Quote Originally Posted by jcustis View Post
I'm about 100+ pages in, and to be honest, already pissed off....

I understand that this book is written for a specific audience, but I'm having a tough time coming to grips with the fact that one of our supposedly best-trained special ops warriors would write such ignorant babble about our ROE, where it originates, and the purported "fear" it creates in every young servicemember. Give me a break...

Seems Luttrell (remember, in my opinion) was setting this issue up throughout the whole first part of the book, with the repetition about mortal danger, fanatic jihadists, and "fighting for each other"....

If this is Luttrell's true point of view, ...
I haven't read the book, nor will I. I have relatively little to add to the previous comments, and the big issues that have been raised have been addressed by others better than I could, but just to put one more perspective out there -

Luttrell's co-author, Patrick Robinson, is a bit out there. I read a few of his books back when I was spending a lot of time stuck at airports (anyone who travels much in the US has probably seen his stuff on display), and as time went by, they went from moderately entertraining, Clancy'ish thrillers focused on SEAL and sub ops, to sort of a combination of war porn and right wing blog posts.

It should be noted that the last book I read addressed a semi-coup by the US military due to the anemic response of the newly elected, radical left wing US President in the face of a threat. Said threat was a plot by a renegade SAS operator and his wife, a beautiful female radical Islamist named Shakira, to destroy the eastern seaboard of the US by launching cruise missles into a volcano in the Atlantic ocean. The science actually made more sense than the plot.

Perhaps more relevantly - in another of his books, SEALS kill a couple of civilians who stumble onto their hide site.

I'm a bit embarrassed to be admitting to reading this stuff, but in my defense, they didn't start out like that. I actually threw the last one away, and I NEVER throw books away.

None of this is a defense of Luttrell. He's a big boy, his name is on it, and he did the media tour thing. I just think that there are likely to be multiple agendas in that book. And that Patrick Robinson might not have been the best choice in ghost writers.