who do you think does recon for a SEAL team? yep SEALs when they were at the first OP they phoned in exactly what they were going to do. move back, hold at OP2, wait for comms to be established. We have had guys go 6+ hours with no comms traffic and we immediately dont start bombing things. the team had intel from some taliban traitors that the Shah was only guarded by a small number of men, when they arrived they obviously realized this was wrong. in 2005 while drones were prevalent in the area not every team had drone support handy so they couldn't get video of the town and its inhabitants. If you use satellite imagery (where their maps came from) you cant tell combatants from non combatants.
This was a high profile kill from a target ( according to the movie) had just made the news for killing 50 marines, and mailing there heads back to the families...
You telling me this is how sloppy a Seal Unit is?
Also you didn't address the fact that in the "Movie" there commanding officer ( Eric Bana) knew ahead of time they were going into an area were the coms would sure to fail.
That team not only wasn't told that, but they didn't even prepare for it ahead of time.
That's a pretty big fucking screw up to go from a Shah with 15 bodyguards to a 200 men encampment.
Also you are yet to address the ROE situation which is the one that ultimately got them killed. In the movie they immediately let them go with not thought of how they will even get out of there.
They don't have a seal scout ahead to see if they can even exit, they don't think of another way to buy themselves any time to escape.
Just because a village houses Taliban does not mean the entire village is. there were probably 200+ women and children also in that town as well as a school of some kind. Once again ROE dictates you cannot attack unless you know with a certainty all targets are combatants. I have been in a FOB in a small village and watched guys holding the taliban flag, obvious members but holding no weapons and we could not engage due to ROE.
They had the dead or alive orders on the target. When the seal team saw that they were in over there heads with no extraction, and no coms they should have moved out of the kill zone area.
In the movie they couldn't even kill the Shah without direct communication with a senior officer. There was no way for them to kill this guy either way.
That new intel they obtained could have been used by there commanding officers to decide how they were going to proceed with this new situation.
You also have no idea how many soldiers were attacking, i guarantee it was not 200 at the onset.
I'm going by the movie, and the never ending waves of soldiers that came at them constantly.
the Airsupport was a huge issue because everyone shares air assets in theatre teams dont have dedicated close air support at least at the time. The army had troops in contact at another location so the SEALs apache's were pulled. The Chinooks should have turned around and not taken off without any support, they weighed the risk/reward and decided to carry on.
Except according to the wiki that shit isn't even accurate. In the Movie they have no air support at all, and in real life version of those events they had Apache support.
That is a huge fucking difference.
and finally your comment on rambo after the battle and the removal of the Shah when they did sight recon every man on that team was responsible for a dozen+ kills. and each were shot several times. Michael Murphy was shot 7 times while radioing for help, Marcus when he was rescued had a broken back and his hand replaced with 50% pins and rods ,several gunshot wounds, an intestinal parasite, and shrapnel burns on 40% of his body.
Did you even watch this film? they never missed, every shot was a kill immediately, and they seem unaffected by massive trauma.
Adrenline may make you forget the pain, but it doesn't stop you from bleeding out, or moving on broken limbs.
The first damage they take is catastrophic. Emile gets his hand severed in half, and seems to not only stop the massive bleeding that would have caused with a simple piece of cloth, but also is able to still fire a high powered rifle more then effectively against enemy troops.
It is very easy to look at this in retrospect and call out why the op went bad but in the situation they made the best calls possible to try and survive and be criminals of war.
They did not make the best calls possible, and it started from the top down to the bottom.
The US government is not going to put people in prison because you A) marched 3 prisoners out with you to an extraction point or B) Tied them up while you got away.
Not everything needs to be a kill....
One last point the original book is steeped in controversy. The facts related in the book do not match up with the official after-action reports they have of that operation filed by Marcus himself.
How did Marcus get clearance to even write this book? Why did the book come out in the middle of massive ROE issues in Washington?