I was late to Lone Survivor, the book. It was published in 2007, and I became aware of it only after seeing a trailer for the movie, which will be released this week.

I just powered through Lone Survivor, the book, and if we assume the basic outlines of it are accurate, it is an astonishing story of survival in horrific circumstances.

But I was troubled by several facets of it.

–The author, the Navy SEAL named Marcus Luttrell, describes an episode where he and three other SEALs debate whether they will or should kill three civilians. Goatherds, to be specific. Goatherds who have walked into a hide where the four Americans are trying to set up the killing of a Taliban leader.

The author describes the three goatherds (one of them a teenager) as uncooperative, perhaps hateful, but to kill what certainly appear to be civilians (does the Taliban herd goats?) … that is somewhere they should not go. And in Luttrell’s book telling it comes down to a vote that wins by 2-1, with one abstention.

Which takes us back to … are elite American special forces discussing the killings of civilians regularly, and are they deterred mostly because they fear being brought up on murder charges? Or was it this one troubling time?

–Luttrell’s self-description reinforces that he is particularly arrogant and also particularly ignorant. He has little or no interest in the people he is sent to kill. He is saved by Afghan civilians, ethnic Pashtuns, who take him in when he is nearly dead and protect him from the Taliban. He has no idea that Pashtun culture calls for strangers to be protected, and the US military apparently could not be bothered to tell guys who will be inserted into very dangerous situations anything about the civilians they might encounter.

–Also, his sadistic SEAL training (described at length) leaves him potentially brutalized but certainly believing he is indestructible, which seems a bad way to enter combat. At one point, as he is tortured by the Taliban, he explains how, were he not wounded, he would bound out of bed and, essentially, beat to death all of his tormentors. At once. Because he’s a SEAL, see? Again, disturbing.

–When Luttrell manages to get word to U.S. forces that he might be alive, the area around the village in which he is holed up (and being fed and cared for) is bombed heavily by U.S. forces. The bombardment frightens the villagers and damages some of their homes. Luttrell, meanwhile, does not seem to grasp that someone’s homes being bombed by outsiders might predispose those people to dislike the outsiders. He seems incapable of framing this in a “what if the roles were reversed” sense. What if foreigners arrived in his native state of Texas and began shooting people he knows?

–Luttrell also shows little or no concern for the welfare of the villagers who have taken him in. He complains about what he is being fed, his water container and that the villagers are not keeping him informed of their actions — when most of them cannot speak English and he surely cannot speak Pashto. And failing to remember that they are risking their lives to protect him.

–His persistent attacks against “liberal media” who (he is convinced) have created an environment where the SEALs just cannot go in and “kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out”. That is unsettling. He also prefers that the American public know nothing about any combat setting until long after events and, it would appear, the military can spin their own glorified/sanitized version of events.

He also is deeply offended that the same heartless and gutless and (of course) liberal media speculated he might be dead after he was gone four or five days in the wilds of Afghanistan. (They never thought once about his mother!) He rants about how he was listed as Missing In Action (not dead!) when most Americans who were alive for any major war know that MIA generally means … “we never found a body”.

There is more, but those are my main points.

Turns out, Luttrell’s book, a 2007 bestseller, has generated a cottage industry of those who have pointed out apparent errors, both large (he doesn’t get right the name of the military operation; he may have overestimated the hostile force by 100 t0 1,000 percent) and small (a certain Marine unit he names apparently doesn’t exist).

One of the most prominent critics of Luttrell’s book writes the onviolence.com blog, and links to a US Marine historian who also has some pointed critiques of Luttrell’s book.

And now we have the movie, which tweaks the story again. (No vote to kill or spare the goatherds; one of the Afghan villagers leaves it and never comes back; apparently, less ranting about the Rules of Engagement.)

I plowed through the book. There is that.

That this man could have gotten out alive from the situation described is astonishing, and his earlier description of events in which nearly everything that could go wrong did go wrong … is compelling. He also concedes to deep emotional scars from the event, and we certainly can see how that would be so.

It is the mindset of the writer on the topics outlined, above, that is disturbing. It is a movie I will not see.