Article of the Week 9: IRB Section 4

The Lone Survivor was a powerful and chilling book. Since the last section, Marcus and one of the local people who had saved him ran from the village hoping to find shelter to fight the Taliban. The Taliban ran through the village and beat up children to keep the village morale down; they did no more because the Taliban needed the support of small villages such as these. After the Taliban left, Marcus and his friend ran from the village and miraculously stumbled upon a troop of US soldiers looking for Marcus. After radioing in, Marcus and the other troops were lifted out via helicopter on a village opium plot. Marcus spends the rest of the book describing how his family and friends reacted to his mission and his friends' deaths.

Repetition is rampant in The Lone Survivor. The author continues to express ideas of never being alone, and the threats of the liberal media. Throughout the book, Marcus emphasizes this SEAL tradition of never leaving each other alone. When they trained, they always had a partner, but what struck me was at the end when the Navy was taking the bodies of the dead soldiers back. Even then, they sent a SEAL to stay with the soldier until he was buried. This stuck with me because it showed how much the organization invested in the people who had gotten this far.  Maybe more important than never being alone, was the threat of the media in a soldier's life. Marcus described the news as a sort of weapon that the Taliban had in their arsenal--the only one of which the SEALs were afraid. This fear of the media caused Marcus' team to go against their training and ultimately led many lives lost. These ideas were constantly brought up in the book, but the reader did not realize the scope of these statements until the end of the story. It was interestingly  written to escalate. First, Marcus mentioned that he did not like the media, then he showed how they changed his decision, and last of all, showed the destruction of such a decision. The plot of this story almost ran like a syllogism.