WSJ Interview with "Lone Survivor" Marcus Luttrell.
On Monday Lt. Michael Murphy was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor
I have no military background so I wouldn't try to understand what military life is like or what they go through on a day-to-day basis. I always felt I could understand what Eric Bana's character says at the end of Black Hawk Down. After making it back to the stadium, he is telling Josh Hartnett's character why he does it. His friends say he must like killing people or that he is 'some kinda war junkie." Bana says," I just smile because they won't understand, it's about the guy next to you."The same can be said for family, close friends, and even not so close friends when they need your help. From the outside looking in, you cannot understand and from the inside looking out, you can't explain it.

"All I wanted to do was stop talking" about what happened in Afghanistan, Mr. Luttrell says, "and now I'm neck-deep in it." Another frustration is the inadequacy of words to convey the experience. "I can sit here and tell you that I got into a gunfight," Mr. Luttrell says, "but you can't put it into words. Your heartbeat doesn't raise, the hair on the back of your neck doesn't stand up when
I tell you that. When you're out there--the stuff we get into--people get sick.
You get so scared, you urinate on yourself. That's fear."

In the months following the mountain fight, queries from family and friends about the gun battle and debriefings following inaccurate news reports (such as one announcing his death) on the incident became such a distraction, Mr. Luttrell says, that it was difficult to concentrate on his SEAL duties.

"Normally I wouldn't talk about any of our operations. This one wouldn't leave me alone," he says. "It kept banging on my door and I had to do something about it." The solution, he thought, would be to set the facts down in print so that they would be on the public record. Then maybe he could move on.

If you look around and see all the movies Hollywood has created (because they are fiction) lately and they are mostly despicable, garbage picking at worst stories out there: Redacted, Rendition, Lions for Lambs and the one Tommy Lee Jones was in. America knows this and they don't care and they don't go see these movies. Stories like Mr. Luttrell's and Mike Murphy's are more in line with America's sense of respect and view of the Armed Forces. We may not all agree on everything but we'll be damned if we pay to let some voyeur in a director's chair bring down our fighting men. When will Hollywood ever learn.

Hollywood, he says, has no idea what war is like. That's why he's wary of negotiations currently under way to film "Lone Survivor." If it happens, he says with the trace of a grimace, he'll probably "go out there and help," otherwise it might turn into "a love story" or a special-effects extravaganza with "people spinning from wires, which it wasn't. It was about death and people dying."

It should be noted that Mr. Luttrell is giving away his income from "Lone Survivor," reportedly putting it in a trust to aid military charities and the families of the dead soldiers, although now he says simply: "I'm in control of it so it goes to the right places."