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‘Lone Survivor’ enthralls, tugs at heart strings

Anyone who can finish Seal training is of a caliber of person that many can only dream to become. More will quit that those that exceed. They are made to overcome obstacles and odds that most of us couldn’t wrap our minds around. Director Peter Berg brought us an utterly heart breaking true story that will make you want to yell and scream and cry all in the same moment. Without knowing it, you become attached to the men in the movie.

Lone Survivor takes you to Afghanistan, with Seal Team 10 members Marcus Luttrell (Mark Wahlberg), Michael Murphy (Taylor Kitsch), Danny Dietz (Emile Hirsch), and Matt Axelson (Ben Foster). This four-man team goes on a mission to kill Ahmad Shah, a Taliban leader who recently killed 20 US marines.

The movie begins with getting to know these guys. A couple of them have wives and one has a fiancé. We become attached with the back-story of men just wanting to go home to the women that love them and wait for their men to return from war. Axelson, Axe, instant messages his wife the morning before they leave for this operation, and tells her he will be out of contact for a couple days for “work’, but that he loves her.

Mike Murphy receives an email from his fiancé, she wants an Arabian horse as a wedding gift, and he wants nothing more than to make that happen for her. Danny Dietz gets an email from his wife asking about paint colors for the house. She wants to redo the house, and the guys suspect she may be pregnant. Dietz wants to pick whichever color he knows she’s already decided on. He takes a print out of the color palate with him on the mission.

This four-man team gets dropped on a hill and they make their way towards the village where they know the Taliban and Shah are. They soon run into a complication when three shepherds come across them. After a few minutes of intense arguing, Murphy makes the call to let the two boys and the old man go, while they abort the mission and make their way uphill to get in cell service to reach base. As expected, soon after letting the shepherds go, they are ambushed by the Taliban. Next is a sequence of gunfire, and watching these men you’ve learned so much about fight for their lives and for that of each other.

Though they take many of the Taliban out with them, they are outnumbered and outgunned. As they get shot and drag each other across the rough terrain, you start to think that maybe they will be OK; maybe they will make it out. Then it gets worse, and soon the four men are throwing themselves off of cliffs over boulders and shale and they obtain injuries that most humans couldn’t get up and walk with. But these four do.

Next we watch as Axe and Luttrell fight for their lives, full of bullet wounds and broken bones. At one point, amid the gunfire, they lose one another and scream for each other for a few minutes of quiet as the Taliban reloads. Murphy got a signal out, and two American choppers are seen coming in. The two remaining men are thrilled, they yell more, and then lose all hope as the Taliban blow one chopper to smithereens.

Though I’ve given away most of the plot, I would spoil the ending of this magnificent story of modern warfare. The actors and director and film crew did a fantastic job of portraying the story of those brave men who died at the hands of the Taliban for our country.

These men and women of our Seal Teams are the unsung heroes of our time; whose names and what they have done are mostly unknown. Definitely go check this film out, but prepare to shed some tears along the way.

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