First there was Operation Red Wings, which as I have stated I believe to have been cocky, arrogant, chaotic, ill-conceived, ill-planned, badly executed, badly supported, poorly coupled with any other branch of the service, and ultimately bad for morale.

Next, there is this from The New York Times.

Britt Slabinski could hear the bullets ricochet off the rocks in the darkness. It was the first firefight for his six-man reconnaissance unit from SEAL Team 6, and it was outnumbered, outgunned and taking casualties on an Afghan mountaintop.

A half-dozen feet or so to his right, John Chapman, an Air Force technical sergeant acting as the unit’s radioman, lay wounded in the snow. Mr. Slabinski, a senior chief petty officer, could see through his night-vision goggles an aiming laser from Sergeant Chapman’s rifle rising and falling with his breathing, a sign he was alive.

Then another of the Americans was struck in a furious exchange of grenades and machine-gun fire, and the chief realized that his team had to get off the peak immediately.

He looked back over at Sergeant Chapman. The laser was no longer moving, Chief Slabinski recalls, though he was not close enough to check the airman’s pulse. Chased by bullets that hit a second SEAL in the leg, the chief said, he crawled on top of the sergeant but could not detect any response, so he slid down the mountain face with the other men. When they reached temporary cover, one asked: “Where’s John? Where’s Chappy?” Chief Slabinski responded, “He’s dead.”

Now, more than 14 years after that brutal fight, in which seven Americans ultimately died, the Air Force says that Chief Slabinski was wrong — and that Sergeant Chapman not only was alive, but also fought on alone for more than an hour after the SEALs had retreated. The Air Force secretary is pushing for a Medal of Honor, the military’s highest award, after new technology used in an examination of videos from aircraft flying overhead helped officials conclude that the sergeant had killed two fighters with Al Qaeda — one in hand-to-hand combat — before dying in an attempt to protect arriving reinforcements.

Good Lord!  Whatever happened to no man left behind?  This is really dark, and is surely a blight on their reputation, with the reputation questionable in my opinion anyway.

Now there is something that apparently I’m late to, perhaps because I wasn’t watching closely enough.  It pertains to Marcus Luttrell.

If Marcus doesn’t understand the problem with universal background checks, then he is part of the problem rather than the solution.  If he can’t fathom an overextended federal executive infringing on God-given rights and liberties, then he needs to study history and philosophy before opening his mouth again.  This is the problem with making more of military heroism than is there.  He is a military hero.  He isn’t a political philosopher, theologian or veteran of the war of independence (which began over gun control as much as anything else).

Why am I not feeling the love for the Navy SEALs?

Since it isn’t my story, I won’t wax on about the story Marcus Luttrell wanted to tell about his brothers in Operation Red Wings.

But it is the most intense movie I have ever seen.  By the end of the movie I was left virtually breathless and teary eyed.  In an age of horrible movies from Hollywood, this one is well worth the money.

Two sidebar notes on the movie.  First, the cinematography is some of the best and most intense I have ever experienced.  You are quite literally there.  The initial five minutes or so of the close action scenes and rapid camera movement took some getting used to, but after that, it became obvious what the producers and directors were doing.

Second, the movie is very close to what Marcus intended and what he wrote in the book.  There is a bit of Hollywood drama introduced into the story, but not much, and not significant.

Review: I cannot tell the story – Marcus has to.  It is his to tell, and he does his brothers proud with this movie.  It will take its place alongside the best war movies, and perhaps it is the very best of all time.  Go see it.