LONE SURVIVOR AND A CULTURE OF SACRIFICE

By James Wilson

            I recently saw a film that rocked my world.  Lone Survivor is a story of the human dignity that makes life worth living and without which we’re left with a pale counterfeit.  It showcases the difference between living and surviving.  It is about the will to sacrifice survival, a will without which there is no hope of achieving the dignity of authentic human life.

            Lone Survivor is the true account of a Navy Seals mission gone bad in Afghanistan.  A four man team is sent to an inaccessible area to capture or kill a notorious Taliban leader.  Unable to keep prisoners, they must make a decision worthy of the Sword of Damocles when they accidentally capture a trio of goatherds: kill non-combatants who have done them no harm – in cold blood – or release them to the likelihood at least one will rat them out to the Taliban.  They decide releasing is the honorable thing to do, at the sacrifice of their cover.  A short time later the four American warriors find themselves under attack by more than two hundred Taliban fighters.  In the bloody battle that follows three of the four are killed, taking with them a lopsided number of attackers, and a seriously wounded Marcus Luttrell is able to slip away.  During the fight team leader Michael Murphy sacrifices his life by exposing himself to heavy fire in order to call for help.

            Many would find their decision to release the goatherds to be as senseless as it is suicidal.  But the whole story of Lone Survivor is one of sacrifice piled atop sacrifice – from the unimaginable punishment to mind and body the would-be Seals endure to qualify, the further sacrifices of comfort and the right to say, “Enough” during training, to the ultimate sacrifice of life itself in defense of country and honor.

            The four Seals are not the only sacrificial lambs in the story.  Two helicopter loads of rescue troops are shot out of the sky while landing to rescue Marcus; there are no survivors – and no regrets.  He falls into the hands of Afghan tribal leaders who nurse him back to life while awaiting his next rescuers.  When the Taliban come to demand he be given to them his host refuses.  The tradition of Pashtunwali – the honor of the Pashtun people – requires that a host defend a guest with his life, no matter how or why that person becomes his guest. (It predates Islam by centuries.)  The film telescopes events into a final climactic firefight – actually the Taliban simply return repeatedly to demand that Marcus be handed over.  The tribal elders must make the courageous decision to risk death many times.  Such decisions are obviously noble, but are they reasonable? For strangers?  For goatherds?

            Reality is the world was structured around an economy of sacrifice from the beginning.  What we are taught in school about survival of the fittest is a lie.  We buy into that lie only insofar as we are fallen from the state for and in which we are created.

            The vestiges of that original economy of creation are still visible in nature.  Astronomers know the earth is the product of the sacrificial death of thousands of stars that went nova and, in their explosive demise, hurled the right combination of heavy and light elements into this corner of a backwater galaxy so we could live on a planet pregnant with water and abundant life, walking with our God – as the Genesis account proclaims – in the cool of the evening.  Every species of animal from spiders to salmon progresses from generation to generation because parents sacrifice their lives for their children by the instincts built into them.  Our own lives come about because a living sperm and egg sacrifice their individual lives to come together as a new human being who knows them not.  And any time this new human being suffers a breach of his skin thousands of white blood cells sacrifice themselves in a kamikaze attack on any infection that dares invade.  The world is indeed based on the concept of sacrifice, though most of us have forgotten or suppressed that concept except when we admire it in a fallen hero. 

When human beings decide to live sacrificially over and over again, an economy of sacrifice becomes a culture of sacrifice.  Jesus Christ offered the ultimate expression of this economy – this culture.  He did not come to change the economy of this world, but to restore it.

            Does Lone Survivor, a story of sacrifice – whether by risking or relinquishing survival – leading to authentic humanity make any sense?  Nothing else really does.