinook helicopter on a rescue mission to save the recon team. As the story goes, the Chinook arrived to the landing zone first before two Apaches that were sent to escort the passenger vehicle. The explanation for the Chinook being alone while trying to unload the 8 navy SEALs was that the Chinook was faster than the Apaches. However, after a quick internet search the Chinook’s top speed is 200 MPH while the Apache has a top speed ranging from 213/ 261 MPH. SO who is lying and why try to push this false information as a fact, AKA lie? Could one of the Apaches have possibly shot down the Chinook on accident killing the SEAL team members that were responsible for the alleged killing of Osama Bin Laden?

In a resent interview on the podcast Team Never Quit, Marcus Luttrell and Rob O’Neil discuss what happened after the events that changed their lives forever. For the sake of this article I will focus on Luttrell and what he revealed about his past.

After Luttrell was rescued he was taken to Rammstein Germany where he had several surgeries and spent time recovering. Following rehabilitation he was set to his 2nd platoon in Ramadi in a leadership position and rarely, if ever, left the base. At the end of his 7 month deployment in Ramadi one of the guys in his platoon tells Luttrell that his book is coming out and it was posted on the internet. Luttrell didn’t know about “his” book and was quickly notified about it by the Navy. At this point Luttrell had Navy appointed lawyers, publishers, agents and members of the Navy that would train him on public relations.

2007, Lone Survivor is released and Luttrell was finished training with Admiral McGuire, learning the book and the story he was assigned to sell. For the next five years Luttrell was busy recruiting for the Navy until the movie Lone Survivor was released in 2013. Even fights to Japan were commissioned by the Navy for Luttrell to sell the book and movie to the Japanese people. Once the movie was released Luttrell was discharged from the Navy and his job was over.

There are several issues with Luttrell’s book and the same problems with O’Neil’s as well. Members of the military are not allowed to sign publishing deals while still enlisted. Even after they are discharged from the military what they write about being in has to be looked over by the branch of the military they were enlisted in to make sure that classified information isn’t being published. Imagine a member of a SEAL team writes about a mission that was never reported on and a terrorist organization learns the name of someone who killed a top leader of their group. The story of Luttrell’s rescue was written by the Navy in the same way that Pat Tillman’s death was written by the Army and I doubt there is little truth to either story. As for O’Neil, Pentagon policy is to never reveal the name of an operator who kills subjects on the job. Why O’Neil’s name was leaked by the White House is obvious. Just like with Luttrell, O’Neil was to do recruiting for the Navy and boost enlistments. Meanwhile, he’s making public appearances and selling a book that he likely didn’t write as well. O’Neil was also still enlisted in the Navy just like Luttrell while promoting his book, I mean recruiting. Usually, under these circumstances, any books written by enlisted men about events that happened during deployments would be the property of the military. For some reason these men were allowed to profit from their deployments while still serving.

What was not addressed in the podcast was the accusation, by Eric Deming, that Luttrell had left his men during the firefight, trying to save his own ass. Because of revelations like this it is impossible to know the truth of what happened and even if Luttrell or O’Neil final told the truth of what happened how could anyone really believe them?

From Army Ranger Nicholas Moore:

"The ODA and Ranger medics took a look at Marcus and assessed his injuries. He had cuts, bumps and bruises. He even had a bullet wound – through his butt! Marcus was sore from having falling down the mountain in his panic, but he was able to move slowly under his own power... Some asked what Marcus was like. The consensus was that he was ungrateful and the most important thing to him seemingly was that he would never live down the day he was rescued by Rangers. We couldn’t help but have questions about the lone survivor of the lost SEAL team, Marcus Luttrell. We had been frustrated by his inability to remember clear details which would have aided the search for his lost comrades. We also questioned the accuracy of his claims for having been caught up in such a large firefight. Intelligence reports pre-insertion had indicated an enemy force of 12–15 enemy fighters but nowhere near the numbers Luttrell would later describe which amounted to a force of 200 fighters. Certainly, we found no forensic evidence of such a large- scale fight over the two-week period we stayed in the area. We did find a lot of 7.62mm WARSAW ammo for AKs and PKMs in a couple of locations, indicating support by fire, but only a handful of 5.56 NATO brass."

Army Ranger Tony Brooks:

"The body of Matthew Axelson would be recovered on July 10, four days after I had left the mountain. It is thought that he may have survived and evaded for a period of time longer than originally reported... What we have learned and all but confirmed on the ground is that the Shah fighting force was likely in the 8–12 men range. Video evidence and the minimal amount of 7.62mm brass found at the scene helped the determination”

From Mathew Cole:

"The SEALs’ target, a local insurgent named Ahmad Shah, had been alerted by the unmistakable noise of a twin-rotor helicopter flying over a steep and narrow canyon. Shah grabbed his small force, as few as seven but no more than ten, and quietly stalked up the ridgeline in the early morning hours as the SEALs settled into a covered observation post... 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. Some of the Red Squadron operators would refuse to shake Luttrell’s hand in the years afterward... In the aftermath of Naval Special Warfare’s deadliest day, Team 6 conducted an internal examination of what went wrong on Red Wings. After several weeks, their conclusion was straightforward: nearly everything."

From Mohammed Gulab and Marines in a Newsweek interview:

"Gulab maintains the SEALs were far from the stealthy, superhuman warriors described in Lone Survivor. They didn't die because they spared civilians, he says; they died because they were easily tracked, quickly outmaneuvered and thoroughly outgunned. The militants, like many others in the area, heard the helicopter drop the Americans on the mountain, Gulab claims. The next morning, they began searching for the SEAL's distinctive footprints. The way Gulab heard it from fellow villagers, when the militants finally found them, the Americans were deliberating about what to do with the goat herders. The insurgents held back. After Luttrell and company freed the locals, the gunmen waited for the right moment to strike.

The battle, Gulab claims, was short-lived. He wasn't on the mountain with Luttrell but says everyone in the village could hear the gunfire. Gulab scoffs at the estimate by Naval Special Warfare Command that 35 Taliban died in the battle. (A Navy spokesman declined to comment on the matter.) But the Afghan claims the villagers and American military personnel who combed the mountain for the bodies of the dead SEALs never found any enemy corpses. (Andrew MacMannis, a former Marine Colonel who helped draw up the mission and was on scene during the search and recovery effort for the dead SEALs and other military personnel, says there were no reports of any enemy casualties."

"[Luttrell's claims] are exaggerated nonsense," says Patrick Kinser, a former Marine infantry officer who participated in Operation Red Wings and read the former SEAL's after action report. "I've been at the location where he was ambushed multiple times. I've had Marines wounded there. I've been in enough firefights to know that when shit hits the fan, it's hard to know how many people are shooting at you. [But] there weren't 35 enemy fighters in all of the Korengal Valley [that day]."

From Ed Darack who was embedded with 2/3rd Marines:

"I immediately ordered Lone Survivor, thinking that the book would provide much more detail than the Post article did. I also contacted all of the members of 2/3 who played roles in Red Wings, asking them if they'd been contacted about providing after action reports or interviews for Lone Survivor. None had. I read the book, thinking that I could possibly use information in it as source material for VICTORY POINT. Information in Lone Survivor, however strayed so substantially from Luttrell's after action report, and so much general information in it was so inaccurate that I could not use it as a source. For instance, the book describes "hundreds" of Taliban, when in Luttrell's after action report, he stated 20 to 35. While analysis of intelligence later revealed a number somewhere in the range of 8 to 10...A few weeks after its release, I learned that Lone Survivor was written in its entirety by Patrick Robinson (a British writer who primarily pens military fiction titles, many of which portray U.S. Navy SEALs), based on unrecorded interviews of Marcus Luttrell by Robinson. The writing was done while Luttrell was subsequently deployed to Iraq. I also read in this article, written by Patrick Robinson himself, that Naval Special Warfare chose him to be the ghost writer, and this choice had been made just weeks after Operation Red Wings had drawn to a close."

Also From Ed Darack in the book Victory Point:

"First, Wood assumed that their reconnaissance and surveillance team would insert by foot, departing from one of the villages in the Pech Valley, such as Watapor, which lay just twelve hours distant for a strong team like Ronin (traveling through the mountains, not on established roads or large trails). But, he learned, they would insert by helicopter, fastroping onto a spot just over a mile from NAIs 2, 3, and 4 on the saddle between Sawtalo Sar and its sister peak just to its south, Gatigal Sar, certainly alerting Shah and his men of the close presence of American forces, Wood thought. The size of the recon team also bothered Wood. NAVSOF planners chose to insert just four men for phase one. The OpsO would also learn that the four had never operated in the Korangal and Sawtalo Sar area. From Kinser’s briefs, Wood knew that each small nook of the Hindu Kush held its own unique challenges, from the standpoints of terrain, weather, and the locals—and the challenges of the Korangal area revealed themselves to be of deadly serious proportions. Wood felt that the best chances of success came with a team of six, as he originally planned with Eggers and Team Ronin. Comms posed another issue; when asked about their communications gear, Tom learned that they would in fact not be carrying a 117, but an MBITR with a “Sat Fill” allowing the small five-watt radio (as opposed to the 117’s twenty watts) to utilize

- SATCOM with encryption. As a backup, the recon team would use an Iridium satellite phone, not a piece of comm gear Tom would approve for any of 2/3’s operations, particularly after hearing Kinser’s experiences with the unit at Camp Blessing, just eight air miles from Sawtalo Sar. Also related to potential communications problems, NAVSOF chose to command their phases of Red Wings from their COC in Bagram. While the SEALs would place liaisons at the JAF COC housing the Maine command—to ensure no “blue on blue” (fratricide) incidents, and to help coordinate any rescue attempt, should one be needed—Wood regarded this as an absolute, and potentially disastrous split of Red Wings’ command and control, not only a bifurcation of the employment of C2, but a physical separation of the two command elements."

"We need to launch the QRF right fucking now!” an exasperated Tom Wood barked to Rob Scott. “We can’t. We don’t have the authority,” the executive officer answered what Wood already knew. “The react order is in the hands of SOE” As the SEAL liaisons rushed to make a series of desperate calls to Bagram and continued attempts to raise the recon team by radio and Iridium, Capuzzi and his Marines of the QRF waited anxiously near a wooden guard shack at the east end of the PRT airstrip. Wood, Long, and Scott burned with frustration while the four men on the ground fought as desperately aind valiantly as any U.S. military unit ever had in the history of American warfare."

"Forty-five minutes after the hard-compromise call, the Marines couldn’t believe that the order to extract the team hadn’t yet been issued. “By now, we could have birds in the air, eyes on the four SEALs, and grids of Shah and his men’s positions—and then have Apaches run close air support, and get the team the fuck outta there,” the OpsO raged. But the Marines could only stand by, hamstrung by the obscenely convoluted command structure. At a time when every second counted, the Marines in the COC felt helpless."