I’ve Found My New Hero – Marcus Luttrell

At this year's St. Jude Country Cares Seminar, as always, we were treated to a surprise key note speaker.  While this year's speaker wasn't a household name, I soon found out that the images he conveyed from personal experiences would stay in my mind for a long, long time.

The crowd of radio programmers from across the country were shown a video explaining that Marcus Luttrell was the only surviving member of the Navy SEAL team assigned to Operation Red Wing, a 2005 mission to take down Ahmad Shah, a Taliban leader with close ties to Osama Bin Laden.  In his speech, Luttrell talked about his training in preparing for entering the Navy SEALS, then his SEAL training itself, and finally the fateful mission in which he and his team of 4 was surrounded and attacked by Taliban gunmen.  The story that followed was one of horror, death, suffering, and eventually for Marcus, survival.  Let me first say that I wouldn't have lasted through the first day of training, much less a day in the Afganistan mountainside, getting sprayed with gunfire and grenades...getting paralyzed temporarily from the waist down, crawling 7 miles in 115 degree heat, and watching best friends being killed around me.  That's just part of what happened to Marcus Luttrell.  Pardon my language, but I can only classify this man as what he is: The Biggest BADASS of all time!  Watch this sample video of his inspirational speeches and to get the full story, you can purchase his book, Lone Survivor here.