Eric Eliason

SEAL teams dilemma seems a gross embellishment or a barely averted war crime.

I know because I patrolled that same river valley in Afghanistan a year before.

As a member of an Army Special Forces unit we would never have considered killing goat herders.

Movie fans are flocking to Lone Survivor, and critics are praising the film for its attention to detail and its depiction of Navy SEAL bravery. But the story's central "moral dilemma," of American fighting men deciding whether to kill three Afghan goatherds who might compromise their mission, is either a gross embellishment or a barely averted war crime.

I know because I was there in the Pech District of Konar Province with Army Special Forces patrolling the very same river valley in 2004, just one year before the Lone Survivor events.

The movie shows that not long after the SEALs let the goatherds go, they were attacked by Taliban fighters, with only one of the four of them surviving.

My Afghan tour

When I was in Afghanistan, we passed goatherds almost daily. Sometimes we suspected that they told the Taliban our location. Yet never once did we think to detain, let alone kill, them. No moral dilemma here.

What explains this scene then? Maybe the SEALs did consider murder that day. The lone survivor, Marcus Luttrell, claims he argued against the killing. Instead, he accuses his dead friends who can't respond. It would be unfair to blame Luttrell too much. He blames himself for making the wrong call that day. But any number of things, from poor contingency planning to Talibs with binoculars, could have compromised his team. Luttrell cannot know what the freed goatherds did. After all, when the Talibs killed the rest of his team, it was a local Afghan who saved him.

Maybe desperate, but never seriously considered, words morphed into a decision-making process for dramatic value. If so, this slanders U.S. fighters by implying that voting on whether to kill random non-combatants is what we normally do.

But stories of war crimes seriously considered reveal a war effort gone terribly wrong. In 2004, 60 Minutes and U.S. News and World Reportsingled out the Pech as a bright spot where counterinsurgency was working. We won the support of locals by risking our lives to protect them, not by threatening to kill them if they got in our way.

A lost lesson

This lesson, according to the movie, was forgotten sometime between my unit's departure and the SEALs' arrival — after which the Pech suffered years of the war's bloodiest fighting.

If the positive reaction to this movie is any indication of how the Afghan war will be remembered, it augurs the emergence of a self-serving "noble lost cause" mythology. It also bodes poorly for Afghanistan, and for any truly noble future war's success.

The Lone Survivor episode is a tragedy that reveals the best of American bravery. But even greater tragedies could come if Americans leave this movie believing that purposely targeting innocents can ever be right, and heedless of how this attitude undermines our war efforts.

Eric Eliason served as the chaplain for the 1st Battalion 19th Special Forces Group, 2002-08. He is an English professor at Brigham Young University.

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