Marcus Luttrell

Marcus Luttrell was born November 7, 1975, in Houston, Texas. He and his twin brother Morgan grew up training in martial arts under a former Green Beret. By his own account, he knew he would become a Navy SEAL before he was old enough to understand what that meant. He began training for BUD/S at 14.

He joined the U.S. Navy in 1999, completed BUD/S with Class 228, and was assigned to SEAL Team 5. He later deployed with SEAL Team 10 to Afghanistan. On June 27, 2005, he was part of a four-man reconnaissance team inserted into the mountains of Kunar Province — Operation Redwing.

The mission went wrong when three local goat herders discovered their position. The team voted whether to release them or neutralize them. They let them go. Within an hour, 35 Taliban fighters surrounded them. In the firefight that followed, three of Luttrell’s teammates — Michael Murphy, Danny Dietz, and Matthew Axelson — were killed. A helicopter sent to rescue them was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade, killing all 16 men aboard. Luttrell survived by crawling seven miles through the mountains, severely wounded, before being sheltered by a Pashtun tribe who risked everything to protect him.

He was awarded the Navy Cross — second only to the Medal of Honor.

In 2007 he published Lone Survivor with Patrick Robinson. It became a New York Times bestseller and one of the most-read military memoirs ever written. In 2013 it became a film starring Mark Wahlberg, directed by Peter Berg. In 2012 he published Service: A Navy SEAL at War, a follow-up examining what military life costs the men who live it and the families who wait for them.

Luttrell co-founded the Lone Survivor Foundation to provide retreat programs for wounded combat veterans and their families. He is the founder of Team Never Quit, a supplement and gear company built around the SEAL principle of never surrendering regardless of what comes.

He is not a motivational speaker in the conventional sense. He is a man who was tested at the outer limit of what a human being can endure, and survived, and came home, and chose to use what he survived to help the men who are still fighting.