Lone Survivor
I wanted to comment on the book Lone Survivor because I received an email from someone that was interested in going into the SEAL Teams after they had read Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell. I have omitted this gentlemans name: 
Dear Michael,
Thank you for your time in reading this letter. I am 27 years old and recently graduated with my Master’s degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine and am now proudly a licensed acupuncturist.
My original avenue into Chinese Medicine and the healing arts was through the study of martial arts. From a young age I have wanted to better myself and become more than what I am, and to exceed my limitations. This motivation has transformed from being driven by insecurity to become an internal drive which guides me through life today.
A few months before I graduated I read Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell. As tragic as the story was, as soon as I read his account of his SEAL training and his work as a SEAL, I was transfixed. I knew that I wanted to become a U.S Navy SEAL.
I have researched the SEAL training process from enlistment to deployment and have prepared myself for the enlistment requirements. I only have to make that all important decision whether to enlist and serve our country in the US Navy.
I had some questions which I was hoping you could answer. Is there a place on the teams for a healer? As well as being a warrior, can my skills as a healer help my team and help others? In becoming a SEAL operator, can one keep a healer’s heart as well as becoming a warrior for one’s country?
I would also like to say on this Memorial Day Thank you for serving our country. And I truly appreciate your time.
Sincerely and gratefully,
I receive many letters like this every day asking me questions or praising The Intuitive Warrior (TIW). I’m not sure if this writer actually read TIW by this letter. I believe that he would have gotten the idea that his ability to heal others would be extremely valuable if he had read TIW. Because of his background in chinese medicine and martial arts he would probably have knowledge of energy fields. I have studied and applied quantum physics principles to my own work as a former Navy SEAL of 24 years and now as a security contractor in combat zones all over the world. Everything is vibration and our thoughts can affect our environment. I started noticing how invisible energy fields around the body can be influenced by thought when I started the SEAL Teams first hand to hand course back in the early 1990’s. Later, after I retired from the SEAL Teams in December 2002 and started work as a security contractor, I developed the ability to eventually not only detect attacks as much as a week before they happened but also how to influence and thwart the attacks I was detecting through intuition. This ability can be learned and applied by anyone as I discuss throughout TIW.
In TIW I talk about how love is ultimately the most powerful tool in a warriors arsenal and this goes for non military warriors as well. I feel that all of humanity must pass through the warrior archetype at some point in their lives. At the lower end of the warrior archetype you are steeped in fear and at the higher end you are a powerful warrior and fear is no longer who or what you are.
In “The Lone Survivor” Marcus Luttrell is the only survivor of a SEAL reconnaissance mission in Afghanistan. The mission goes bad when goat herders stumble across the four man element that was gathering intelligence on a possible person of value in a village. The group holds the two young men that wondered into there hide site while they debate what to do with them. They eventually decide to let them go and move their location. They are later discovered by a large group of Taliban fighters and have a running gun battle in which all of the men except for Marcus are killed. A helicopter rescue force is called by the Team Leader (Lt. Michael Murphy) during the gun battle. As the helo arrives with the rescue force it is distroyed by a Rocket Propelled Grenade killing the entire force including the helo crew and pilots.
While the Taliban force is distracted by the arrival of the helo, the wounded Marcus crawls into a hidden area and eventually escapes to be taken in by local tribal leaders who secret him away until a rescue force arrives. Thats the story in a nutshell. Marcus also discusses his SEAL training, some of the men he works with and his family life back in Texas.
I’m going to breakdown parts of this story as they relate to my experience and a bigger picture that underlies this story that I think many people are drawn to.
I first of all want to say that some of the things the team did should not be denigrated because many would and have done the same thing given similar circumstances. I believe that if something valuable can be learned from tragedy then by all means it should be shared. I do not want to appear as an arm chair general that has the opportunity to kick back and dissect a mission and then criticize the outcome. What I want to share now is what I feel others could do to change a similar circumstance into a more optimum outcome.
First of all when you move across a landscape you leave an imprint. This is usually in the form of tracks. Navy SEAL’s on a reconnasance mission would be weighed down with a lot of gear. Upwards of 100 pounds or more per man, including weapons, ammo, comms, water etc. The kind of footwear that the men would be wearing would be different than what the local population would wear. The locals would be barefoot or in sandals. Four heavily laden men with boots walking together would make very identafiable tracks to a local goat herder. A goat herder lives most of his life on the land tending his herd. He is able to easily notice a change in the environment over which his herd would travel. He would travel off the beaten path most often.
I have done training exercises in the desert of Kuwait and many other Middle Eastern and African countries and it is uncanny how camel, sheep and goat herders with their flocks suddenly appear out of no where. We would often take an interpreter with us to communicate to the locals, that would always seem to appear out of thin air shortly after we arrived at a location to train at, to keep them out of harms way as we trained.
There was another account of this similar exposure of a combat operation in the first gulf war.
The book Bravo Two Zero discribes how a reconnasance force of the British Special Air Squadron (SAS) Special Forces troops are comprimised in very similar circumstances and outcomes. 
Lesson learned is to be aware that just because you are quiet and well hidden doesn’t mean you are invisible if you have had to trek across a landscape where tracks are easily identifiable and the locals are very aware and observant.
The next thing that I would bring up that both groups could have done was to tie up their prisoners and leave them where they could be found later. Flocks usually stay close to the herders for protection so they could have been found that way or other locals that are familiar with the routes that each other take could have tracked back to find their family members or friends. I learned Japanese samurai tying arts that I incorporated into the Navy SEAL combat fighting course that I started. Unfortunately those skills are apparently no longer taught to everyone. But a basic knowledge of tying could have sufficed.
Lesson learned would be to tie up and leave anyone that has compromised your team on a combat mission where unnecessarily killing the locals would only inflame the populace against your cause. I believe that one of the main reasons that Marcus was secreted by the tribe was because of the teams decision not to kill the herders. Letting the locals go is a sure case of having your mission compromised.
Another lesson learned would be that once your mission is compromised by locals who either see you and get away or who are let go should be a check list item for wrapping up your mission and getting the F out of Dodge ASAP.
Last lesson learned and one that falls on the shoulders of the SEAL teams and any other unit that puts people in the field where they could potentially be shot at, is to have air support either in the air near the area of operation or to have a very short window of response time. I was fortunate while I worked at SEAL Team Six to always have air support available in training evolutions and most especially combat operations while conducting Operation Just Cause, the Panama invasion in 1989.
So as I said earlier a greater message is coming out of this book that was a New York Times best seller for many many months.
That is a message of love. Of course this seems quite foreign to many who see war as evil and anything or anyone that participates in it to be the opposite of or no where near the idea of the thought of love. This book however is most diffinately one of love. You see the love that Marcus has for his family, his comrades and his country. He speaks of this throughout the book and it is unmistakable. We see how his teammates die for one another throughout their gun battle in the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan. I am reminded of a quote from a very wise man named John the Divine who said: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”. How many of you reading this would knowingly sacrifice your life so that others may live? Lt. Michael Murphy did this on that fateful day and earned a posthumous Medal of Honor for his actions.
We also see how a rescue force was put together on short notice and all were unfortunately lost. The village that secreted Marcus away for several days were in danger of having retribution from the Taliban but out of love for their fellow man hid him away anyway. They knew that turning him over to the Taliban would have been a death sentence in the most horrible way imaginable.
In Lone Survivor we also read how American Special Forces eventually rescued Marcus at great personal risk but did so out of love for a fellow soldier. This book speaks of loss but also of triumph and how Marcus and his family back home had a connection that reached across the continents that separated them. An unspoken connection of love that we all share with one another but unfortunately choose to often forget.
Love is the strongest, most binding force throughout the universe and when the connection is made with this omnipotent, omniscient vibration we connect with the most deepest part of our being. As a warrior, connecting with this energy is the greatest achievement you can acquire in your quest for mastery as a warrior. It is not a weakness to be a warrior that is connected with love on a deep level. Quite the contrary, by connecting with this greater aspect of yourself as a human being you transcend the lowest form of a warrior. A soldier that fights out of fear is the lowest aspect of warfare wether in or out of combat. By connecting with the love aspect of yourself you will conduct yourself at the highest vibration possible. The men that fought, died and risked being killed in this story all conducted themselves at the highest aspect of a warrior, Love. So Love is the greatest gift that this story has to give and why the story is so popular all over the world.
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Michael Jaco served as a Navy SEAL for twenty-four years before becoming an independent security contractor. During his service he achieved what many others previously thought to be impossible or unattainable. He retired in December 2002 as a Navy "Chief" and started his own training organization which educates participants in tactical awareness skills. Born in Columbia, South Carolina, he now lives in Elgin with his wife and children. 
Hey Michael,
Congratulations on TIW, it is definitely the most unusual book I’ve ever read by a former SEAL. You comment in the book about certain commanders driving their men nuts by over-thinking every possible “what if” before giving a mission the green light to proceed. It’s hard to imagine that in the case of the Murphy/Luttrell element, or Andy McNab’s squad in the SAS, no one thought to ask,”What if we are compromised by locals?” As you point out, it’s a highly probable scenario for a recce team dropped into a hostile country. In fact, in Doug Waller’s book “The Commandos” (in which you appear as a BUD/S instructor) he tells of a team of Army Special Forces operators whose hide site in Iraq is compromised by a local child, resulting in a firefight. Isn’t there any type of standard operating procedure taught to spec ops soldiers in case of discovery during recon? It would seem as though that should be question #1 in the pre-planning.
Thank you for a great book. It’s teaching me to “rethink how I think”, so to speak. I plan to share it with my son who is attempting to join the Teams.
Very powerful and instructive words here Michael. I think you are so right that people too seldom see that the highest motivation of a warrior is love. And let’s hope that the lessons learned you have proposed are incorporated. Keep up the great work!
Hi Michael,
Thanks for another great post. I’d like to add a few things starting with this quote:
“It is not a weakness to be a warrior that is connected with love on a deep level. Quite the contrary, by connecting with this greater aspect of yourself as a human being you transcend the lowest form of a warrior. A soldier that fights out of fear is the lowest aspect of warfare whether in or out of combat. By connecting with the love aspect of yourself you will conduct yourself at the highest vibration possible. The men that fought, died and risked being killed in this story all conducted themselves at the highest aspect of a warrior, Love. So Love is the greatest gift that this story has to give and why the story is so popular all over the world.”
It isn’t a weakness. You’re right. But it’s unfortunate that people don’t understand why. So many people have this massive ego thing going on. Being a bad-ass means being pissed off and doing things out of anger—getting your motivation and power from anger. It does work, but only temporarily and it isn’t a foundation for anything. Plus the power has no core.
Doing things out of love is where the real power is generated. And I notice in myself too. If I feel angry, it saps me. I don’t derive any power from it whatsoever. I’ve also noticed that positive vibrations spill over into all parts of my life, just as the negative ones can as well.
I just don’t think it occurs to most people that they can generate enormous power out of love. I also think that people don’t understand what love is. Just because someone can tell you the definition of something doesn’t mean they understand it. It can be taught and I believe there are many different types of love, and on different levels.
Everything takes practice, even developing a certain frame of mind or a particular disposition—even learning and understanding how to live through a projection of love.
Like you said in a previous post, “all we need is love.”
gp
Very wise words Gerald. You are finding your voice, my friend.