This Military Tragedy Became a Blockbuster Movie. Here’s What It Didn’t Tell You.

In the flickering darkness of a nearly empty movie theater, Nick Baggett, a retired Navy SEAL, watched a private screening of a Hollywood film about one of Naval Special Warfare’s most famous missions — and the violent death of his son-in-law. Next to him was his daughter, Maria “Patsy” Dietz, the widow of that slain SEAL, and as the sounds of gunfire ripped through the theater, she sobbed, just as she had eight years prior, when she first learned her husband was dead.

It was late 2013, not long before the film was set to be released, and the two had flown from Virginia Beach to New York to watch Lone Survivor with its writer and director, Peter Berg. The movie was based on the bestselling memoir of the same name by Marcus Luttrell, the only member of a SEAL reconnaissance team to return from a deadly mission in eastern Afghanistan.

In Berg’s version of the story, Luttrell and his seemingly battle-hardened teammates — Matthew Axelson, Michael Murphy and Baggett’s son-in-law, Danny Dietz — had been hunting for a senior Taliban commander near the Pakistani border. He’d murdered 20 Marines, the movie explained, and the SEALs planned to capture or kill him.

But soon, the mission playing out on-screen — Operation Red Wings — spiraled into disaster. As the SEALs surveilled the enemy in the Hindu Kush mountains, a group of goat herders stumbled across them. Fearing they would alert the Taliban, the team detained the herders and called headquarters to speak to their commander. The call dropped the moment he got to the phone. Unable to get through again, the team argued about what they should do. The best way to protect themselves, they figured, would be to kill the civilians, but the SEALs feared they would be pilloried by the press and charged with murder. Murphy, the officer in charge, aborted the mission and let the herders go.

Sitting in that theater, Baggett watched as one of the herders ran down the mountain and alerted the Taliban. Minutes later, a horde of fighters attacked the SEAL team with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. The Americans fired back, killing waves of them; but the militants were unrelenting, and the SEALs were forced to retreat, tumbling down the mountain. The Taliban shot and killed Dietz and later killed Axelson. Murphy handed Luttrell some extra ammunition and crawled onto the edge of a cliff, exposing himself to gunfire so he could get reception on his satellite phone and call for help. “Please hurry, sir. Thank you,” he said into the phone as the Taliban continued firing, leaving him dead on the rock where he’d sacrificed himself for his teammates.

That call, the movie explained, should have launched a quick reaction force, including two Apache helicopters. But Baggett watched the film in dismay as the Army deployed those aircraft for a different mission. That meant only two MH-47 helicopters full of SEALs and members of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment — known as the Night Stalkers — rushed in to try and save the recon team. Without the support of the Apaches, the helicopters were exposed, vulnerable. The militants shot one out of the sky with a rocket-propelled grenade, killing the eight SEALs and eight Night Stalkers on board. The death of those 16 servicemen and Luttrell’s three teammates on the ground made this incident the largest loss of life in one battle in the history of Naval Special Warfare at the time.

During the catastrophic firefight depicted on screen, Luttrell was shot, bloodied, battered and knocked down the mountain after a rocket-propelled grenade exploded nearby. The next day, Afghan villagers found him and tended to his wounds. They protected him from the militants and sent a note with a map to a U.S. military base close by. As the Taliban began another brutal onslaught, American helicopters arrived and rescued the badly injured SEAL. He was close to death, the movie implied, and had to be resuscitated back at base.

Though the film hewed closely to Luttrell’s memoir, Baggett knew Berg had taken some liberties. But he believed the movie — like the book — had accomplished a noble goal: lionizing the bravery of the SEALs and capturing the extraordinary bond between them. Yet something gnawed at him as he sat in that theater — a key part of the story Berg and Luttrell had left out. One the “lone survivor” had offered eight years earlier in his intelligence debrief after his rescue but perhaps felt he couldn’t tell publicly. That version, which Baggett read shortly after the tragedy, revealed a long list of deadly mistakes by the recon team and their higher-ups. “It was like a horror movie,” he said.

Having read that debrief and spoken to colleagues at Naval Special Warfare, Baggett knew his son-in-law and his teammates didn’t die because they spared those goat herders. They died because they were inexperienced, inadequately trained for the mission and perhaps felt pressured to ignore proper battlefield procedures. Their superiors had sent them into hostile territory on a risky, ill-timed and poorly planned operation that didn’t have a clear chain of command. None of that detracted from their courage, their willingness to sacrifice their lives. But Baggett felt there were hard, valuable lessons to be learned from this battle, from the death of his son-in-law. Instead, Naval Special Warfare Command helped spin what happened to the families and the public.

Naval Special Warfare Command and U.S. Special Operations Command declined to comment. Berg and Luttrell did not respond to inquiries from POLITICO Magazine. Over the years, the former SEAL has largely stood by his memoir, occasionally offering new and conflicting details. “I can’t understand why anyone would want to write a story many years later after memories have faded when a definitive story was written shortly after the events,” said Tony Buzbee, Luttrell’s attorney, in an email. “Anyone writing such a story in my view has an agenda.” In a 2016 statement made on Luttrell’s behalf, Buzbee wrote that “everything he wrote in his book is absolutely true.”

For decades, Baggett, his fellow SEALs and other veterans with direct knowledge of Operation Red Wings have mostly remained silent about what really happened on that ill-fated mission. In public, many rallied around Luttrell’s memoir, but in private, they agreed the book was full of exaggerations and other inaccuracies. They questioned whether government or military officials had tried to control the narrative. And they lamented how the book and movie versions of Lone Survivor had transformed one of Naval Special Warfare’s greatest disasters into a major recruitment tool, spawning a string of SEAL-related movies, podcasts and leadership seminars. “We morphed,” Baggett said, “from an operational unit into something more commercial.”

Today, however, more than two decades after Operation Red Wings, a growing number of veterans — many of them disillusioned with the global war on terrorism, especially after the Taliban retook Kabul in 2021 — have begun to publicly challenge the veracity of Lone Survivor and other prominent war stories. On podcasts, on Reddit and in YouTube videos, they’re speculating about why the truth was hidden from the public and exploring long-standing rumors about what really happened — some of them true, some as misleading as major parts of Luttrell’s book. 

For more than a few of these veterans, Red Wings seems to have become a metaphor for the war: Leaders covered up mistakes, exaggerated stories and abandoned allies, sowing a deep sense of bitterness and distrust in the American government and military. “It’s really hard to fight in these places and to lose friends … and not ask, ‘Was it all worth it?’”said Michael Breen, an Army first lieutenant who had already been in combat for more than 18 months before he helped come up with the mission’s artillery plan and took part in the recovery.

In his 2018 memoir, Touching the Dragon, former Navy SEAL James Hatch wrote about the wrenching experience of recovering the bodies of the 19 U.S. servicemen killed in Red Wings. The aftermath was gutting as well, he wrote, because “the American myth-making machine” had distorted what had happened. “There’s a deep pain felt by guys who’ve been involved in the loss of others — and … maybe by some of the families of those lost ones, too,” he wrote, “when you take a version of their story and just tell the parts that allow it to be a legendary epic about flawless heroism.”

Baggett, who retired as a SEAL master chief, agrees. In a series of exclusive interviews, he and more than 100 other people with direct knowledge of the mission — SEALs, Marines, Rangers, Air Force pararescuemen, Green Berets, pilots and others — revealed the mistakes in planning, coordination and execution that some high-ranking military officials foresaw long before the SEALs hit the ground that day.

POLITICO Magazine also obtained documents rarely seen outside of the shadowy world of special operations that corroborated their accounts. This exclusive information — including handwritten notes from people involved in Red Wings, minute-by-minute messages sent during the operation and time-stamped videos of the battle shot by the militants — offers the most complete public account of that operation to date. It also answers some of the questions that have lingered like a persistent fog, shrouding the public — and the families of the fallen — from the truth. After more than 20 years, Baggett believes people are finally ready to hear it.

When the lights went up in that theater in New York, Baggett thanked Berg, and he and Patsy (who declined to comment for this article) headed to Lower Manhattan to visit the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero. There, he gazed at the names of the dead on the edges of the fountain, at the water plunging into a deep, black hole. He thought about what the global war on terror had taken from him. From his daughter. From the country he loved.

‘This Is Going to Be a Shit Show’

In late June 2005, not long before Red Wings was set to launch, Army Lt. Col. J.P. Roberts was sitting in a colleague’s office near Bagram Airfield — a massive U.S. military base about 30 miles from Kabul — brooding about the impending mission. “This is going to be a shit show,” he recalled saying in a 2025 interview.

Roberts had been helping approve operations for America’s NATO allies, but several weeks prior, his commanding officer, Army Col. Jeffrey Waddell, had asked him to advise a group of Navy SEALs about a complicated mission they were planning in the Korangal Valley. Waddell’s task force was an integral part of the war against the Taliban. It was mostly composed of Army Special Forces, but there were also dozens of Navy SEALs, mainly from SEAL Team 10, under his command. Now, sitting in his colleague’s office, Roberts, a Green Beret, knew he had to tell his commanding officer an uncomfortable truth — that the mission was a disaster waiting to happen.

The target was Ahmad Shah, a local, Taliban-linked militant leader Waddell and company believed was involved in the kidnapping and killing of a Turkish development worker in late 2004. More recently, he’d carried out a series of attacks around Kunar province, mostly against Marines, according to a copy of the Red Wings mission outline obtained by POLITICO Magazine. None, however, had killed Americans, despite what Luttrell and Berg claimed in Lone Survivor. And while Shah boasted he had as many as 600 fighters, the Americans believed he was exaggerating wildly. “Haji math,” the Red Wings mission outline called it, estimating that Shah traveled with about three to five bodyguards and had a group of 12 to 15 militants in the area. “He was a nuisance,” Roberts said, not a major player in the war against the Taliban, let alone “one of Osama bin Laden’s closest associates,” as Luttrell claimed in his memoir.

Roberts and others on the task force staff felt Red Wings presented too much risk for too little reward. Plus there wasn’t enough thought given to contingencies or worst-case scenarios. “Up there in Kunar, it’s a bunch of Afghan rednecks,” he said. “It’s like going to North Georgia and being with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. You’re going to get in a gunfight.”

Logistically, the mission was also happening at the worst possible time. Beginning in mid-June, Waddell and his team were in the middle of handing over control to their replacements. “You don’t do any big operations during the transfer of authority,” said Lt. Col. Paul Roberts, the twin brother of J.P., and a Green Beret officer on the task force that had just landed in Afghanistan to relieve Waddell’s group. “That’s taboo. Your elements are moving around. Some of them may have just arrived and some are packing up to leave. There’s confusion every step of the way.”

Waddell wasn’t deterred. For several months, he had been gunning for Shah, who was on a list of targets approved by his boss, Major Gen. Jason Kamiya, according to J.P. Roberts. Waddell had originally wanted a group of Green Berets to capture or kill him, but that plan fell apart. When the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment arrived in Afghanistan that spring, they developed their own mission to take down Shah. It was their first real entry into the war, and for Waddell, it proved to be an opportunity. (Waddell could not be reached for comment by phone, email or through intermediaries.)

In early June, that Marine battalion had mapped Shah’s daily routines. By the end of the month, they were confident he would be in the village of Chichal at the summit ridge of Sawtalo Sar, a 9,282-foot mountain covered with soaring pines and massive deodar cedar trees. With help from their sister battalion, the Marines developed a plan to capture or kill him. It involved having a six-man scout sniper team walk through the Hindu Kush mountains to surveil the militant leader. When darkness fell, a much larger group of Marines would drop in via helicopter and surround Shah and his men. The Marines wanted the Night Stalkers, experts in flying in low moonlight, to drop them in, but those aviators reported to Joint Special Operations Command — a separate, secretive task force focused on destroying Al-Qaeda and killing bin Laden.

The Marines knew that task force might loan out their aircraft to a conventional military unit, but only if the battalion worked with a group of special operators under Waddell. They found such a partner in Lt. Cmdr. Erik Kristensen, an officer from SEAL Team 10 on his first real combat deployment. The SEALs under Waddell and his predecessor had good relationships with the task force and had conducted some successful operations. But Kristensen, a former English teacher who had once served on a Navy destroyer, was trying to find more missions for his men on a task force dominated by Green Berets. “We were definitely hungry for more,” a former member of SEAL Team 10 said in a recent interview.

Kristensen had no problem with the Marines running the operation, according to interviews with members of the regiment conducted roughly 20 years ago. A similar arrangement had worked in the past. But Waddell disagreed. Like many leaders in special operations, he didn’t trust conventional troops to lead his teams. So for the Night Stalkers to take part in the mission, he said, his SEALs had to run at least two of the operation’s five phases. That created a logistical nightmare and violated a fundamental principle of military missions: One group should run the operation from beginning to end. Doing otherwise creates confusion about who is in charge, which could turn deadly. “There’s too much division of responsibility,” said a former senior Army official with intimate knowledge of Red Wings and its aftermath who — like many others in this article — spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the mission. “It’s so much easier to coordinate if you have a clear chain of command.”

The change also required two combat operations centers, one at Bagram and the other at the air base in Jalalabad, which could also cause confusion for the men on the ground. “This is fucking outrageous,” Major Tom Wood, the Marines’ operations officer, recalled saying after he learned of Waddell’s requirements, in an interview about two decades ago.

Wood and the Marines felt they were in a bind. The Afghan national elections were coming up, and the Americans wanted to show the counterinsurgency was succeeding. Working with Waddell’s task force seemed to be the only way to do the mission. The SEALs would be in charge of the initial phases — recon, and then the assault. The Marines would help cordon off the area, remain there and gather intelligence.

Kristensen wanted to use aircraft to spot Shah, according to an earlier iteration of the mission outline. But Waddell and his staff were worried they wouldn’t be able to identify the militant through the thick foliage. The SEALs then came up with two subsequent plans. The first involved inserting eight men on the ground for recon. The other used 12. Both were scratched when Joint Special Operations Command wouldn’t let them use the aircraft.

The SEALs, the Marines, and Waddell had only one more chance to get Shah, on June 27, before most of the Green Berets on the task force shipped out. They knew the militant was constantly moving around the village, sleeping in different locations, which offered different ways to escape. Now, they had to trap him in a wider swath of territory and surveil him in more treacherous terrain.

Frustrated and feeling slighted, the SEALs came up with a third plan that required just one four-man recon team — Luttrell, Axelson, Murphy and Dietz. Keeping the team small freed up more SEALs to kick down doors looking for Shah — and, they hoped, lessened the risk of the four men being spotted by locals. “Getting compromised was a very high likelihood,” said an experienced member of SEAL Team 10. “We were wringing our hands over that. Four is not really many guys, but they’re the easiest to hide. We fucked up. We could have put more recon dudes on the ground and picked them up on the way to the target if we needed more assaulters.” Meanwhile, after consulting with Waddell, the SEALs changed the goal of the mission from killing Shah to something more achievable: disrupting his network and forcing his militant group to retreat, according to the mission outline.

Wood and the Marines questioned several parts of this plan, they said in interviews roughly 20 years ago. Instead of sneaking through the mountains to their surveillance positions, the SEALs were going to be dropped in by an MH-47 helicopter, which can be heard from miles away. Like J.P. Roberts, Waddell’s staffer, the Marines felt four men wasn’t enough — especially since no one planned to bring a machine gun. The mountain terrain was rugged, and without superior firepower, the Americans could be caught in a deadly ambush.

The SEALs, however, seemed content with their plan, and Waddell approved it. After a perfunctory briefing, so did his boss, Kamiya, who declined to comment for this article. Several members of Waddell’s staff were dumbfounded — as were CIA officers and Green Berets stationed nearby in Asadabad. “I enjoyed working for [Waddell],” Major Frank Harrar, a member of his task force, wrote in an email. “He force[d] us as a staff to screen these [operations] with the right amount of rigor and make sound recommendations. In the case of Red Wings … what I observed was a different dynamic. It was more of a ‘rah-rah, let’s get these boys outside the wire one more time!’”

The former senior Army official agreed, adding that Kamiya and his task force bore the ultimate responsibility: “They should have had the wherewithal to say, ‘Let’s stand down.’”

In late June, as they strolled to the chow hall, J.P. Roberts made one final pitch to his commanding officer. “What if we pushed this off?”

“We’re not fucking cancelling the mission,” Waddell snapped, according to Roberts. “We’re fucking doing it.”

After speaking to Waddell, Roberts tried to whip up some last-minute contingencies. He emailed an Army general at Jalalabad Air Base to try to claim two Apaches as part of the quick reaction force. The helicopters, he discovered, weren’t dedicated to the mission and he was concerned someone might commandeer them for another operation.

As he went to sleep that night, he still hadn’t heard back from the general, and Roberts had a bad feeling about Red Wings. One passage from the mission outline, in particular, bothered him: “Ahmad Shah has knowledge of impending U.S. operations,” a source had told the Americans. “[He] plans on downing a helicopter using an RPG and an unidentified weapons system. [He] wants to let [the] helicopter let 10 men off then attack.…”

Waddell, however, had made his decision. “The military isn’t a democracy,” Roberts said. “When the boss says we’re going, we go.”

‘DON’T GET F%&*#$@ COMPROMISED!!!!!’

As Operation Red Wings began on the night of June 27, Lt. Brett Thomas was nervous. A junior member of SEAL Team 10 on his first combat deployment, Thomas sat in the back of one of two MH-47s that took off from Bagram Air Base. He was the officer in charge of the backup recon team — the four men who would be inserted instead of Dietz, Murphy, Luttrell and Axelson if their MH-47 had a mechanical failure or some other issue.

What everyone feared most was being spotted — that the militants or a group of civilians would discover the SEALs surveilling Shah. This fear was expressed, ominously, in all caps and exclamation points, in the mission outline: “DON’T GET F%&*#$@ COMPROMISED!!!!!”

The proper response to a compromise, Thomas knew, was to cancel the operation, call headquarters and meet a helicopter at a predesignated rendezvous point. But tactics developed during previous wars in urban settings had bled over into largely rural areas like this one in Afghanistan, where they often didn’t apply. If a team bumped into civilians while doing reconnaissance on top of a building in Bosnia or Iraq, they could quickly call back to base for reinforcements, take control of another building within range of the target, remain in the area and finish their mission. In Afghanistan, however, calling for reinforcements could take more than an hour, and by then you could be in a firefight — or dead.

SEAL Team 8, which preceded SEAL Team 10 in Afghanistan, faced this dilemma, said Mike Peter, a former SEAL master chief and close friend of Baggett. Three times they ventured out on a recon mission and were compromised by goat herders, he said. Two teams continued on. A third team called headquarters and got a helicopter to pull them out. They were mocked as soon as they returned to base, said Peter, who was on that team. The junior guys under Kristensen got the message. One SEAL made it explicit, recalled one of his younger counterparts who had just arrived in Afghanistan: “He told us not to be p—ies, not to blow the mission,” using a vulgar term for female genitalia. That SEAL said his team ran into goat herders on his first operation but never told anyone because of the pressure to complete it.

As his helicopter buzzed over the mountains, Thomas could imagine what his teammates flying alongside him must have felt as they prepared to slide down a long, nylon line into enemy territory. All were driven, promising young SEALs, he said, much more “squared away” than himself. But all had very little combat experience. “They weren’t battle-hardened guys,” Thomas said.

There were experienced operators on SEAL Team 10, which was created after 9/11 to respond to the global war on terrorism. To make sure they had enough manpower in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the command loaned them platoons from other units. Dietz, a young, athletic martial arts enthusiast and graffiti artist, came from SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team 2 (SDV-2) out of Virginia Beach. The other three came from SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team 1 (SDV-1) out of Hawaii. Both teams mainly operated mini-submarines for covert operations and were trained to be experts in reconnaissance. But the team out of Hawaii hadn’t done their mission training with the rest of the guys, and it showed — in the way they handled communications check-ins and used their radios in difficult terrain, in the tactics they employed clearing buildings or dealing with run-ins with civilians, said several members of SEAL Team 10.

When Kristensen reduced the team to four, he asked Murphy — who seemed eager to get outside the wire — to be the officer in charge. He wanted Dan Healy, the most senior enlisted member of the SDV-1 platoon, to join him. But “Healy was adamant that he was not going in the field with Murphy to be the adult supervision,” said the experienced member of SEAL Team 10.

A fit and determined former hockey player from Long Island, Murphy was seen as a talented young lieutenant. But his promising career had nearly ended roughly a year prior, when he accidentally shot another officer in a training exercise. That SEAL, Andy Haffele, was partially paralyzed in his arm — and would never see combat. Luttrell, a trained medic, had treated him and helped save his life. Despite the accident, the leaders of SDV-1 and a Trident Review Board chose to keep Murphy on. “Mike took this incident to heart,” his commander, Todd DeGhetto, told the author Gary Williams in his 2010 book, SEAL of Honor. “He was a smart kid. I briefed my Admiral [Joseph Maguire], he backed me up, because I told him point blank that Mike would never make that mistake again.” (Both Maguire and DeGhetto did not respond to requests for comment.)

Not everyone agreed with their decision. The accident not only hurt Murphy’s friendship with Haffele, it hurt his relationship with some of his fellow SEALs. Because of this tension, Murphy bunked in a different area from his teammates, said the experienced member of SEAL Team 10. “Murph had to overcome some stuff,” said Lt. Jon Macaskill, a junior officer from SDV-2 who was initially wary of Murphy but eventually became his friend. “He was not ‘the Murph’ from Lone Survivor. [That made] him out to be this invincible hero. There was definitely on Murphy’s part — and my part — a desire to prove our mettle.” Red Wings was a chance to do so.

After more than an hour in the air, Thomas learned from his superiors that Murphy and the other SEALs had roped down onto the mountain. “I breathed such a sigh of relief,” he said. “I feel like an asshole for feeling this way. This was a hairy op. I was ready to do what I needed to do but … normal people, without all the bravado, we’re all terrified.”

What Thomas didn’t realize then was that the operation had already gone awry.

Heavy Breathing and Gunfire

Capt. Matt Brady quickly understood what Thomas did not — that the mission had a major problem. He was one of the Night Stalkers who flew Murphy and the other three SEALs to the mountain. The MH-47s were loud, but the pilots were supposed to do a series of maneuvers and fake landings to confuse the enemy. They didn’t. As the helicopters ascended toward the target, the aircraft accompanying them for protection and aerial surveillance had to turn around because of mechanical problems. “Technically,” Brady said in a 2015 interview, “I should have aborted.” But there had been no signs of enemy fighters, so they pushed on. As they got closer, however, he noticed through his night-vision goggles lights on the mountainside — either flashlights or fires. It was not the barren, unpopulated terrain they were expecting. It was also perhaps a sign that the locals — and even Shah — knew where they were dropping the SEALs. “You can’t hide an MH-47,” said the former senior Army official, “especially if it’s hovering.”

Soon, Brady spotted a clearing on a steep slope, and his helicopter descended into a hover. He saw the tips of 90-foot-tall trees above the MH-47’s rotor blades. “It was so unnerving,” he said. “This was the worst landing zone I’d ever seen in my life.” The Night Stalkers lowered the helicopter just enough for the flight crew to drop the fast ropes and gave the signal for the SEALs to slide down. At about 17:00 Zulu — a universal standard of time used in the military and in all of the documents we obtained — the recon team made their way onto the mountain. As Brady prepared to race away, a member of the crew realized the rope was stuck on a tree stump; he cut it and the rope fell to the ground.

For the Night Stalkers, this was a standard safety procedure, but for the SEALs, it was a major risk. If Shah and his men found the rope, they would know exactly where they had hit the ground, and might be able to track them down. When the helicopters returned to Jalalabad Air Base, Brady spoke to Kristensen in the tactical operations center. The SEAL commander asked if he could go back and get the rope. Doing so would be dangerous, Brady explained, both for his helicopter crew and for the recon team. Murphy and company said they had hidden the rope, according to a senior SEAL familiar with Red Wings, and Kristensen gave them the OK to press on.

As the SEALs on the ground proceeded with their mission, Dennis White, a Navy communications technician at Jalalabad, stayed up with a team of Marines, SEALs and others, monitoring their radios for a few hours. Days prior, he had spent time with Dietz as they tested communications equipment, including an Iridium satellite phone, a PRC-148 MBITR radio, and a larger PSC-5 satellite radio. Now, he was excited — and nervous. He idolized the SEALs. “I knew that people were depending on me,” he later told the Dietz family in one of two letters he sent them after the mission.

Those letters, coupled with two other documents obtained by POLITICO Magazine, offer important new insight into Operation Red Wings. One is a printout of a military internet relay chat, a group messaging platform used by the teams in Bagram and Jalalabad. The other is a situation report created by the military — based on several types of information — after the mission unraveled.

By 23:43, about seven hours into the operation, the recon team — known by their call sign, Spartan — had staked out the area where they thought Shah was hiding. They settled in and waited to see if they could spot him.

White took a short nap, swapping shifts with a colleague, then showered and returned to his post around 4:00 on June 28. Though the SEALs had some initial communications problems in the mountains, they had checked in five times with the tactical operations centers in Bagram and Jalalabad, said the senior SEAL familiar with the mission. They had also moved to a new observation point to get a better view of the village.

Neither the chat log nor the report mention the goat herders who played such a pivotal role in Lone Survivor, and White doesn’t remember hearing about them until after Luttrell was rescued. The encounter occurred shortly after a radio check-in at 5:20, the senior SEAL said, when the recon team detained the herders. A few minutes later, according to the relay chat, they called Jalalabad, looking for Kristensen and his deputy, Lt. Mike McGreevy — only to realize they were at Bagram.

At 5:32, the recon team reached Bagram, the senior SEAL said. By the time their leaders came to the phone to offer guidance, however, the call had dropped. Based on documents and interviews with White and other people familiar with the communications, the recon team never reported being compromised. “Spartan’s last comm was that it was packing up and moving on,” White wrote in the relay chat at 5:34.

Soon, the senior SEAL said, the recon team released the herders and headed back to their original observation point, though no one at either base was aware of it at the time.

All White knew, according to his letters, was that Spartan briefly contacted Jalalabad on the Iridium, and minutes later on the radio. “At 610z we had a comm check without any info,” he wrote in the relay chat, referring to the radio exchange. Those calls gave White the impression the SEALs were continuing the mission as planned. “Recon team reported eyes on tgt and doing well,” the situation report later recorded, citing a 6:08 communications update.

“No one knew they were compromised,” said Paul Roberts, the Army Special Forces official from the task force that replaced Waddell’s. Before the mission began, Roberts said, he had urged Kristensen to find a way to delay it until after the changeover, so they could develop a better plan. The young commander, he said, appeared concerned, but the mission went ahead as planned. “These guys didn’t have a lot of experience,” Roberts added. “[They] were trying to prove themselves.”

Two hours passed, and White and his counterparts wondered why the recon team hadn’t checked in. “Have you heard from them since 620z?” one of the communicators in Bagram asked White in the relay chat.

“Negative,” White replied.

Around 8:43, the recon team called Jalalabad on a satellite phone, but lost connection, according to the chat and White’s letters. The team appeared to be referring to a series of helicopter landing zones for the upcoming raid: “HLZ 1, 2, SWIFT, and [unintelligible] appears to be good HLZ,” the Navy communications technician passed along in the chat. About seven minutes later, a radio call reached at least Bagram, though it was weak and difficult to decipher, the senior SEAL said.

White didn’t know what to think, but he had no reason to believe the team was in imminent danger; neither the relay chat nor situation report show any record of emergency communications.

He eventually stepped away to use the bathroom or grab a bite, asking Mark Takla, the military lawyer sitting next to him, to watch the satellite phone and radio. When he returned at around 9:18, Takla was frantically talking to the recon team on the satellite phone. “I could hear heavy breathing and gunfire,” White wrote in one of his letters to Dietz’s family. White thought the person on the other end of the line was Dietz, whom he believed he’d been speaking to throughout the mission. Takla, however, believed it was Murphy, the officer in charge. “He advised us his team was in contact with the enemy and needed immediate close air support,” Takla wrote in an article years later in Orange County Lawyer, a local magazine for attorneys in the area. (Takla did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)

Both Takla and White frantically shared what they knew with their counterparts in Bagram, but it wasn’t much. Whoever was on the line said they were running down a valley towards a village, which Takla and White assumed was Chichal. (No one said “thank you” or “sir,” as Luttrell claimed in the book and movie.) The SEALs had chosen not to bring Blue Force Trackers, GPS devices that allow commanders to monitor a team in real time, so the last known location for the SEALs was their original observation point.

Over and over again, White and Takla called Spartan, desperate to get through. “Time was in slow motion,” White wrote in one of his letters. “Everything … seemed to be a bad dream.”

‘I Have to Try to Get My Guys’

Almost immediately, Major Tony Dill realized the contingency plans to rescue the SEALs had foundered. An experienced Green Beret, he’d arrived weeks before the mission to help with the changeover on Waddell’s task force. Now he was dealing with a worst-case scenario.

Less than an hour after Spartan’s desperate plea for back-up, Kristensen called Dill and said he wanted to send a team on MH-47s to find his men. Dill knew Kristensen had the authority to make that decision, but needed permission to use the helicopters. He thought Waddell’s task force was unlikely to grant that. They didn’t know exactly where the SEALs were on the ground, and in a previous battle, the militants had hit an MH-47 with an RPG, forcing an emergency landing.

Dill explained that the Marines and a few SEALs were already in their Blackhawks, ready to launch, with Apaches gearing up to provide protection. Other aircraft were rushing to the mountain, trying to communicate with the recon team. “Roger,” Dill recalled Kristensen saying. “But I have to try to get my guys.”

Not long after talking to Kristensen, Dill got a call from Waddell’s task force at Bagram, asking him to help with the rescue effort. “Waddell was in charge,” said the former senior Army official with intimate knowledge of Red Wings and its aftermath. “But he was not leading. And most of his staff had departed.” So Dill sat in a corner of his tent in Jalalabad at a folding table and began playing a pivotal role in the chaotic recovery mission along with J.P. Roberts. “I had no comms, no coordinates and no visuals,” Dill said. “But at least I didn’t have to ask ‘Mother, may I?’ anymore.”

He quickly called the aircraft flying toward the recon team to see if they had heard from the SEALs. Nothing. Then Roberts hurried in with some alarming news: “The Apaches are gone.”

Unlike in the movie, where the military diverted the helicopters for another mission, the reality was more complex. There had been a massive miscommunication due to the chaotic nature of the changeover and the blurred lines of authority, said the former senior Army official. The SEALs expected to use two Apaches out of Jalalabad as part of a quick reaction force in case something went wrong. But the staff working for Kamiya, Waddell’s boss, had a different understanding, the former senior Army official added. So did the Apache pilots and their commanders — they only had orders to be at Jalalabad for the Marine portion of the operation.

The result: When the recon team called for help, the Apaches were in Bagram. They eventually flew to Jalalabad, but the confusion between the different parties led to a delay. Meanwhile, the aircraft Roberts had tried to borrow from the general in a last-ditch effort to help the SEALs had never been assigned to them. “It’s the telephone game,” said the former senior Army official. “Everybody in the room heard something different.”

As Dill tried to figure out what to do, Kristensen called back. He’d been given permission to use two MH-47s to rescue his men. The two quickly hashed out a plan. The SEALs would fly to Jalalabad and link up with four Blackhawks. Before they got to the landing zone, they’d slow down and wait for the two Apaches. Once those gunships had scoured the area for enemy fighters, all the other helicopters would fly above the recon team’s last known location. But they wouldn’t land or attempt a rescue unless they spotted the SEALs on the ground or heard from them on the radio.

The plan, however, quickly changed, and for decades, speculation has swirled around how and why. The internet relay chat and the situation report provide a remarkably detailed account of what happened next. At 10:49, according to the situation report, Kristensen and his men left Bagram on two MH-47s, each carrying 16 SEALs, along with pilots and crew. (The latter was led by the air mission commander, Maj. Stephen Reich, a Night Stalker pilot and former pitcher for USA Baseball’s Collegiate National Team.) After more than a 30-minute flight, they landed in Jalalabad and quickly kicked eight SEALs off of each helicopter; in the summer heat, the aircraft were too heavy to safely fly that many men at more than 9,000 feet.

About two hours after the recon team had called for help, according to the situation report, Kristensen’s force lifted off — a significant delay. The four Blackhawks and two Apaches soon followed them.

Capt. Don Bentley was the pilot of one of those Apaches. Capt. Alex Brown was his gunner and co-pilot. Their recollections, along with a recording taken from one of the Apaches during the mission, offers a minute-by-minute view of what happened when they tried to save the SEALs.

As they landed in Jalalabad, Brown and Bentley were shocked when Kristensen and the other MH-47 buzzed overhead, throttling toward the mountain. The Apaches quickly followed, taking off at around 11:26, according to the relay chat. They expected the bigger, faster MH-47 to eventually slow down and wait for them. “We knew something big was going on that day,” Brown said. “But it was confusing as fuck.”

At 11:34, as Brown and Bentley rushed toward Sawtalo Sar, they tried to contact the recon team on the ground. “Spartan, Spartan, this is Shock 63,” Brown said on the recording, “I’m just trying to reach Spartan.” No answer. As the Apache whirred through the air, bursts of static crackled over the radio.

About 15 minutes into the flight, Brown and Bentley worried the MH-47s were too far ahead. “When are they going to slow up?” Brown said on the recording. Soon, the Blackhawks relayed a critical update — someone on the ground was using an emergency beacon on their radio to indicate their location. Was it the recon team? Or had the militants taken the SEALs’ equipment?

As the Apaches soared over the jagged, mountainous terrain, the weather was hazy and the pilots struggled to see what was going on below them. Brown asked the other helicopters to circle the area so they could swoop in and fire on any militants. “Heavy metal,” one of the Blackhawk pilots said over the radio, the code word for the MH-47s to allow them to pass. “They’ve got to slow way the fuck down,” Bentley said.

But they didn’t. Instead, Kristensen and Reich decided to drop the SEALs off near the previous night’s landing zone so they could rope down to the mountain and find the recon team. Then the helicopter would return to Jalalabad and pick up more SEALs. They still didn’t know where the recon team was, but they were determined to save them, despite the incredible risk. (Reich had helped execute another daring rescue in Afghanistan in 2002, saving five U.S. servicemen after a crash.) “They became impatient,” said the former senior Army official familiar with Red Wings. “Very often, we have this warrior ethos — we never want to leave behind a fallen comrade. But we don’t think about how many people we’re endangering.”

Alan Mack, a chief warrant officer for the Night Stalkers, was in the 160th’s tactical operations center in Bagram, watching Reich’s helicopter on a video feed from an A-10 “Warthog” aircraft. Around 11:45, he saw the MH-47 come to a hover. Then he saw a massive source of heat in the ramp of the helicopter — an explosion. The front and rear rotors fell out of sync and collided. The fuselage of the MH-47 careened down the mountain. Bodies and pieces of aircraft littered the landscape.

“MH-47 is down! MH-47 is down!” an aviator shouted over the radio.

“Holy shit, holy fuck!” Brown said. “We’ve got to get in there!”

Back in Jalalabad, Dill learned of the explosion and frantically tried to call everyone back to the airfield. Minutes passed with nothing but static on his radio. Then he received a report from another aircraft — there had been multiple explosions near the mountain. A service member on that aircraft told him there appeared to be no survivors at the crash site.

“I thought,” Dill said, “that up to five [helicopters] had gone down.”

‘It Was Like Seeing the Walking Dead’

No one knew exactly what type of weapon had hit the helicopter. But at least two SEALs said they saw a corkscrew smoke trail as something struck the MH-47 — a sign it could have been some sort of heat-seeking, shoulder-fired missile — like the ones the CIA gave the Afghan mujahedeen to fight the Soviets in the 1980s.

Inside the other MH-47, Carl Finney, the senior enlisted member of SEAL Team 10, ordered his men to break open the windows and shoot anything on the ground that moved. Several of them screamed at the Night Stalkers to land. They feared their brothers were pinned down below them. “It was complete chaos,” Finney said. “I thought I’d just lost half my men.” The Night Stalkers remained composed. One pilot reminded the SEALs he had friends on the other aircraft as well. Soon they were circling the ridgeline, looking for anyone who might be alive.

Brown and Bentley circled the crash site at least four times over the next hour, following the other Apache. The sun blinded their vision. Hoping to deter the militants from rushing to the crash site, the A-10 fired a rocket filled with white phosphorus, a chemical that smothers the landscape with smoke. “We couldn’t see shit,” Brown recalled.

At 12:14, the other Apache, which was lower to the ground, reported there might be a survivor near the downed helicopter. “One guy with his hands up, on top of the ridge,” said one of the pilots. About 10 minutes later, as Brown and Bentley crested that ridgeline, Brown saw something red out of the corner of his eye, about 100 to 150 feet to his left. It was a militant standing behind a boulder. Then Brown saw a puff of smoke, and a rocket or missile whizzed past them. Brown pulled his trigger but the gun wouldn’t fire; the angle was too far left. “They were so fucking close,” Brown said on the Apache tape. “I can’t believe they didn’t hit us.”

Low on fuel, the Apaches eventually returned to base. As they flew back, Brown and Bentley tried to digest what had happened. Was the guy with his hands up a survivor? Someone from the recon team? Or was it the militant who had fired at them? They didn’t know, but they suspected the latter; the downed helicopter appeared to be completely destroyed.

“Holy shit, man, I can’t imagine anything that could have gone worse,” Bentley said.

“Whatever you did,” said Brown, “you did it right, because we’re alive right now.”

When Brown stepped out of the aircraft, he was shaking. “It was my absolute worst day in the Army,” he said. “It was a huge defeat. I felt ashamed.”

After his MH-47 landed at Jalalabad, Finney was similarly shaken. Then he realized many of his men from SEAL 10 were still alive — they’d been kicked off the helicopter at the last minute. “It was like seeing the walking dead,” he said. “I almost started crying.”

Healy, the senior enlisted SEAL who’d declined to go on the recon mission with Murphy, insisted he and his teammates from SDV-1 were going to rescue their fellow teammates. “He said, ‘Come on, dude, those are my guys out there fighting,’ and that’s when he pulled off a couple of my new guys and he put the SDV-1 guys on there,” said Finney. (Healy and his teammates would later die in the crash.)

Dill, the Green Beret who was helping to coordinate the rescue effort, was frantically trying to get in touch with anyone who could give him an update. Finally, a commander on the other side of the air base called and explained the helicopters were refueling so they could rush back to the crash site. That’s when Dill realized they had only lost one helicopter. “Still bad,” he said. “But better than five.” Dill asked the commander to find the lead pilot and order everyone back to the airfield.

The SEALs were upset. Two of them angrily confronted Dill and Roberts when they returned to their huts in Jalalabad. “Who the fuck turned down our rescue?” they said.

Dill and Roberts explained that everyone at the crash site appeared to be dead — and they needed to come up with a better plan. With the recon team still possibly being hunted and reports circulating that the militants may have used a heat-seeking missile, they wanted to fly a few kilometers from the crash site to stay out of range — then figure out a way to walk through the mountains from multiple directions. “You never go rescue a dead body,” Roberts told POLITICO Magazine. “We were not going to lose another helo.”

A short time later, storm clouds rolled in, grounding all aircraft. The SEALs were gutted. “We were all ready to get our boys,” one wrote in his journal. “But they wouldn’t let us. The cowards in charge couldn’t make a decision.”

Dill understood their sadness and anger. “Everyone wanted to do something to try to help,” he said about the SEALs. “Stopping the second launch ended up being the right decision. We just didn’t know it at the time.”

Finney, however, was livid. “Every one of us,” he said, “was dying to go back in.”

‘I Guess This Is a Suicide Mission’

The chaotic, grueling and remarkable effort to find Luttrell and recover the bodies of his comrades took two weeks. It was “one of the largest and most dangerous combat search-and-rescue missions since Vietnam,” writes Wesley Morgan in The Hardest Place, his 2021 book about America’s war in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley. Most of those involved — CIA officers, Green Berets, Marines, members of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, SEALs, Air Force pararescuemen, pilots and Afghan partner forces — consider that time to be among the most punishing days of their military careers.

The Army Rangers played a critical role in that operation. They were among the first to find Luttrell, hear his survival story and raise questions about what had really happened on that mountain.

For Ranger Sgt. Nicholas Moore, the rescue effort began at dusk on June 29, more than a day after the militants shot down the MH-47. He climbed aboard a helicopter at Jalalabad Air Base, with little food or water in his pack, assuming the mission would be short. After a brief flight, Moore slid down a fast rope onto the dark, rugged mountain. Few other special operators had made it there at that point.

A day earlier, on June 28, after storm clouds thwarted Dill’s and Roberts’ plan to get to the mountain, Joint Special Operations Command took control of the recovery mission. At about 16:00, a Predator drone finally made it through the storm clouds and scanned the crash site. “The broken rotors and downed trees glowed from the light of the fire,” wrote one of the drone operators, Air Force Lt. Col. T. Mark McCurley, in his 2015 book, Hunter Killer. “There could be no survivors.”

Kristensen and the other SEALs on the helicopter were dead. So were Reich and his fellow Night Stalkers. According to the situation report, however, another aircraft saw someone using a flashing light and reflective tape to try to alert them. An hour later, it saw someone trying to signal them with another source of light, too. Both sightings suggested there could be at least one survivor from the recon team still out there, running from the enemy.

It was a good sign, but the escape and evasion plan drawn up by the SEALs before the mission lacked sufficient details and planning, according to Army officials. “Well, I guess this is a suicide mission,” Lt. Col. Chris Miller, a Green Beret working for the CIA, wrote about the task force’s initial recovery plan in his 2023 memoir, Soldier Secretary. “We had nothing.”

At dawn on June 29, dozens of Rangers, Green Berets, SEALs and CIA paramilitary officers with their local allies, known as Mohawks, left bases in Jalalabad and Asadabad and headed to the crash site. The bad weather, lack of good intel and fears of losing another helicopter led the task force to try to get there over land. “It was an incredibly complex situation,” said Lt. Col. Chris Vanek, an Army Ranger who helped plan the recovery for Joint Special Operations Command. “We didn’t want to reinforce failure with additional failure.”

It was a slog from either base, but the heat and terrain made it torturous — even for the physically fit members of American special operations. They started out mostly in Humvees and pickup trucks, bumping over narrow trails, with some Mohawks lagging behind on foot, leading donkeys packed with weapons and ammunition. Eventually, the trails became so narrow everyone had to hop out of the vehicles and trek up the mountain. “It was so fucking hot even the donkeys quit,” Miller recalled in an interview. After a few hours, some of the special operators dumped ammunition to lighten their loads. Others couldn’t continue and had to be administered IVs.

Moore and his fellow Rangers, along with a few SEALs, made it to Sawtalo Sar well before this land convoy. After hours of strenuous climbing in the dark along a narrow trail, they arrived at the crash site before dawn on June 30. It was roughly 36 hours after the helicopter had been blown out of the sky. At that point, Moore wrote in his 2018 memoir, Run to the Sound of Guns, “our gas tanks were on empty.”

There was little time to rest. They quickly set up a security perimeter, fearing another ambush. They didn’t find any militants, but there were signs of them everywhere — including stacked rocks and bunkers that were impossible to see from the air. “This whole mountain was dedicated to fighting,” Moore wrote. “The Afghans had … plenty of experience against invaders.”

In a cave on the north side of the mountain, they discovered a section of the fast rope the recon team had tried to hide — an indication, according to Moore and other Rangers, the militants had found it. (In Luttrell’s memoir, he mentions the rope being cut and their attempts to hide it. But when Berg included this detail in a version of his script, the Navy objected to it.)

Meanwhile, Rangers from another platoon climbed down the mountain into a ravine, where most of the bodies from the helicopter crash had been thrown. They put them in body bags, hauled them up the slope and laid them out on a grassy clearing.

Sgt. John Wagner was one of those Rangers going up and down that slope, pulling bodies out of the mud and the wreckage. In an interview, he recalled the horror of finding so many dead Americans. Some had been incinerated in the explosion — there was nothing left of them but skeletons and ID tags.

Wagner also saw dead Afghans, but not where the firefight took place. After the militants had shot down the MH-47, the Americans used phone intercepts to track Shah back to Chichal, the village where he’d been hiding. They then bombed a few homes there with GPS-assisted munitions. When Wagner got to Chichal on July 1, he learned the bombs had missed Shah but killed civilians. “We found a bunch of children’s limbs,” he said. “That was traumatic for my guys.”

The loss of life was tragic and unnecessary, said an intelligence officer involved in the recovery. It was also costly, upsetting locals at a time when the U.S. military desperately needed their help. “[Red Wings],” he added, “was one of my first forays into the truly dumb nature of the global war on terrorism.”

‘They’re All Dead’

While Wagner was in Chichal, Moore and his fellow Rangers headed back down the mountain. Someone had been sending out a signal on his radio but hadn’t identified themselves. The rescue team still didn’t know if it was an enemy or a survivor — or a troop of monkeys seen wandering the mountain with the SEALs’ equipment. They split into two groups and set off to find out.

The next day, Moore and his nine Ranger teammates heard on the radio there was at least one survivor in a nearby village. Though they didn’t know it at the time, it was Marcus Luttrell. He’d forgotten his blood chit — a form of military identification used to ask for help behind enemy lines — so he scrawled a short note on a piece of paper from his military field notebook and gave it to a village elder to take to the Americans.

The village elder walked miles over rugged terrain to Camp Blessing and handed it to the Marines. In an interview roughly two decades ago, First Lt. Matt Bartels, who received the note from an Afghan interpreter, recalled it was scrawled in black ink on a folded piece of green paper and said something like: “BEEN SHOT VILLAGE PEOPLE TOOK ME IN NEED HELP.”

The signature was hard to read, but the Americans suspected the note was from Luttrell. They couldn’t, however, be sure. Was it another trap? Soon, a group of special operators swooped into Camp Blessing on a helicopter. They cuffed the village elder’s hands behind his back, threw a hood over his head, dragged him into their aircraft and took off for Asadabad.

Despite being treated so roughly, the Afghan still wanted to help. He insisted Luttrell was safe in his village and tried to show the Americans where it was. But the intelligence officers didn’t recognize the name of the village. One finally asked him who the militants in the area were. When he answered correctly, the Americans realized they had a different name for the village on their map.

On the morning of July 2, Moore and his Rangers linked up with eight Green Berets, a member of the 82nd Airborne, a Mohawk and three members of Afghan partner forces. This hodgepodge group had received intelligence that the village was swarming with Taliban. They’d camped out in the cold and rain, near a steep hillside, waiting for reinforcements. “We were … soaked … and our weapons were full of dirt,” reads an unpublished history of the rescue mission, compiled by those Green Berets in 2005, and told mainly from the perspective of their commander, Capt. Kent Solheim. “[We were] … almost out of water, low on batteries, [and] without food.”

The Rangers, however, had learned the village was friendly, and after a quick airdrop of supplies, the two groups came together and set off to find Luttrell. Hours later, they arrived in the village, eventually finding the SEAL at the far end of it, dressed in tan military boots and traditional Afghan attire. “Marcus was coherent,” the Green Beret history recounted, “and in good spirits.”

For days, the villagers, led by a man named Mohammad Gulab, had been hiding Luttrell in a cave. The militants had come to the village, looking for the SEAL. They had threatened Gulab and his family and tried to bribe him. But he refused to betray the American, considering it his duty under Pashtunwali, a tribal honor code that mandates protecting people in need.

The Americans tended to Luttrell’s wounds. He had been shot and punctured by shrapnel, among other injuries, according to the Rangers and Green Berets. He was also sick because he drank contaminated water. Moore’s platoon leader, First Lt. Rick English, a former Green Beret who served in Delta Force, the Army’s most selective unit, passed away from cancer in 2014. Several years before he died, he spoke to Dr. Tony Brooks, a Ranger corporal in the same company, in a series of interviews for Leave No Man Behind, Brooks’ memoir about the Red Wings rescue and recovery. Brooks provided summaries of his notes from the interviews to POLITICO Magazine, as well as portions of English’s original notes from that day in the village. “[Luttrell] appeared injured, but not incapacitated,” Brooks wrote in his notes after speaking to English. “[He] walked under his own power … [and] could still put up a fight.”

The Americans questioned Luttrell for hours, and he told them a massive firefight had erupted between the militants and the recon team.

“Where are your teammates?” English asked, according to Leave No Man Behind.

“Dead,” Luttrell replied. “They’re all dead.”

The SEAL seemed worried about another attack by the militants. “They were everywhere,” he told his rescuers. “All up in those mountains.”

But perhaps because of shock, trauma or exhaustion, his answers were often terse, the details hazy and inconsistent. Luttrell, the Rangers said, couldn’t specify how many insurgents had attacked the Americans or where his teammates had died, beyond indicating a general area on a map and some notes about militant fighting positions. “We were enormously frustrated,” Moore wrote. “We really wanted to find the other men.”

Both Moore and English also noted Luttrell seemed to have all his equipment and magazines of ammunition. Neither counted Luttrell’s bullets, and Moore assumes the SEAL fired the bulk of one magazine as the Americans tried to break away from the militants in treacherous terrain. But there were many more magazines than what the Ranger expected after a deadly, hours-long firefight like the one described in Luttrell’s book. (In his memoir, the SEAL claimed he went through all but about one or two of his 11 magazines of ammunition.)

Later that afternoon, other members of English’s platoon went up and down the mountain, led by Sgt. First Class Ray Fuller. They found a smattering of American shell casings near the ambush site but no dead militants. After a few hours of searching, they found the bodies of Dietz and Murphy about 100 feet apart in a ravine. Fuller recalled discovering their satellite phone near a creek bed, less than 10 feet from Murphy, its antennae folded up like it hadn’t been in use. Another Ranger in his platoon remembered seeing it higher up in the draw, lying next to a map and a rifle cartridge.

After an American aircraft pummeled the ridgeline with artillery, Air Force pararescuemen medevaced Luttrell out that night, July 2, in a daring helicopter rescue. “Marcus, who was wounded from his encounter with the enemy, leaped over the terrace wall and ran to the helicopter without assistance,” the Green Berets wrote in their unpublished history.

It took about another week for a group of SEALs and Rangers to find Axelson. He was a modest Cupertino, California-native who excelled at golf and majored in political science in college. His body lay about a half-mile from the other two SEALs, a former Ranger told POLITICO Magazine. Axelson had clearly been dead for days, the Ranger said — his shirt off, his body intact — lying not far from a trail of brass and a 9mm pistol magazine with his nickname on it — “Axe.”

By that time, Moore and the Rangers in his platoon were headed home, frustrated they hadn’t recovered all the bodies and wondering about the accuracy of the surviving SEAL’s murky account. “Nothing we ever found,” Moore said, “supports [Luttrell’s] version of the story.”

The Man Who Stared at Goat Herders

Because Luttrell was the only American to survive the mission, the first attempts to piece together what happened leaned heavily on him, according to people present during his debriefings. It was early on the morning of July 3, 2005, when a military transport plane brought him back to Bagram. After seeing a doctor, he wanted to shower and rest, so the task force set him up in a small plywood shack. Jeff Dellapenta, a fellow SEAL, was assigned to shadow him for the next few weeks. Luttrell was in and out of sleep as the two SEALs rested in the darkness, the room illuminated by a TV and Christmas lights hanging on the wall. They watched a bootleg version of Batman shot by an Afghan with a handheld recorder in a movie theater. Kent Paro, the commander of SEAL Team 10, brought them cheeseburgers. (Paro declined to comment.)

When Luttrell was finally ready to chat, Dellapenta told him about the downed helicopter and the rescue operation. The young Texan had known there was some sort of crash but hadn’t realized so many of his friends had been killed. “Survivor’s guilt doesn’t start a month later, it starts immediately,” said First Lt. Jonathan Harmon, an Air Force combat rescue officer who led the reintegration process and played a critical role in the rescue mission along with his colleagues at the Joint Personnel Recovery Center, which coordinates search and rescue efforts. “Seeing his buddies get shot and knowing he couldn’t treat them was a significant issue that we had to overcome. I don’t know if he will ever overcome that.”

Soon, U.S. military officials began walking Luttrell through carefully coordinated debriefs designed to sustain his morale, gain intelligence and help him recover. The first was in the Joint Special Operations Command compound, and was run by an intelligence official who quickly produced a report to understand how the enemy operated. “I remember being absolutely blown away by the detail he provided,” said the senior SEAL familiar with the mission.

POLITICO Magazine obtained a copy of this debrief, and it is remarkably detailed, from the “three women and a donkey” Luttrell saw in Chichal while they were surveilling Shah to the “clean teeth” and “manicured hands” of several insurgents. The general outline of it is similar to what Luttrell described in his memoir and was depicted in the movie. But there are some striking differences and critical omissions.

In this debrief, Luttrell said the team was watching the village and trying to find Shah when two goat herders and a young boy stumbled across them. The SEALs detained the herders and tried to speak to them using an electronic translation device, then discussed tying them up. But Luttrell never mentioned a debate about killing them, as he does in the movie, let alone a vote about it — a pivotal point in his memoir. Instead, he said the team tried calling back to base, but their superiors weren’t available to offer them advice about what to do. Eventually, the SEALs let the locals go and returned to a previous waypoint, where they tried and failed to reach headquarters — a claim called into question by the situation report, the relay chat and the recollection of White, the Navy communications technician.

At about 8:45 Zulu, Luttrell “estimated that … 30-40 Taliban fighters began to line the ridge above them,” with AK-47s, grenades and RPGs. That’s far fewer than the 140-plus insurgents he described in his book or the seemingly endless horde of Taliban depicted in the movie. Before the enemy could attack, Luttrell said he shot the closest militant in the head, and the insurgents rained down gunfire. Dietz was shot in the hand; Murphy was shot in the abdomen. The young officer then ordered his SEALs to “flee the position and break contact,” according to the intel brief. The Americans tumbled down the mountain, losing equipment but trying to fire back at the enemy. “When [the recon team] … did take down a fighter on the high ground, another would fill the firing position,” according to the debrief. As they continued their descent, Luttrell said, Axelson ran out of ammunition and Dietz lost his gun. The SEALs were able to link up in a clearing, where they again tried to call back to base but still couldn’t get through.

As the Americans bounded down the mountain again, they began taking fire from three different directions. Luttrell saw Dietz about 250 feet behind him, according to the debrief. He heard the communications specialist scream “Help me!” and never saw him again. (In his book, Luttrell claims Dietz died in his arms.)

From there, the debrief gets ambiguous, stating that Luttrell and Axelson somehow ended up about 500 feet ahead of Murphy. Axelson had a head wound — his skull was exposed — and Luttrell stopped to examine it. That’s when Luttrell indicates he heard — not saw — his officer-in-charge call back to base on a satellite phone as the firefight continued. (In his book, Luttrell sees Murphy make the call on a cellphone, blood spurting from his chest, as he reports their approximate position. “Roger that, sir,” he heard Murphy say. “Thank you.” He later writes he heard him screaming for help.)

Luttrell told his debriefers he tried to scramble back to Murphy but only made it about 150 feet because of enemy gunfire. He blasted the militants, “expending a full magazine” of ammunition, before dashing back down to Axelson — a claim that seems at odds with the amount of ammo the Rangers found on Luttrell in the village and an interview he later gave to 60 Minutes. Luttrell said Axelson’s eyes were glazed over and he tried to bandage his head wound before they continued their descent. “Stay alive,” Luttrell says Axelson told him as they made it another 150 feet or so. That’s when the militants fired an RPG at them. The blast, Luttrell claimed, knocked him 40 feet down the mountain and into a crevice. “His ears were ringing and he believed his legs were broken,” according to the intel report.

Covered in mud, he placed a rock in front of him to hide from the militants and waited, his finger on the trigger of his rifle, listening to gunfire nearby. It was 9:32, Luttrell claimed in his debrief — about 45 minutes after the firefight had begun. He never saw Axelson or Murphy again. (This version, too, differs from the book, in which he claimed four Taliban killed Murphy at close range, while Axelson died right in front of him before the RPG blast hurled him down the mountain.)

Hours later, according to the intel report, Luttrell saw three Taliban fighters approaching and killed all three — almost half the total number of insurgents he claimed to have killed during the ambush and its aftermath. Nowhere in that document does it say the SEALs killed 35 militants, the number listed on Murphy’s Medal of Honor page online, or the more than 50 dead Taliban Luttrell claimed in his memoir.

The report also details Luttrell’s time in the village — including his escape plans and alleged encounters with the Taliban.

“People think the first telling is more accurate,” says retired Col. Steven Kleinman, a longtime Air Force intelligence officer and interrogation expert during the global war on terrorism. But even a detailed one, he says, isn’t necessarily a true one. “When we tell a story, we don’t mean to deceive, but we use logic to fill in the gaps.”

Over the next few days, Luttrell told his story over and over again — to his commanding officer, to a chaplain, to a psychologist and to Harmon. Other military officials stopped by to say hello or to ask for his help in finding Axelson. “It was overwhelming,” a SEAL who was familiar with the debriefs, said of the process. “Looking back, I can see there was a lot of fog of war and lapses in memory and time. I think he’s still traumatized.”

The senior SEAL familiar with the mission said no one ever vetted any of Luttrell’s early accounts with maps, imagery, after-action reports, videos or interrogations of alleged militants or villagers. “I believed they were accurate, based solely on his amazing recollection,” he said. “I tried to ask experts if guys in his situation would make something up and then file it away as a true memory, but the verdict was split. I never sought nor got ‘ground truth.’”

More debriefs — at least one on video — began in Landstuhl, Germany, several days later, as the second phase of Luttrell’s reintegration began. After two weeks with the young SEAL, Harmon produced a classified report about what Luttrell had told him. Few were authorized to read it. While Harmon and others involved in the process utilized sources beyond the lone survivor’s statements — including maps, videos and communications logs — by design, they didn’t aggressively interrogate Luttrell or write a broader history of the mission. Instead, they tried to dig deeper into his psyche without retraumatizing him. The goal was to help Luttrell recount the incident as accurately as possible, recover from his physical and psychological wounds and return home with a sense of honor. This version of Luttrell’s story, Harmon said, is “not perfect, … [but] is the best account we’ve got. I don’t know if we are ever truly going to know what happened … that day,” Harmon added. “Including Marcus. He’s under stress. He’s evading the enemy and his friends are being killed. That’s the worst environment in which to ask someone to recall specific details. I don’t know if he has told me everything.”

‘No One Wanted to Talk About It’

In combat, eyewitness accounts often diverge. People in stressful situations recall contradictory details — or sometimes — events that never happened. Questions linger, and misinformation flourishes, especially when facts are classified at the secret and top-secret levels.

After Operation Red Wings, there were several attempts to chronicle what occurred and derive lessons from the tragedy. But few SEALs were ever authorized to read them. “It was a strange environment … [and] very controlled,” said the senior SEAL. Many felt no one had adequately answered their questions — or pushed hard enough for the truth. And so they were left with nothing more than what Luttrell told them.

Most of SEAL Team 10 first heard a version of Luttrell’s account roughly 24 hours after his rescue, when Finney, the senior enlisted special operator, gathered all the surviving SEALs and asked Luttrell to describe the ambush. Leaning on a crutch, he told them his story. Most felt he was being honest. (That would change when his memoir was released.) He had a reputation for being earnest, helpful — “a good kid” — but inexperienced. They were glad he was alive. Luttrell had never completed any formal training on survival, evasion, resistance and escape — known as SERE school in military parlance — according to Harmon, making his rescue even more impressive.

The SEALs were far more critical of their leaders. As they said goodbye to the bodies of Murphy and Dietz at a ramp ceremony at Bagram on July 5 — their coffins draped in American flags — some were angry, others just grieving. Most wanted to make sense of the tragedy. What kind of weapon had shot down the helicopter? Why weren’t they allowed to rescue their teammates after the MH-47 had crashed? Did anyone survive? And what had happened with those Apaches? Rumors swirled: About an Army general taking their helicopter; about Shah having a Stinger missile from the CIA; about leaders from SEAL Team 6 pulling their men off the rescue helicopters because they knew the militants had such a weapon; and about an American who may have briefly survived the fall from the MH-47 — and had been trying to alert another helicopter.

A few SEALs tried to put together their own after-action report, fearing their superiors were whitewashing the deadly fiasco. Later, a senior Army official tried to talk to them about what had happened — but it only compounded their suspicions. An RPG, he said, had shot down the helicopter, not a heat-seeking missile. When at least two SEALs objected, they felt he dismissed their accounts: “You didn’t see what you thought you saw,” a SEAL in the room recalled him saying. “There are those moments when you’re just crushed by the military, when you just don’t trust it anymore. That was my moment.”

“It was weird,” the experienced member of SEAL Team 10 said. “We were all like, ‘What the fuck?’”

Paro, the commander of SEAL Team 10, was in Sarajevo when Red Wings kicked off. He traveled to Afghanistan after the helicopter was shot down. “I know the whole thing weighed on him,” said Thomas. He added that Paro tried to assure his men there was no conspiracy to cover-up misdeeds. But some didn’t believe him.

The SEAL Team 10 commander did put together an after-action report, compiling “lessons learned,” added Thomas, who stumbled across it years later. It was a PowerPoint primarily based on Luttrell’s original debrief. He presented it to the leaders of SEAL teams in Virginia and San Diego. But his superiors never made it part of a community-wide debrief, which many SEALs felt was necessary after such a tragedy. “Before Operation Red Wings,” Morgan wrote in The Hardest Place, “only 69 Americans had died in combat in Afghanistan. The loss of 19 special operators at Sawtalo Sar raised that toll by more than a quarter in the space of an afternoon — a shock to a country and a military that had mostly written Afghanistan off as a war already won.”

Most of the SEALs on the mission never read Paro’s report. “I think [Red Wings] was largely viewed as a big embarrassment,” said the senior SEAL with knowledge of the operation. “There were so many things wrong … that no one wanted to talk about it.”

The SEAL Team 10 commander did, however, identify the mission’s critical problems, including targeting Shah in such a risky fashion, not aborting the mission after the compromise and rushing to the crash site without the Apaches.

Apparently left unsaid, however, was an acknowledgement that SEALs such as Kristensen and Murphy — who most people with knowledge of the mission say bear some responsibility for what happened — were put in situations they weren’t trained for due to the structure of the SEAL teams and the inexperience of their officers. “As far as natural leadership ability, [Kristensen] was great,” said a second former SEAL, who was deployed with him in Afghanistan and knew him well. “But he was put in an awful position. Same thing with Murphy. As a community, we failed [them].”

Other investigations and reports dove more deeply into what happened, but most of the SEALs weren’t allowed to read them either. The first was what’s called a commander’s inquiry. Maj. Gen. Frank Kearney, the head of Special Operations Command Central, was chosen to spearhead it for the overall commander in Afghanstan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry. Kearney only had a few minutes to speak to Luttrell on the phone — Harmon, the combat rescue officer leading the SEAL’s reintegration, said an interview would be counterproductive to the process at the time. Kearney did, however, speak to SEALs, Marines and officials from Kamiya’s and Waddell’s task force, among others, said J.P. Roberts, the Green Beret. (Kearney declined to comment.)

The result of Kearney’s inquiry wasn’t a granular recreation of what happened; it was a big-picture analysis of failures in tactics, command and control and the planning that led to the disaster — going all the way up to Kamiya’s task force, which never published mission orders after it approved the operation, creating confusion down the chain of command. “A huge amount of my experience with Red Wings was that I had no idea who was ever in charge,” said Breen, the Army officer involved in the mission and the recovery.

Roberts believes there were aspects of what happened that no one ever told Kearney about — like Waddell refusing to cancel the operation despite the obvious problems with planning and coordination. “We were trying to protect our commander,” Roberts said of Waddell, whom he believes would never have approved the mission if he had known how inexperienced the recon team was. “When we work with a task force, they always assume that these guys are ready to be out there,” said the SEAL who knew Kristensen well. “Nobody ever asks, ‘Are your recce guys fully trained?’ That’s nobody’s responsibility but ours.”

The commander’s inquiry remains classified, and few people appear to have been authorized to read it. Kearney sent it to Eikenberry, expecting him to disseminate it further. But only Gen. Bryan Brown, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, and Adm. Joseph Maguire, the commander of Naval Special Warfare, appear to have been given explicit permission to review it. “When we get these mission failures, we don’t learn anything,” said Harrar, the former member of Waddell’s staff. “We still study failures from the Napoleonic era, but why aren’t we studying lessons from two years ago? Or two months ago?”

Breen agreed. “We had a choice between learning hard lessons and myth-making,” he said, “and we chose myth-making.”

‘We Shot Down a Helicopter’

Another comprehensive review was conducted by Rick Green, a historian for U.S. Special Operations Command. Few were authorized to read that document either. (Green did not respond to a request for comment.)

Any thorough report would have considered the perspective of Afghans involved in the mission and weighed them against the available evidence. When Air Force pilots and pararescuemen saved Luttrell, they also picked up Mohammad Gulab, the villager who played a leading role in protecting him. While Luttrell was in Bagram being debriefed, Gulab was being interviewed in Asadabad by an intelligence officer running Afghan assets in the area.

In the spring of 2016, we wrote a cover story about Gulab for Newsweek, chronicling how he spent the decade after Red Wings hiding from the Taliban before he finally escaped to America — without help from Luttrell or Naval Special Warfare Command. Not long after our story was published, the intelligence officer who interviewed him reached out to us. What the Afghan told us about the battle and its aftermath, the officer recalled, was similar to what he had said in his debrief.

We never received a copy of that document, but what Gulab told us differed from Luttrell’s account in several ways. Some discrepancies were mundane — Luttrell claimed Gulab found him in a stream, while the Afghan said he found him behind a rock, asking for water. Others were much more troubling. Gulab said the militants told him they discovered the SEALs not through the goat herders, but because they heard the helicopter and tracked them down by their distinctive footprints. He also heard that Axelson was still alive on the night of June 28 — and that the militants killed him the next morning. (Gulab declined to comment for this story.)

Gulab wasn’t the only Afghan with valuable insight into what had happened on Sawtalo Sar. The militants gave their own debrief in the form of a video, shot with two handheld cameras, as they ambushed the SEALs. The CIA learned of it before Luttrell was rescued, according to Miller, the former Green Beret attached to the agency. Parts of the raw footage, anonymously sent to a reporter nearly 20 years ago and authenticated by the Marines, show Shah and his men attacking the SEALs, the loud, frequent bursts of their AK-47s clearly distinguishable from the muffled, controlled blasts from the Americans. The footage is about nine minutes long, and the time stamps appear to match up with the relay chat and parts of Luttrell’s chronology. “One or two are still alive,” a militant says near the end of the recording, at around 10:10. “Capture them. Make sure they don’t run away.”

Based on this footage — and longer versions of it, in which the time stamps are covered up — the battle appears to be one-sided. The militants — brandishing RPGs and other powerful weaponry — do most of the shooting. The footage only shows nine men in the group, including Shah and the two cameramen. But the Marines later estimated there could have been one more member of the militia, based on radio and phone intercepts during and after the ambush, as well as human intelligence acquired in Pakistan. None of the fighters seen in the footage were dressed in “white ‘manjammies’ with a dark sash,” as Luttrell described the 30 to 40 militants in his initial debrief. “When shit hits the fan, it’s hard to know how many people are shooting at you,” First Lt. Patrick Kinser, a former Marine infantry officer who participated in Red Wings told us in 2016. “[But] there weren’t 35 enemy fighters in all of the Korangal Valley [that day].”

Another Afghan account came in the fall of 2008. It was a little over a year after Luttrell’s memoir was released — and months after Shah was killed in a shootout with Pakistani police. Two American contractors working for an Army special mission unit were in Jalalabad and reading Lone Survivor when they learned a militant subcommander had become a “source.” He claimed to have information about how the Taliban had begun using night-vision goggles on the battlefield.

One of the contractors, who had law enforcement experience, led the videotaped interview. The other, a former Army Ranger, listened to the first day of it from another room.

Early on, the lead interviewer began establishing a rapport with the militant. He tried to get a sense of whether he was being genuine, the former Ranger recalled.

“Do you remember what happened not too far from here with the American fighters?” the militant said.

“What American fighters?”

“You know, the fighters we killed,” the militant said. “There were four of them. We killed three. We shot down a helicopter and you guys spent two weeks looking for the bodies.”

The contractors were shocked. Using his recollections of Lone Survivor as a guide, the lead interviewer began probing, testing the reliability of the militant’s account. What he told him was very different from Luttrell’s narrative. When the SEALs originally slid down the fast rope and onto the mountain, the Afghans heard the sounds of the rotor blades and turbine engines. Shah and about a dozen other militants (including the two cameramen), the subcommander said, set out to find them that night, and early in the morning, they discovered where they had hit the ground. From there, they tracked the SEALs down by following their bootprints in the dirt. The militants watched the Americans for a while to make sure a larger force wasn’t about to arrive. Once they were confident no one else was coming, they ambushed the recon team, firing at them with superior weaponry from higher ground, forcing them down into a ravine.

“How many fighters did you lose?” the lead interviewer asked, according to the former Ranger.

The militant looked confused. “What do you mean? Like I couldn’t find them?”

“Like, they were killed.”

“None,” the militant said, adding that a couple were wounded but all survived. (The intelligence officer in Asadabad heard a similar story when he debriefed an Afghan source about Red Wings in 2005 and found it credible.)

Hours later, when the MH-47 rushed in to rescue the recon team, two of his men fired at it with RPGs, he said, as it hovered in the air about 300 feet away. There were no survivors, the militant said.

Shah and his men, the militant added, did not have a heat-seeking missile, a claim that matched the findings of an investigation by the Army’s Aircraft Shoot Down Assessment Team. The militant’s interview also supported the account of Mack, the Night Stalker who saw the helicopter on the feed in the tactical operations center. He didn’t see the flares of the MH-47 disperse as a defense mechanism when it senses a heat-seeking missile, leading him to determine, among other reasons, it was an RPG. (A second Night Stalker pilot who also saw the shootdown on the feed agreed.)

By the time the militants realized the villagers were protecting Luttrell, some of their men had returned to their day jobs. Shah’s foot soldiers never attacked, the subcommander said, because they were outnumbered and outgunned by Gulab and his neighbors. Instead, they positioned themselves around the village and fired mostly into the air, hoping it would distort their numbers and scare the locals into handing over Luttrell.

After two days of interviews, the contractor with law enforcement experience determined the militant was giving them reliable information, according to the former Ranger. Later that afternoon, a member of the Army special mission unit gave the only copy of the videotaped interview to a member of an elite Naval Special Warfare team. By that time, Lone Survivor had become a U.S. bestseller and the definitive account of “Operation Redwing,” as Luttrell called it, for many Americans.

‘Danny Is No Longer With Us’

On the evening of July 4, 2005, while America celebrated Independence Day, Patsy, Dietz’s wife, and her mom, Gloria, went on a short walk. Dietz had been missing-in-action for days, and friends and family had gathered at their modest home in Virginia Beach to pray for good news. Not long after they left, Baggett, Patsy’s father, was outside when he saw two military officials in uniform pull up to the house. The moment he’d been dreading had finally arrived.

As the head of the training department at SDV-2 — the same unit as Dietz’s — Baggett had found out about the helicopter crash right away. Days later, he learned of his son-in-law’s death from a colleague, but couldn’t tell anyone. All his daughter and the rest of Dietz’s family knew was that the young SEAL was missing. He understood the military would want to deliver the grim news.

And so, for roughly two days, Baggett swallowed his feelings, comforting Patsy as she refused to eat and sent emails to Danny late at night, praying he would respond. Friends and family tied yellow ribbons to the trees in the front yard — a symbol of hope that missing service members will come home.

When Patsy and her mom returned to the house that evening, they saw the military officials and rushed toward them. “Danny,” one of the officials said, “is no longer with us.”

Patsy’s knees buckled. She slumped to the ground. Then she jumped up and sprinted into the woods. Baggett chased after his daughter. By the time he caught up to her, she was on the ground, vomiting in the dirt.

When they got back home, Baggett noticed someone had ripped the yellow ribbons from the trees and thrown them on the ground.

Days later, a colleague sent him Luttrell’s initial debrief. He could see right away the mistakes the team had made. Wanting to learn more about their training, he reached out to a friend at Naval Special Warfare Group 3, which was responsible for evaluating the SDV Teams before they deployed. He sent him a list of questions. “Not an armchair quarterback,” he wrote his friend, “but I believe there are significant indications that when things went bad, guys just ran without maintaining a consolidated effort. I believe there was significant lacking of tactical experience.”

The response from his friend at Group 3 — and another colleague there — was disturbing. Among other issues, he learned Group 3 had failed Murphy’s SDV-1 platoon due to poor performance on land during their operational readiness exercise — a final evaluation that tests their ability to deploy. “They failed it badly,” Baggett said. “They were like soup sandwiches.” The platoon was given a quick retest, then cleared. “They were not ready,” said a former member of SDV-1, “WARCOM’s job was to provide war fighters, and everyone felt pressure to send them.”

As he dug deeper, Baggett received a copy of the Red Wings mission outline and learned people had raised concerns about the operation before it kicked off — including operators from SEAL Team 6. “The mission was too risky,” said Baggett. “And they had no contingency plans. What it comes down to is a certain level of overconfidence.”

Weeks after Danny’s death, Baggett finally broke down and cried.

‘We Were Extremely Concerned With Recruitment’

In the fall of 2005, after Luttrell returned to the States, he traveled to Virginia Beach to meet with Patsy. Baggett picked him up at the airport, dropped him off at Patsy’s home, then left.

The next day, Baggett learned that Luttrell was thinking about writing a book about the mission. Baggett was supportive, but knew it was unusual for Naval Special Warfare to allow him to do so. With a few exceptions, the SEALs were proud of their reputation as quiet professionals. That all changed with Lone Survivor.

By April 2006, less than a year after Red Wings, and while still on active duty, Luttrell had retained a prominent entertainment lawyer, an agent and a co-writer — the novelist Patrick Robinson. For several weeks, Luttrell traveled to Robinson’s home in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, telling his story as they sat on the writer’s back porch. They’d talk for 30 minutes or so as Robinson took notes, and the author would take breaks to make sense of them while Luttrell sat at the end of a dock, gathering his thoughts.

Luttrell eventually returned to his unit — he was now part of SEAL Team 5 and determined to redeploy — while Robinson finished the manuscript and sent it to Naval Special Warfare officials. In September 2006, months after receiving a Navy Cross at a ceremony at the White House, Luttrell and his co-writer shopped the book in New York City. Little, Brown acquired it in an auction for a seven-figure advance, according to The New York Times, aiming to get it out by the following summer. Luttrell then deployed with his unit to Iraq, trying to keep his book project a secret from his fellow SEALs. “Marcus read the whole book … every single word,” Robinson told POLITICO Magazine. “Everybody knew what was going on.”

Lone Survivor came out on June 12, 2007, not long after Luttrell was officially discharged. That same day, he appeared on NBC’s Today show with Matt Lauer and Lone Survivor quickly became a New York Times bestseller, thanks in part to endorsements from conservative pundits Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck. The encounter with the goat herders immediately became a flashpoint. Some argued it illustrated the U.S. military was too hemmed in by criticism from the press and the rules of engagement on the battlefield. As reporter Matthew Cole put it in Code Over Country, his 2022 investigation into SEAL Team 6: “The book … painted the War on Terror in stark black-and-white terms. … [It was a] near-fantasy of personal heroism laced with speculation that the ‘liberal media’ — and not failures of mission planning — caused the disaster.”

Roughly 20 years later, the story of how Luttrell got the Navy to sign off on his memoir remains murky. For more than a decade, he’s said the book wasn’t his idea, that Naval Special Warfare encouraged him to write Lone Survivor to help answer lingering questions posed by the families of the fallen — and to dispel some of the misinformation coming from the press, the Taliban and even Al-Qaeda. “My command decided the [Naval Special Warfare] community needed to get out in front of it,” he wrote in his second book, Service, which was released in 2012. “They decided I should write a book about the mission. I’m glad they allowed it, because I felt a powerful calling within me to honor the memory of some great warriors I once knew.”

When Lone Survivor was released, however, Robinson, Luttrell’s co-author, told a slightly different story. “When Marcus came back, he asked permission from the Navy to write a book essentially about the bravery of his three friends who died on the mountain,” the novelist told us in 2016. “Everybody said, ‘No, you can’t, but I don’t want to be the person to tell you no.’ It went all the way to the top of the Navy … and the problem was taken by the Navy to the Oval Office. To which President George W. Bush said: ‘It’s about time America had a hero. Someone tell the boy to write his book.’”

A former Naval Special Warfare official offered a similar account. “The admiral [Maguire] received a phone call from the White House and was told if Marcus Luttrell wanted to stay on active duty [while writing a book], he will,” the official said. “WARCOM … had to get behind it.” (A spokesperson for Bush said he could neither confirm nor deny that this occurred.)

Once the command got involved, however, “they wanted the story to be told as something heroic,” said a former Army official familiar with the aftermath of Red Wings. The way the media was writing about the SEALs — as the U.S. military was embroiled in two controversial wars — wasn’t always flattering. Roughly a year before Luttrell was granted permission to write Lone Survivor, the journalist Sean Naylor published Not a Good Day to Die, an in-depth account of Operation Anaconda, a disastrous and deadly 2002 battle against Al-Qaeda. It offered embarrassing details about planning and intelligence failures that implicated the SEALs. Naval Special Warfare, the Army official said, encouraged Luttrell to tell his story in part because “they didn’t want Sean Naylor getting his hands on it.”

However the decision was made, the Navy and Naval Special Warfare ultimately endorsed Lone Survivor, calling Luttrell’s memoir an “accurate accounting of Operating Redwing [sic]” in a 2007 press release. Maguire seemed to get behind it, too. “He was my shadow, my top cover,” Luttrell said in a 2024 episode of his podcast, Team Never Quit. “[Naval Special Warfare] gave me some freaking media training and started sending me through all these schools to get me ready to start going on TV… and that was my new job: recruiting.”

Luttrell’s memoir came at an important time for the SEALs. With the U.S. several years into conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the American people more and more frustrated by them, the military increasingly relied on Special Operations Command to help win its wars. In its 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon said it needed to “increase Special Operations Forces by 15 percent and increase the number of Special Forces Battalions by one-third,” a significant influx for the 2007 fiscal year. “We were extremely concerned with recruiting,” said the senior SEAL with knowledge of the mission.

Getting that many highly trained operators in “the pipeline” takes a long time, but the SEALs found some unorthodox ways to boost their ranks, including movies. First there was Act of Valor, featuring active-duty SEALs. Next was the film adaptation of Lone Survivor, starring Mark Wahlberg and Taylor Kitsch. (Universal Pictures acquired the rights to Luttrell’s book for more than $2 million, according to The Wall Street Journal). Naval Special Warfare allowed Berg, the Lone Survivor filmmaker, unusual access to men involved in the mission and information about the operation that was never made public. Redacted emails made available through a public records request show Navy officials reviewed Berg’s script and made sure the movie mostly stuck to Luttrell’s story.

Today, Naval Special Warfare says it discourages such efforts, but Luttrell’s memoir spawned a cottage industry of controversial and reportedly inaccurate books and movies — from Chris Kyle’s bestselling memoir, American Sniper, which later became a feature film, to divergent accounts of the Bin Laden raid. Some SEALs later used these stories — and the SEAL brand — to launch careers in politics, media and leadership. As Lt. Forrest Crowell, an active duty SEAL put it in his master’s thesis for the Naval Postgraduate School: “[Naval Special Warfare’s] endorsement of Marcus Luttrell appears to have sent the initial signal to the SEAL community that writing books about current operations was acceptable.”

Maguire may have come to regret the process he and his command helped set in motion. In an interview with Newsweek in 2012, he said, “Hollywood, money and politics were never part of the success of SOF [Special Operations Forces], but they very well could be part of its demise.” Even after getting access to Kearney’s report, however, he never pushed for community-wide debrief for the SEALs. The reason, according to Cole, the author of Code Over Country, is that delving so deeply into the failures of the mission after so many people had died would be seen as callous and insensitive to their families. “The worst thing they did was not address the mission’s shortfalls,” said a third former SEAL. “That wound ripped through everybody. I think they did it with good intentions. But in retrospect, they didn’t have the capacity to recognize the fallout so many years down the line.”

The senior SEAL familiar with the mission put it more bluntly: “Maguire was a political animal. He was doing public relations.”

Part of that public relations effort, former SEALs said, seems to have included commendations. After Red Wings, Paro, the commander of SEAL Team 10, put all four members of the recon team up for Silver Stars. To most SEALs, that seemed fair. But all were later upgraded — Axelson, Dietz and Luttrell received the Navy Cross, the second-highest award, while Murphy received the Medal of Honor for making the heroic call for help, the first SEAL to earn the accolade since Vietnam. (The Navy later named a destroyer in his honor.) “Not since 1975,” Morgan wrote, “had such a raft of top-tier valor medals been awarded for a single engagement.”

Murphy’s award was unconventional — and controversial — former SEALs said, in part, because there weren’t two eyewitnesses to his heroism, as required by Navy regulations. “[His] award nomination went back and forth to the Navy Classified Awards Board several times, with the file growing fatter with more supporting documents each time,” a Navy officer with direct knowledge of the process wrote in an email. “SPECWAR very much wanted the award to be approved because they kept resubmitting it.”

Documents POLITICO Magazine obtained via a public records request offer a glimpse into that process. In an undated letter to the secretary of the Navy, the commander of Naval Special Warfare — a position Maguire held until June 2007, just months before Murphy’s medal was upgraded — said the young officer’s Silver Star had been fast-tracked so it could be presented to his family at his funeral. But since then, information had emerged that merited greater distinction. In the packet were slides from a brief given to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, maps and satellite imagery from where the battle took place, a letter from Brown, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, as well as a statement from Mark Takla, one of the two men on the other end of the line when the SEALs called for help. The packet included Luttrell’s initial debrief — in which he indicated that he heard, rather than saw, Murphy make the call on the satellite phone. But it also included a recorded statement from the young Texan that differed from his original (the details are redacted). “I attribute this to the condition of the survivor at the time,” the head of Naval Special Warfare wrote. “It was only after he was able to decompress and rest, and carefully consider and reconstruct the actions of his teammates that the survivor was able to focus on the selfless heroism and inspiring leadership that Lt. Murphy and his other teammates demonstrated.”

Most of the SEALs involved in the mission said the bulk of the evidence indicates Murphy did make a call for help on the satellite phone, though they credit Dietz with an earlier attempt to get through on the radio. Despite the mistakes made on the operation, they believe the recon team did the best they could with the training they had, especially considering their disadvantages on the battlefield — the rugged terrain, the size of their force and their inferior firepower. No one wants to take anything away from them. But few were happy with the exaggerated stories that emerged in the book and the movie, the unusual nature of the medal upgrades, or what they appeared intended to mask. “Maguire sold it to our community as a way to preserve their dignity,” a retired SEAL officer told Cole in Code Over Country. “They handed out a bunch of awards … and swept it under the rug.”

In an interview, the former Night Stalker said such an approach is all too common across the military. “The problem is bigger than Red Wings,” he explained. “It’s systemic. In order to try and honor our heroes, we fail to learn the appropriate lessons.”

There were, of course, some efforts to learn from the mission. Over the years, some SEALs said they went out of their way to talk about the operation and its mistakes with their men. Yet Baggett and others said there were still lessons learned that weren’t passed along in a timely manner. “I keep losing friends on these stupid ops that never should have happened,” said another senior SEAL familiar with Red Wings and its aftermath. “It makes me want to vomit.”

Baggett concurred. In early 2009, he got a call from his old friend Mike Peter, who had just become the senior enlisted member of a platoon at SDV-1 in Hawaii. Like Baggett, Peter knew all about their issues with training for land warfare in the lead up to Red Wings. But he was certain Naval Special Warfare would make sure it had improved. He was wrong. “They hadn’t learned anything from Red Wings,” Baggett recalled Peter telling him. “They were as fucked up as a bag of rats.”

In an interview with POLITICO Magazine, Peter said the training issues at SDV-1 went back to the pre-9/11 era, when the leadership shifted its focus away from land warfare and back toward diving missions — an old-school mentality that left them without the requisite skills needed for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “They had tons of water training,” said Peter. “But their training on land was completely defunct.”

As his new platoon began their operational readiness exercise, he watched, frustrated, as they failed it due to poor performance on land — just as Murphy and company had before they deployed for Red Wings. “I said, ‘Hey guys, this isn’t necessarily your fault, you weren’t fucking trained.’”

‘Everybody Knows There Is a Scab on This Story’

For years, Baggett never thought he would talk publicly about Operation Red Wings. He cared about the truth but didn’t want to stir up bitter memories for the families of the dead. He also didn’t want to be seen as piling on Luttrell. “I think Marcus has done the best anyone in his situation could have done,” Baggett said. “There is probably a lot of stuff that lives with him and there’s no way to get it off his chest.”

But over the past decade or so, Baggett and others have watched as SEALs became mired in one scandal after another — from the death of a SEAL recruit and subsequent investigations into drug abuse and failures of leadership to an attempt by Naval Special Warfare to block an Air Force special operator’s Medal of Honor.

And then came Eric Deming. He’s a retired SEAL master chief who has long spoken out against corruption in the Navy — from drug abuse to profiteering inside the SEAL teams. Last year, he went a step further, unloading on Naval Special Warfare — and Luttrell — in a series of podcast appearances. His first, in March 2024, was a two-hour interview on The Anti-Hero Podcast. It went viral, as Deming accused Luttrell of cowardice and fraud, detailing many of the mistakes that plagued the Red Wings mission.

The podcast was controversial. Deming wasn’t part of SEAL Team 10 during Red Wings and didn’t have firsthand knowledge of the mission. Some of what he said was true — like the pressure put on the recon team to not be “a bunch of p—ies.” But other parts were false — like his claim that there’s drone footage of Luttrell abandoning his teammates. “When you don’t tell the truth,” Baggett said, “and Naval Special Warfare didn’t, everyone else is going to fill in the blanks.”

Deming’s subsequent appearances on other military-themed podcasts spawned more views and more commentary. Veterans and civilians alike argued about the truth — and why so much of it had been obscured. “Everybody knows there is a scab on this story,” said the former Army Ranger familiar with the interview of the militant who was part of that ambush. “They keep picking at the scab, but they don’t know how to heal the wound. I think the healing of the wound will come when people will realize there are lessons to be learned.”

In an interview, a fourth former SEAL recalled the last time he went through land warfare training, in the mid- to late-2010s. One of the exercises involved a helicopter being shot down. The SEAL complained the training didn’t seem true to life — in the real world, the whole operation would stop, he said, because the team would have to protect the aircraft and look for survivors. “Everyone looked at me like I was an idiot,” he said. “I was the only one who noticed. Naval Special Warfare didn’t do what’s best to pass on [that knowledge].”

For many of the SEALs we interviewed, the renewed focus on Red Wings has been painful — but also cathartic — especially after the U.S.’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Today, the war that took so many of their friend’s lives is over, and their reservations about speaking about the mission have waned in the face of what they see as some much-needed accountability. “I love my brothers in the SEAL teams,” said Macaskill, the former officer. “I am not a fan of Naval Special Warfare as a whole. We eat our own and simultaneously try to glorify our community.”

Macaskill, Baggett and others we spoke to don’t think telling the truth about Red Wings dishonors the men who died on that mountain — nor does it dishonor Luttrell, whose survival story remains remarkable despite Lone Survivor’s exaggerations and other inaccuracies. “Fuck legacies and egos,” said Thomas, the officer from SEAL Team 10. “Whatever screw-ups I made, publish them. That way, in the future, some young kid doesn’t get killed.”

This article contains reporting Ed Darack conducted as he researched his 2009 book, Victory Point: Operations Red Wings and Whalers — the Marine Corps’ Battle for Freedom in Afghanistan.