Marcus Luttrell – Service: A Navy Seal At War (Little Brown)

On a June night in 2005, on the mountainous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan the world changed forever for Navy Seal, Marcus Luttrell. As the best laid plans of Operation Redwing to track and capture a notorious al Qaeda leader came unglued, leaving Luttrell and his team surrounded by a heavily armed force and ending with his teammates dead and Luttrell severely injured by a rocket propelled grenade and the lone survivor.

Luttrell told the story of that horrific battle and that of his mates in the bestseller Lone Survivor.

How does a badly injured Navy Seal respond to the loss of his entire team and serious injury? By dusting himself off, returning to crushing training schedule and flinging himself back into battle; this time in the al Qaeda hot bed, Ramadi in the Anbar Province.

In Service: A Navy Seal at War, Luttrell details the process he went through to recover from not only his bodily injuries, but the scars left by the loss of his Seal team. In many ways, Luttrell’s return, not only from that ill-fated mountain side but in many ways to life is due to the dedicated members of his military ‘family”.

You have to wonder what it is that drives these brave individuals to subject themselves to the torturous training, the unrelenting pace of military operations and the constant position as the tip of America’s military spear. The only answer is that these are a special breed of human beings, cut from a different cloth and called to a higher purpose.

Luttrell takes inside the pre-planning, staging and execution of a steady stream of operations and those operators who risk life and limb every time they step into battle. As the plan for the battle for Ramadi evolved, Luttrell talks extensively about the real change of mindset when it comes to the approach of involving the Iraqi people in the process of the battle for and protection of their own freedom.

Luttrell’s insights into the warrior’s mindset and the conversion of Iraqi religious and sectional leaders from supporting terrorists to supporting freedom. You can read between the lines, the internal struggle that Luttrell subjected himself to, as he went through a life transition.