In 2009 as I was headed to Virginia Beach to fight on an MMA card with my opponent, who was kindly driving, I read Lone Survivor in its white dustcover, a memoir by a Navy SEAL named Marcus. By the time I was done reading the book and Damien and I were getting set to fight, I was questioned in the changing room by a man concerning my preparation, and the rules for, a machete duel. He introduced himself as a former SEAL. I immediately mentioned the book and it was as if he were hit by a psychic blow when he said, “Good book. I knew those guys, all of them.”
The book was so good that I have never been able to forget Marcus’ name, and have never bothered to recall his last name—the account being that personal.
Yesterday a young man lent me the DVD of the movie and I sat up into the wee hours viewing it. In many respects it was similar to viewing The Way Back, the film adaptation of The Long Walk, in that the filmmakers were faithful to the spirit, and the defining episode of the author’s account, but caved into patriotic sentiments and the filmmaker’s naturally epic impulse, to distort the record.
Before comparing this film to the book—or at least my five year old recollection of it—let me state that it could have been done no other way. The U.S. military was needed to make this film, as was the cooperation of individuals still in combat in Afghanistan. I think the filmmakers made the best choice possible by concentrating on telling the part of Marcus’ story that involved his three teammates, which was essentially how he wrote the book, as a remembrance of them.
The book was an incredibly vivid record of an operation gone wrong at the end of a logistical and intelligence shoestring, against the people and the environment that has broken every empire that has sought to impose its will on it. The last portion of the book was an anticlimactic recollection of a kindly Afghan man and his family sheltering a wounded warrior.
The heart of the movie is the heart of the book, portrayed with gut wrenching authenticity. The first scene of the movie, the final half hour, and the resumption of the first scene at the end, is in essence an ode to a gleaming weapon of excellence which was thrust into the bare rock of a stark land by an uncaring empire; essentially the story of Achilles, a brutal war protest cloaked in a remembrance of its most ferocious practitioners. And, just as the Trojans received credit for their deeds and quality in Homer's Iliad so did the Taliban in Lone Survivor. The scene where the young Afghan shepherd literally runs down a mountain is awesome, and must have been shot using a free runner. The crucial scene in the movie is when the SEALs release the civilian hostages that compromised their operational survival. This sent chills up my spine as I remember my brother Rich [an army ranger in the 1991 Gulf War] recounting a nearly identical 'death by shepherd' situation.
The first third of Lone Survivor is a faithful record of SEALs preparing for war. The mid half of the movie is a graphic depiction of 4 of these men battling a mountain and an implacable foe; a brutal fight out of which the only good things that came were this story and the friendship between Marcus and the man who abided by his people’s custom of hospitality to save a stranger in a brutal land.
The final half hour of the movie is essentially the story of this unlikely friendship told as if it were the conclusion of a 1940s John Wayne western; a childish yet necessary sacrifice to our national delusion. Do not stop watching when the movie becomes a superhero film, but stick around for the memorial to the men who died on that mountain. A pair of scissors to remove 15 minutes worth of necessary good guy/bad guy combat fiction would have made it the perfect movie memoir. Somehow I think the filmmakers understood this, as they made no effort to depict sensible combatant behavior in the final fictional battle, in stark contrast to the brutal realism of the earlier actual battle.
