Lone survivor: the eyewitness account of Operation Redwing and the lost heroes of SEAL team 10 (6 page)

He’s a Navy SEAL as well, a little behind me in rank, because I joined first. But he still assumes a loose command whenever we’re together. And that’s pretty often, since we share a house in Coronado, California, hard by the SEAL teams.

Anyway, there’s two or three houses on our Texas property, the main one being a single-story stone ranch surrounded by a large country garden, which contains one little plantation for corn and another couple for vegetables. All around us, just about as far as you can see in any direction, there’s pasture, studded with huge oak trees and grazing animals. It’s a peaceful place for a God-fearing family.

Right from kids, Morgan and I were brought up to believe in the Lord. We weren’t compelled to go to church or anything, and to this day the family are not churchgoers. In fact, I’m the only one who does go to church on a somewhat regular basis. On Sunday mornings when I’m home, I drive over to the Catholic church, where people know me. I was not baptized a Catholic, but it suits me, its beliefs and doctrines sit easily with me. Since I was young, I have always been able to recite the Twenty-third Psalm and several others from beginning to end.

Also, I thought the late Pope John Paul was the holiest man in the world, an uncompromising Vicar of Christ, a man whose guidelines were unshakable. Tough old guy, John Paul. A lot too tough for the Russians. I’ve always thought if he hadn’t been a vicar, he’d have made a good Navy SEAL.

Down home, in our quiet backwoods area, it looks like an untroubled life. There are a few minor irritants, most of those being snakes. However, Dad taught us how to deal with them long ago, especially the coral snakes and those copperhead vipers. There’s also rattlesnakes, eastern diamondbacks, and king snakes, which eat the others. In the local lake you can find the occasional water moccasin, and he is one mean little sonofabitch. He’ll chase you, and while I don’t much like ’em, I’m not scared of them. Morgan goes after them as a sport, likes to hustle ’em up, keep ’em alert.

A mile or so up the road from us, there’s a mighty herd of Texas longhorns. Beyond the house there’s a half dozen paddocks for my mom’s horses, some of them belonging to her, others boarders from other people.

People send horses to her for her near-mystical power to bring sick or weak animals back to full fighting form. No one knows how she does it. She’s plainly a horse whisperer. But she has some special ways of feeding them, including, for a certain type of ailing racehorse, some kind of a seaweed concoction she swears to God can turn a cow pony into Secretariat. Sorry, Mom. Didn’t mean that. Just joking.

Seriously, Holly Luttrell is a brilliant horsewoman. And she does turn horses that seem very poorly into gleaming, healthy runners again. I guess that’s why those horses keep on coming. She can only cope with about ten at a time, and she’s out there in the barn at five every morning looking after them. If you take the time, you can see the effect she has on them, the very obvious results of her very obvious skills.

My mom’s a seventh-generation Texan, although she did once immigrate to New York City. Around here, that’s like moving to Shanghai, but Mom has always been a rather glamorous blonde and she wanted to make a career as an air stewardess. Didn’t last long, though. She was back in the big country of East Texas real quick, raising horses. Like all of us, she feels Texas is a part of her spirit. It’s in mine, in Dad’s, and it sure as hell is the very essence of Morgan.

None of us would live anywhere else. We’re right at home down here, with people we have known and trusted for many years. There’s no one like Texans for a spirit of expansiveness, optimism, friendship, and decency. I realize that might not be acceptable to everyone, but that’s how it seems to us. We’re out of place anywhere else. It’s no good pretending otherwise.

That might mean we just get real homesick quicker than other people. But I will come back to live here when I’m finished in the military. And I intend, sometime, to die here. Hardly a day goes by, wherever I am in the world, when I don’t think of our little ranch and my huge circle of family and friends, of having a beer on the front porch and telling tall stories full of facts, some of ’em true, all of ’em funny.

So while I’m on the subject I’ll explain how a farm boy from the backwoods of East Texas came to be made a petty officer first class and a team leader in the U.S. Navy SEALs.

The short explanation is probably talent, but I don’t have any more of that than the next guy. In fact, my natural-born assets are very average. I’m pretty big, which was an accident of birth. I’m pretty strong, because a lot of other people took a lot of trouble training me, and I’m unbelievably determined, because when you’re as naturally ungifted as I am, you have to keep driving forward, right?

I’ll outwork anyone. I’ll just go on and on until the dust clears. Then I’m usually the only one left standing. As an athlete, I’m not very fast, but I’m kind of sharp. I know where to be, I’m good at anticipating things, and I guess that’s why I was a halfway decent sportsman.

Give me a golf ball and I can hit that sucker a country mile. That’s because golf is a game that requires practice, practice, and more practice. That’s my brand of doggedness. I can do that. I play to a reasonable handicap, although I wasn’t born a Ben Hogan or anything. But Ben came from Texas like me. We were born about ninety-four miles apart, and in my country that’s the equivalent of a sand wedge. Ben, of course, was known to practice more than any other golfer who had ever lived. Must be something in the water.

I was born in Houston but raised up near the Oklahoma border. My parents, David and Holly Luttrell, owned a fair-sized horse farm, about 1,200 acres at one time. We had 125 head up there, mostly Thoroughbreds and quarter horses. My mom ran the breeding programs, and Dad took charge of the racing and sales operation.

Morgan and I were brought up with horses, feeding, watering, cleaning out the barns, riding. Most every weekend we’d go in the horse van to the races. We were just kids at the time, and both our parents were excellent riders, especially Mom. That’s how we learned. We worked the ranch, mended fences, swinging sledgehammers when we were about nine years old. We loaded the bales into the loft, worked like adults from a young age. Dad insisted on that. And for a lot of years, the operation did very well.

At the time, Texas itself was in a boom-time hog heaven. Out in West Texas, where the oil drillers and everyone surrounding them were becoming multimillionaires, the price of oil went up 800 percent between 1973 and 1981. I was born in 1975, before that wave even started to crest, and I have to say the Luttrell family was riding high.

It was nothing for my dad to breed a good-looking horse from a $5,000 stallion and sell the yearling for $40,000. He did it all the time. And my mom was a pure genius at improving a horse, buying it cheap and devoting months of tender loving care and brilliant feeding to produce a young runner worth eight times what she paid.

And breeding horses was precisely the right line to be in. Horses were right up there with Rolex watches, Rolls-Royces, Learjets, Gulfstream 1s, palaces rather than regular houses, and boats, damn great boats. Office space was at a premium all over the state, and massive new high-rise blocks were under construction. Retail spending was at an all-time high.
Racehorses, beautiful. Give me six. Six fast ones, Mr. Luttrell. That way I’ll win some races.

That oil money just washed right off, and people were making fortunes in anything that smacked of luxury, anything to feed the egos of the oil guys, who were spending and borrowing money at a rate never seen before or since.

It wasn’t anything for banks to make loans of more than $100 million to oil explorers and producers. At one time there were 4,500 oil rigs running in the U.S.A., most of them in Texas. Credit? That was easy. Banks would lend you a million bucks without batting an eye.

Listen, I was only a kid at the time, but my family and I lived through the trauma to come, and, boy, I’ve done some serious reading about it since. And in a way, I’m glad I lived through it, because it taught me to be careful, to earn my money and invest it, get it somewhere secure.

And it taught me to think very carefully about the element of luck, when it’s running, and how to keep your life under control. I have long since worked out that when the crash came in Texas, its effects were magnified a thousandfold, because the guys in the oil industry sincerely believed money had nothing to do with luck. They thought their prosperity came from their own sheer brilliance.

No one gave much consideration to the world oil market being controlled in the Middle East by Muslims. Everything that happened had its roots in Arabia, assisted by President Carter’s energy policy and the fact that when I was five years old the price per barrel of crude was $40.

The crash, when it came, was caused by the oil embargo and the Iranian revolution, when the ayatollah took over from the shah. The key to it was geopolitical. And Texas could only stand and watch helplessly as the oil glut manifested itself and the price per barrel began to slide downward to an ultimate low of around $9.

That was in 1986, when I was not quite ten. In the meantime, the giant First National Bank of Midland, Texas, collapsed, judged insolvent by government financial inspectors. That was one huge bank to go belly-up, and the ripple effect was statewide. An era of reckless spending and investing was over. Guys building palaces were forced to sell at a loss. You couldn’t give away a luxury boat, and Rolls-Royce dealers darned near went out of business.

Along with the commercial giants felled by the oil crash went the horse farm of David and Holly Luttrell. Hard-running colts and mares, which Dad had valued at $35,000 to $40,000, were suddenly worth $5,000, less than they cost to raise. My family lost everything, including our house.

But my dad’s a resilient man, tough and determined. And he fought back, with a smaller ranch and the tried-and-trusted techniques of horse raising he and Mom had always practiced. But it all went wrong again. The family wound up living with my grandfather, Morgan sleeping on the floor.

My dad, who had always kept one foot in the petrochemical business ever since he came back from Vietnam, went back to work, and in a very short time he was on his feet, with a couple of huge deals. We moved out of Grandfather’s place into a grand four-story house, and the good times seemed to be back.

Then some giant deal went south and we somehow lost it all again, moved back out to a kind of rural skid row. You see, my dad, though born over the border in Oklahoma, is a Texan in his soul. He was as brave as a lion when he was a navy gunner in Vietnam. And in Texas, real men don’t sit on their money. They get back out there, take risks, and when they hit it big, they just want to hit it bigger. My dad’s a real man.

You could tell a lot about him just by the names he gave the ranches, big or small — Lone Star Farms, North Fork Ranch, Shootin’ Star. Like he always said, “I’d rather shoot for a star and hit a stump than shoot for a stump and miss.”

I cannot describe how poor we were during the time Morgan and I were trying to get through college. I had four jobs to pay tuition and board and make my truck payment. I was the lifeguard in the college pool and I worked with Morgan on construction, landscaping, cutting grass, and yard work. In the evening I was a bouncer in a rough local bar full of redneck cowboys. And I was still starving, trying to feed myself on about twenty dollars a week.

One time, I guess we were around twenty-one, Morgan snapped his leg playing baseball, sliding into second. When they got him to the hospital Morgan just told them we didn’t have any money. Eventually the surgeon agreed to operate and set the leg on some kind of long-term credit. But the anaesthetist would not administer anything to Morgan without payment.

No one’s tougher than my brother. And he eventually said, “Fine. I don’t need anaesthetic. Set the leg without it. I can take the pain.” The surgeon was aghast and told Morgan he could not possibly have such an operation without anaesthesia. But Morgan stuck to his guns. “Doc, I don’t have any money. Fix my leg and I’ll handle the pain.”

No one was crazy about that, especially the surgeon. But then Jason Miller, a college buddy of Morgan’s, turned up, saw that he was in absolute agony, and gave him every last dollar of his savings to pay the anaesthetist. At which point they put Morgan back together.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. When we were young, working the horses, my dad was very, very tough on us. He considered that good grades were everything, bad ones were simply unacceptable. I once got a C in conduct, and he beat me with a saddle girth. I know he was doing it for our own good, trying to instill discipline in his sons, which would serve them well in later life.

But he ruled our lives with an iron fist. He would tell us: “One day I’m not gonna be here. Then it’s gonna be you two, by yourselves, and I want you to understand how rough and unfair this world is. I want you both prepared for whatever the hell might come your way.”

He tolerated nothing. Disobedience was out of the question. Rudeness was damn near a hanging offense. There was no leeway. He insisted on politeness and hard work. And he didn’t let up even when we were all broke. Dad was the son of an Arkansas woodsman, another amazingly tough character, and he brought that stand-on-your-own-feet ruggedness into our lives at the earliest opportunity.

We were always out in the woods, in rough country in the East Texas pines, the red oaks, and the sweet gum trees. Dad taught us to shoot straight at the age of seven, bought us a .22 rifle, a Nylon 66. We could hit a moving Miller High Life beer can from 150 yards. Now that’s redneck stuff, right? Redneck kids in redneck country, learning life’s skills.