I was in Helsinki during the recent “Night of the Arts” event, and visited a fully packed bookstore. All books were on discount, so after quick scouting I grabbed a “No.1 New York Times bestseller” from the shelf: Lone Survivor, written by Mr. Marcus Luttrell, a US Navy SEAL. It turned out to be just about the worst book I’ve ever read.

The SEAL troops are highly trained special forces soldiers of the United States Navy. They are at home while gliding through the air in a parachute and while diving under water, and have to undergo a highly gruesome training regime which weeds out the ones without high levels of willpower and physical capability. In other words, they are the top professionals at what they do.

I can understand that the emphasis in the training of a Navy SEAL has nothing to do with writing books. Perhaps for this reason the author Luttrell was aided by Mr. Patrick Robinson. But even so, the book occasionally reads like it was written by a 13-year old.

I’ve always considered the SEALs as a professional bunch of soldiers who are both physically and intellectually highly capable and understand that in order to beat the enemy one has to understand and respect the enemy, especially if one is deep within the enemy territory where the enemy has a clear advantage. Unfortunately, the book presents at least the author as some kind of a Hollywood action movie cliché - pumped-up jock with oiled biceps, on a persistent testosterone-high, shooting from the hip with two machine guns, Rambo-style, shouting “God bless Texas” while slow-motion explosions go off in the background.

The bad thing with this kind of depiction, even though it may offer some kind of boost to the author’s self-imagined “reputation” as some kind of a Supreme Bad-Ass Motherfucker Killing Machine Who Survived the Taleban (and Got a Picture Taken With The President), is that it changes also the reader’s perception of the Navy SEALs as a whole and lessens the respect towards the SEALs by suggesting they are little more than dumb brutes who go in unprepared. Blast first and ask questions later.

Another rueful thing is the author’s blame that his SEAL buddies died because of the liberal media of the USA. In the book, after the SEAL team has found a place from which to observe an Afghan village where their high-value target would be roaming, the SEAL team gets practically walked upon on surprise by three goat-herders and their goats. The SEALs do not know whether the goat-herders are Taleban or not, nor if the goat-herders would later tell Taleban troops the position of the SEALs. The team tries to request assistance via radio but that does not work. Therefore, the group next votes whether to kill the three goat-herders, but eventually abstains from doing so due to fear of backslash from the “liberal media” and the “civil lawyers”.

The author claims to have voted against killing due to his Christian moral values. Later, the author suggests this decision turns out to be the one which eventually results in the death of the rest of the SEAL team, but instead of blaming his Christian upbringing, he places blame on the liberal media which forces soldiers to follow some form of rules of engagement.

In any case the option to let the goat-herders go was the right one. Not due to compassion, but because in practice, although killing the goat-herders silently would have been easy, getting rid of hundreds of goats would not have been easy at all and would have exposed their positions in any case. The right option would have been to let the goat-herders go, follow them to see they truly go away and then find new positions immediately.

But what did the SEAL team do? Sure enough, the team follows the goat-herders to make sure they go away. But after this, the SEALs go back to the same positions they were found in, as if nothing had happened. Assuming the worst case where the goat-herders would indeed proceed to tell Taleban troops the location of the SEALs, the only sane course of action would have been for the SEALs to immediately move out of that area.

So the SEALs stayed put and concealed themselves. What happened next is that they spotted a group of obviously Taleban troops, on a higher ground, eyeing in their general direction. No shots were fired, but the Taleban were either trying to round the SEALs up or to scout if the place was still empty or not. Eventually the author spotted a Taleban quite close to his left, near a tree and shot that Taleban to the head. This resulted in a firefight which, long story short, eventually killed everyone except Mr. Luttrell.

Think of the situation: you are well concealed, obviously no-one sees you as no shots have been fired. You see the enemy, but you’re not sure if the enemy sees you. The enemy is at a higher ground than you. Also, the enemy outnumbers you at least over twenty times. You can’t really move into better positions. The enemy starts to round you up. What do you do? Good question. There’s really not much to do, the mistake had already been made. You could stay silent and hope you won’t be seen, and wait for the enemy to disappear, but it’s unlikely they would do that.

I think the moment when the SEALs decided to just go back to their old positions actually sealed their fates. Everything subsequent, including the death of the SEALs and the rescuers sent after them, was a direct result of this bad choice. The episode with the goat-herders or the “liberal media” is not to blame.

Seen from this angle, the book, with all the macho bravado, the irrational finger-pointing and the bad writing, turns out to be a very sad story indeed.