Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10

I'm not sure I can separate this book review from my politics. Although, after reading some of the other reviews of this book, I'm not sure anyone reviewing this book has yet, so I'll just add my own bias to the pile.

Marcus Luttrell, a Navy SEAL, writes a first person narrative of his four member covert SEAL team's failed Operation Redwing mission: to take out a high ranking leader of al Qaeda, protected by members of the Taliban, in the remote and forsaken mountains of Afghanistan. The mission, attempted during June of 2005 and risky to begin with if everything went perfectly, turned into a bloody retreat as their location was apparently leaked to the Taliban by some unarmed goat herders Luttrell and his team mistakenly, or rightfully...depending on your ideology, set free after the goat herders stumbled onto their hidden location.

Luttrell and his SEAL teammates faced 4 against 100+ odds against a heavily armed, better positioned Taliban army and the results are disastrous for the SEALs. Within 24 hours, Luttrell turns out to be the sole survivor and his injuries and position give him little chance for rescue. Days later, dying of thirst, his legs destroyed from a grenade explosion and from seven miles of crawling, he is found and protected by an independent and stalwart Pashtun tribe who refuse to hand over Luttrell into the hands of the Taliban. With their protection, Luttrell is eventually able to send out an emergency beacon picked up by the US military and is later rescued by an elite team of Army Rangers.

Brave and physically fit as Luttrell is, elite as the Navy SEALs are, courageous and patriotic and confident as his team was...Luttrell does not give this story, or his team, the justice they deserves because he fills his book with so much personal bias, so much political and military rhetoric, and much too much tangent-flowing-pat-on-the-back-extraneous-information that this story of survival and valor is weakened to the point of failure. He failed to share his story in a neutral, matter-of fact way that could appeal to the masses, instead choosing to propagandize it to those who already agree with his personal political philosophies. The entire book reads like a Toby Keith song.

Recently, I was watching What Not To Wear on The Learning Channel and after a woman's boss told the video camera that she didn't feel like she could send her employee to certain meetings because of how she dressed, Stacy and Clinton told their victim that her clothing should never have a negative impact on the workplace. Neutral or positive....yes...but if her choice of clothing was hurting her opportunities for progress and promotion, she needed to change how she dressed for work.

Both for its perspective and understanding about the sacrifice and heroism those asked to defend our country display - this is an important story to tell. Unfortunately, I feel like Luttrell's choice of voice is like this woman's personal choice in clothes: it may be exactly what he thinks but how he tells it is not very helpful and perhaps even harmful. The writing was poor to distraction. According to the cover, there was a co-author involved but the writing felt so juvenile - it read like a high school, or worse, junior high school essay. First hand accounts of history are, of course, invaluable, but a grown-up story should be given the benefit of grown-up writing.

Beyond that, I lost track of how many times Luttrell veered off track his story of survival. Whether it was the detailed account of exactly how extremely physically fit Navy SEALs are through rigorous training is (his Bud/SEAL training fills the first 2/3 of the book), how liberal, unfair and anti-military the mainstream media is, personal stories of his family members and childhood, or the unnecessary repetition of military procedures and his personal racism, (I found his stereotypes of the Arab people disconcerting, particularly after Afghan men risked their lives, and the lives of their entire tribe, to protect and help him) this book ended up having too many objectives than the one the title claimed: the story of Operation Redwing and the fate of the SEALs who gave their lives to the cause.

Not ever having served in the military, nor knowing many people who have, I can only imagine the indoctrination that must occur to train and prepare soldiers for battle. Luttrell clearly believes certain things to be so but that does not necessarily make them so. The laws protecting human rights given in the Geneva Convention, the criminalization of torture, humiliation and harassment of an enemy, rules of engagement - all, according to Luttrell, written by a bunch of liberals in suits - might seem misplaced and unnecessary in Luttrell's mind, who has a Machiavellian belief that in the military realm, the desired end should justify any means. However, history has shown that without checks of power, mankind is notorious for disregarding human life. I'm not saying those rules and regulations make his job easy or fair, because, just as he complains, too many of our enemies do not abide by these same rules. He contends that unless the members of the military are given free-rein to do "whatever needs to be done to win" we will lose not only this war, but any war.

Maybe he's right. I don't know. Maybe he should have killed those goat herders who he believed betrayed their location. Maybe the coalition guards in Abu Ghraib had every right to humiliate and treat their prisoners like animals and slaves for the sake of their own morale. Maybe the only real way to be patriotic is to believe your country is stronger and tougher than any other. But I hope not.

I hope there is room for a little humanity in the world. I hope, like that Pashtun tribe in Afghanistan, there is room to do the right thing regardless of the guns pointed at you. I hope there are people everywhere who do the right thing because it is right and not because there is a law against doing something else that is wrong. I did not get the sense from Luttrell that in his world of war games and war, he believes many human beings are capable of doing the right thing. Except, of course, Americans and only if those Americans happen to be from Texas, think Bush is the greatest commander-in-chief ever or members or relatives of members in the military. Otherwise, those actions are a surprise and perhaps even an anomaly.

Luttrell may be brave, tough and patriotic. He may be highly trained, confident and a finely tuned warrior.

But....I hope, for my own sons' future, that he is wrong.

Loving Frank

This book was brought to my attention several months ago but I didn't seriously consider reading it because I thought it was essentially a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, the famous architect. I have a serious handicap when it comes to reading non-fiction and if I'm going to read a biography of someone, I wanted to read about someone whose life's details I had some...nay....any interest in knowing. An architect, even a really, really famous one, didn't meet that criteria.

When it was selected as a book group selection, I waved my white flag and read it anyway. Say what you will about book groups, one thing I appreciate about the forum is that they tend to throw books in my path that I wouldn't otherwise read. When I end up actually enjoying the mandated book, I appreciate the selection even more.

Loving Frank is part factual biography, part fictional novel featuring the life of Mamah Borthwick Cheney's as she fell in love with Frank Lloyd Wright. Mamah, a feminist, intellectual and suffragist, was married to safe, loyal but rather boring Edwin Cheney. The married couple were financially secure enough to keep a nanny, a housekeeper and eventually hire an up and coming architect to build one of his conceptually new "Prairie Houses". Financial and marital security did not bring contentment to Mamah, however, and when Wright intimately connects with her on an intellectual and emotional level during the building of her and her husband's home, a physical affair between the two quickly follows.

What makes this story compelling and great discussion fodder isn't Frank and Mamah's relationship or their affair, it's the constant negotiating and justification the author forces Mamah to debate with herself and with the world about the honesty and integrity of romantic and self love. For Mamah, a person's own happiness super ceded that of any one else's, including one's children, although she admitted several times how incongruous that belief felt at times. When she found literature written by radical thinker, Ellen Key, her belief that she should be with Frank at the expense of everything else, because she loved him, deepened. I am left wondering when, if ever, a selfish act is the BEST act. As much as the pair wished it to be so, they did not exist in a bubble and their relationship had real and lasting consequences to the families they abandoned.

If the moral debate is the actual gift of the book (and for me, it was), then the fancy wrapping and giant bow is the holy-cow-wow! drama and historically significant events that made up the life of Frank Lloyd Wright. This should be a very interesting discussion.

The Last Jihad

I cannot remember who recommended this to me, but I'm fairly certain I was told to read it because it's not the kind of book I normally check out. Jay - yes. Me - no.

I knew right away that it might not be my kind of book after seeing the rave reviews by both Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity on the back cover. Hmmmm. In spite of their warning, I forged ahead.

The Last Jihad takes place in 2011 - ten years after the the World Trade Center attacks and enough time later for the current president to have persuaded the American people that he's just about vanquished every foe. With a 70% approval rating and the economy stronger than ever, the War on Terror is declared won.

During his victory tour in his hometown of Denver, Colorado (described with annoying detail. O.K. I believe you. You've been to Denver), his motorcade is attacked by a kamikaze pilot.

This attack is coordinated by none other than Saddam Hussein, who the author unfortunately didn't realize would be an obsolete bad guy when he wrote this in 2001. It was hard to muster up the anxiety about a nuclear attack on Israel, and the United State's own necessary response because the villains were who they were. I know I could have replaced Saddam with an actual living bad guy, but with its cheesy dialogue and a cast of confusing characters - it required too much effort.

I passed the book to Jay when I was done, thinking he might enjoy it and he returned it to the library after only a few short chapters. He told me, "If this is what you think the books I read are like, then you must think I'm some sort of idiot."

I stand corrected.

(I'm so not going to get away with this comment after describing his head as "not petite." I'm still digging myself out of that hole).

Love Walked In

I liked this book. I really did. But it's not going to sound like it.

Loved Walked In was recommended to me by Becky K., a blogger whose taste in books I take seriously. Once I began reading, I couldn't put the book down because the writing is intimate - very conversational - so you feel like you're reading a lengthy, but funny and interesting, personal letter from your best friend. I admit that I was disappointed with de la Santos's too frequent and flippant use of the F bomb because the other language she uses is so enjoyable. She's a poet, after all, and can string together some really pretty words. I suppose her defense is that it went with Cornelia's conversational tone, and, like many people nowadays, Cornelia casually peppers her everyday language with vulgarities, but I felt like it took away from a book that was on track to be great.

If the unnecessary language was strike one, then the overly tidy ending was strike two. Love Walked In begins when Cornelia Brown, a pretty, 85 pound 31 year-old woman obsessed with old-style Hollywood romances and working in a Philadelphia coffee shop, meets Martin Grace, a Cary Grant look alike who changes her life forever after he walks into her cafe. Cornelia's story, told in a funny parenthetical filled first person narrative, alternates with eleven year-old Clare Hobb's, who describes her increasingly desperate situation as her mother succumbs to manic depression in a much more direct third person (I mention the different voices because the change really is noticeable and, at first, a little disconcerting). Cornelia and Clare cross paths halfway through the book.

It doesn't feel predictable until it is. There were so many plot twists throughout the first two-thirds of the story, things not going the way you'd expect them to, that its tied-up-in-a-pretty-bow ending didn't feel right. It's a good ending in that everyone's happy and everyone wins (at least the characters whose relevance still matters by the end) , but happily ever after isn't always the best way to end a story.

I AM glad I read it. It's charming and well written, interesting and funny. The criticism comes from it not being as great as it could have been.

Look Me In The Eye

In a day when a cure is expected for nearly every ailment, flaw or disorder, I was struck by John Elder Robinson's assertion that those with Asperger's Syndrome, a neurobiological disorder on the autism spectrum that the author lived with undiagnosed until he was forty, needs no cure - only understanding.

Robinson starts his story with his earliest memories -a failed attempt to make friends in a sandbox - and meanders through his shame at being called a deviant and a psychopath because he avoided eye contact (although his explanation about how he still doesn't understand most people's need to stare at somebody's eyeball while speaking to them is hilarious), leaving home in the middle of his teenage years, finding himself as part of the 70s rock scene and creating flaming guitars for KISS, faking his way through a job interview for a position as an engineer and getting it by reading and memorizing books about the subject, his parallel struggle to "be a team player" through out his career, until he finally arrives at understanding and acceptance for both his gifts and oddities.

Although this book contains many fascinating stories that stem from his dysfunctional childhood rather than his Asperger's Syndrome, Robinson's experiences and viewpoint sheds a great deal of light on an "Aspergian's" way of thinking. I have a nephew who has been diagnosed with Asperger's and a brother and sister-in-law who constantly seek balance between his way of seeing things and their own understanding. I found myself asking my sister-in-law the question, "Do you think he needs a cure?" Who is to say? Robinson made clear in his book that while he has learned a great deal about appropriate social responses through trial and error, he still finds them unnatural and really, more to the point, unnecessary. What is normal? How much of life's successes are social? What parts of our own personalities should be fixed? I mean, I can't imagine an enjoyable existence where we are all the same.

But, if Asperger's Syndrome falls on the Autism Spectrum, and we observe those with the kinds of autism that render them completely unable to connect to the outside world, certainly we feel they miss out on opportunities for relationships and meaningful experiences. Certainly we would choose a cure, if there was one to be found. So at what point of the spectrum do we intercede?

These are simply the questions that I had after reading this book. You may or may not have similar kinds. However, if you get a chance to read this illuminating book, you will definitely have a glimpse into a colorful and fascinating life.

A Lantern In Her Hand

I need to get this book out of my head. I think it's partly to blame for this heavy blanket of melancholy I've been feeling since Friday.

Originally published in 1928, Beth Streeter Aldrich uses this novel to create a fantastic female character, Abbie Deal. Abbie's story begins in 1854, when she is eight years old and at the start of a three week journey, traveling with her family by wagon from Illinois to Iowa. The fact that I grew up listening to pioneer stories from this era made her voyage very vivid in my mind. I could see the sacks of flour falling out of the wagon and floating in the river and the oxen slowly pulling all the families' possessions along a bumpy buffalo trail. The story ends in 1926 with Abbie's death at the age of 80. The face of America changed dramatically between those years, and Abbie's life changed alongside it.

Part pioneer story, part pride of Nebraska lesson, part farming tutorial, part commentary about marriage - Aldrich ultimately uses Abbie Deal to explain the choices and sacrifices that faced a 19th century woman, or more specifically, a mother.

Perhaps Abbie Deal's selfless mothering is the source of my distress. I've always felt I've lacked in this arena and while I've tried really hard not to compare myself to my friends' and siblings' styles of mothering, I found myself forlorn with the realization that I was no Abbie Deal. Abbie was a natural mother. She postponed her dreams of becoming a singer and learning how to paint the prairie's sunset to follow her husband, Will, to Nebraska at the end of the Civil War.

Originally, she postponed these dreams for the sake of her husband, who needed to carve his own way in life away from his father. Later she postponed them because there was no money or opportunity and every ounce of her energy went into building their home and farm and caring for her young children. Later yet, she postponed them because her children grew and had dreams of their own that required any extra time or money she had saved. Finally, she abandoned them altogether because her talents had left her. Her voice had faded from non-use and her fingers were gnarled and knobby from years of work. In the end, all she was left with was her good name and the pride she had in her children's accomplishments.

Thus started the deep, stabbing pain in my chest. This kind of story, really...the universal story of motherhood, always leaves me feeling a little "damned if you do, damned if you don't". Abbie gave up everything of her own...her talents, her time, her figure (I can really relate to this), her life...for her children. The feminist in me resists....even feels slightly miserable that we women are expected and praised for being noble and altruistic, but void of personal achievement. The mother in me, however, wipes away a tear as I watch life from back stage instead of front and center, but wholly gets that my family is THE point. I get to clap and cheer and know that my efforts made this grand production possible.

Throughout the book, Abbie does women a great service by allowing herself to wonder "what if". What if she had married that other boy who wanted her but who she didn't quite love, the one whose wife now wears all those fine clothes? What if she and Will hadn't moved to Nebraska and avoided suffering through drought and grasshoppers and blizzards? What if she had kept at her singing...developed the talent that everyone acknowledged she had? What if, what if, what if? What if I had? What then? Is the prize for the correct choice happiness?

The fun in discussing this book would be hearing the strong arguments that defend the choices made at either end of the spectrum, and all the shades in between. Today, we lucky women get to choose whatever shade we like. Do we like how we look? Does it match our souls?

Abbie Deal chose motherhood but the story did not romanticize her choice. Abbie's story included every distracted husband, every sick child, every annoying friend and every moody child. And yet, in the end, Abbie sat as an old woman and felt satisfied that her five children were a fine product of her life's work.

I recommend this book to every woman out there who enjoys tales of pioneer life or more importantly, empathizes with the difficult decisions made by women everywhere...always.

The Life Of Our Lord

A very quick read (I read it in less than an hour last night), this contains a personal narrative of the life of Jesus Christ given by Charles Dickens to his children. The language is informal and written so that his children could follow and understand.

While there is nothing contained within the pages that those familiar with the Bible haven't already heard, to read it so condensed, so casually and with such love is refreshing. This isn't a history lesson, nor is it a sermon. It is simply the testimony of an important author about the man he knew was his Lord.

You'll hear no complaints from me.

Little Children

I hate it when good books aren’t good. This had it all: an interesting plot, well developed and believable characters, and an authentic ending which I seem hard pressed to find lately. But the subject matter was bad, bad, bad.

Perotta attempts to write an expose on stay at home parents. You’ve got your bored intellectual, your spandex wearing control freak, the spineless followers of spandex wearing mom, and the stay at home by default, career stalled dad.

Sarah, the intellectual, is frustrated in her loveless marriage and lack of socially acceptable peers. Todd, the good-looking dad who is trying to pass the bar exam on his third try, brings his son to the playground and is the object of fantasy (dubbed the Prom King) by the moms on the playground. Sarah is emboldened with her feminist ideas that women and men are the same and can actually be friends and walks over to talk to him at the swing set in order to prove her point to the inferior minds of the lesser mothers. As she is walking over, one of the previously mentioned moms (although this particular SAHM is slightly more acceptable to Sarah because at least she smokes) dares her to get his phone number.

At the swing set, she is surprised by Todd’s friendly nature and informs him of his playground royalty status. He writes his phone number on her hand and then she suggests they really shock the gaping onlookers and hug. Here, her feminist idea that a married man and a married woman can independently be friends is thrown out the window as the hug turns into a kiss RIGHT THERE AT THE SWINGS IN FRONT OF THEIR KIDS.

An affair ensues, she is ostracized (and for good reason in my inferior minded opinion) by the other moms and their drama plays out in both of their marriages.

Icky stuff but dang it…it’s good! My gripe is the haughty nature of the educated mother. I feel like I keep reading about her over and over. Since when does going to graduate school give a degree in life superiority? It’s as if going to school is the only truly worthy thing a woman can do anymore. Hey, I admire the sacrifice and dedication it takes to complete a thesis or advanced degree. Here’s a big, gold star for you. But it also takes dedication and sacrifice, not to mention an incredibly sound mind, to take on the challenge of parenting and running a household with enthusiasm and zest.

The funny thing is, I don’t know either of these women. Sure, moms can be competitive but it’s usually due to their own insecurities. I know I feel I don’t measure up but I don’t believe it’s because some snarky woman on a playground says rude things to me about the processed food I feed my children or because my friend with a graduate degree constantly spouts off quotes from classic literature.

Diatribe aside, (I obviously have some defensive issues to deal with) my favorite thing about this book was the story within a story. Sarah attends a book group somewhere in the middle of the book and expounds on her interpretation of Madam Bovary - - something about how this woman might have been promiscuous but it wasn’tthe point of the book. It was about unhappiness and feminism and that the character tried to take control over her happiness although it didn’t lead to a satisfying outcome. In Sarah’s opinion, at least she didn’t let others decide for her what she could and could not do. While I might not agree with her feelings, I loved realizing at the end of Little Children, that Perotta wrote the same story. Very well crafted and richly layered. There are so many other parts to this book that I didn't even touch.

Definitely recommended but this is not for your Relief Society book group.

Letters

You know the wife of President Hinckley must have been an amazing woman. This book is a compilation of letters she wrote that were saved by her children, sisters, friends and grandchildren and was published after she died in 2004. Her own words show her to be funny, strong, supportive, compassionate, a hard worker and true believer. In addition, her and President Hinckley's history is told with wonderful bluntness. The busyness of business, the jet lag, toll on family and marriage that come from being an apostle and prophet all glare at the reader. But so does the unwavering faith and joy that each of them found in spreading the gospel. There is a letter written by President Hinckley at the end of the book, that brought tears to my eyes. This is a wonderful and inspiring read.