Let me state right up front that there's no earthly reason Navy SEALs have to be likable to me. They do things I can't, they go into situations that terrify me, and even if I *was* tall enough and strong enough and having-a-Y-chromosome enough, I don't think I'd make it as a SEAL. 
 Even leaving out the abilities factor, I'm fairly sure I've spent rather more time than most people do reading war memoirs at this point. I go into them with the implicit assumption that at some point, someone is going to do something I would consider completely reprehensible. And I know that every time, I have been left with the unsettling assumption that I would likely have done just the same thing in those circumstance. This is precisely, completely WHY I read anything, not just war memoirs: it's critical to understand others and their circumstances. 
 That said, I got 30 pages into Lone Survivor and put it down with my blood pressure rising. I've read WAR, I've seen and understood soldiers cheering as they watched enemies exploding in front of their eyes. I've read soldiers who were too exhausted by combat and who, still within the operation, had nothing more than rote apologies for families whose children had gotten killed in airstrikes. I've read enough to know the at-once uplifting and heartbreaking fact that it's about the soldier beside you and nothing else. It's about protecting your team. 
 Luttrell's attitude still got way under my skin. One of the things I always see, implicit or explicit, is the understanding that the people you face are people with full lives, beyond just an insurgency. In WAR, the soldiers worried about how to convince the populace not to join the insurgency. In Love My Rifle More Than You, the narrator spoke about having to bring men in to be questioned, with everyone understanding that they had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time (oddly, this was also the situation in which she found herself watching and doing things that would later haunt her). In Ashley's War, the SEALs and CST members spoke to villagers and reported back on the bind they found themselves in: "The Taliban sees you come," one woman told them, "and they see you leave, too." In memoirs about Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam, everyone has seemed to understand that these were people with full lives, and that having a foreign army come into your home and start fighting terrorists in a way that endangers the populace is a terrifying, and often angering thing. Luttrell seems to have no such understanding. 
 It furthermore reeks of logical fallacy that the man, within 30 pages, has several times referred to the military prowess of W, whose team by that time had made mistakes that cost huge numbers of U.S. casualties, and had also many times referred to the godliness of his (Luttrell's) work while mounting character assassination on anyone else who dared kill because they didn't seem to understand the ten commandments (?). 
 In short, I was left with a strange feeling. Luttrell and his team did things few others could, and did so bravely. He mentioned that SEALs privately believe very few problems COULDN'T be solved with a well-placed bullet, and to be brutally honest, who among us hasn't wondered the same when looking at Syria and North Korea? He fought the Taliban and al Quaeda, forces who committed unspeakable atrocities. He even makes the point that countries who cannot accept that the wrong people die in wars, that innocent people die in wars, should not get into wars, and with this I agree whole-heartedly. 
 But Luttrell seems to have nothing but contempt for those innocent people. He refuses to view either them or the insurgents as rational, reasonable human beings whose actions fall, on a macro scale, very similarly to anyone else's. He proudly describes his mission as revenge killing. I have nothing but respect for the Navy SEALs (and the Green Berets, Army Rangers, and all other special forces), and indeed, for every other SEAL I've read about in these wars. This book, however, I can't do.