Lone survivor

That might mean we just get real homesick quicker than other people. But I will come back to live here when I’m finished in the military. And I intend, sometime, to die here. Hardly a day goes by, wherever I am in the world, when I don’t think of our little ranch and my huge circle of family and friends, of having a beer on the front porch and telling tall stories full of facts, some of ’em true, all of ’em fu

So while I’m on the subject I’ll explain how a farm boy from the backwoods of East Texas came to be made a petty officer first class and a team leader in the U.S. Navy SEALs.

The short explanation is probably talent, but I don’t have any more of that than the next guy. In fact, my natural-born assets are very average. I’m pretty big, which was an accident of birth. I’m pretty strong, because a lot of other people took a lot of trouble training me, and I’m unbelievably determined, because when you’re as naturally ungifted as I am, you have to keep driving forward, right?

I’ll outwork anyone. I’ll just go on and on until the dust clears. Then I’m usually the only one left standing. As an athlete, I’m not very fast, but I’m kind of sharp. I know where to be, I’m good at anticipating things, and I guess that’s why I was a halfway decent sportsman.

Give me a golf ball and I can hit that sucker a country mile. That’s because golf is a game that requires practice, practice, and more practice. That’s my brand of doggedness. I can do that. I play to a reasonable handicap, although I wasn’t born a Ben Hogan or anything. But Ben came from Texas like me. We were born about ninety-four miles apart, and in my country that’s the equivalent of a sand wedge. Ben, of course, was known to practice more than any other golfer who had ever lived. Must be something in the water.

I was born in Houston but raised up near the Oklahoma border. My parents, David and Holly Luttrell, owned a fair-sized horse farm, about 1,200 acres at one time. We had 125 head up there, mostly Thoroughbreds and quarter horses. My mom ran the breeding programs, and Dad took charge of the racing and sales operation.

Morgan and I were brought up with horses, feeding, watering, cleaning out the barns, riding. Most every weekend we’d go in the horse van to the races. We were just kids at the time, and both our parents were excellent riders, especially Mom. That’s how we learned. We worked the ranch, mended fences, swinging sledgehammers when we were about nine years old. We loaded the bales into the loft, worked like adults from a young age. Dad insisted on that. And for a lot of years, the operation did very well.

At the time, Texas itself was in a boom-time hog heaven. Out in West Texas, where the oil drillers and everyone surrounding them were becoming multimillionaires, the price of oil went up 800 percent between 1973 and 1981. I was born in 1975, before that wave even started to crest, and I have to say the Luttrell family was riding high.

It was nothing for my dad to breed a good-looking horse from a $5,000 stallion and sell the yearling for $40,000. He did it all the time. And my mom was a pure genius at improving a horse, buying it cheap and devoting months of tender loving care and brilliant feeding to produce a young ru

And breeding horses was precisely the right line to be in. Horses were right up there with Rolex watches, Rolls-Royces, Learjets, Gulfstream 1s, palaces rather than regular houses, and boats, damn great boats. Office space was at a premium all over the state, and massive new high-rise blocks were under construction. Retail spending was at an all-time high. Racehorses, beautiful. Give me six. Six fast ones, Mr. Luttrell. That way I’ll win some races.

That oil money just washed right off, and people were making fortunes in anything that smacked of luxury, anything to feed the egos of the oil guys, who were spending and borrowing money at a rate never seen before or since.

It wasn’t anything for banks to make loans of more than $100 million to oil explorers and producers. At one time there were 4,500 oil rigs ru

Listen, I was only a kid at the time, but my family and I lived through the trauma to come, and, boy, I’ve done some serious reading about it since. And in a way, I’m glad I lived through it, because it taught me to be careful, to earn my money and invest it, get it somewhere secure.

And it taught me to think very carefully about the element of luck, when it’s ru

No one gave much consideration to the world oil market being controlled in the Middle East by Muslims. Everything that happened had its roots in Arabia, assisted by President Carter’s energy policy and the fact that when I was five years old the price per barrel of crude was $40.

The crash, when it came, was caused by the oil embargo and the Iranian revolution, when the ayatollah took over from the shah. The key to it was geopolitical. And Texas could only stand and watch helplessly as the oil glut manifested itself and the price per barrel began to slide downward to an ultimate low of around $9.

That was in 1986, when I was not quite ten. In the meantime, the giant First National Bank of Midland, Texas, collapsed, judged insolvent by government financial inspectors. That was one huge bank to go belly-up, and the ripple effect was statewide. An era of reckless spending and investing was over. Guys building palaces were forced to sell at a loss. You couldn’t give away a luxury boat, and Rolls-Royce dealers darned near went out of business.

Along with the commercial giants felled by the oil crash went the horse farm of David and Holly Luttrell. Hard-ru

But my dad’s a resilient man, tough and determined. And he fought back, with a smaller ranch and the tried-and-trusted techniques of horse raising he and Mom had always practiced. But it all went wrong again. The family wound up living with my grandfather, Morgan sleeping on the floor.

My dad, who had always kept one foot in the petrochemical business ever since he came back from Vietnam, went back to work, and in a very short time he was on his feet, with a couple of huge deals. We moved out of Grandfather’s place into a grand four-story house, and the good times seemed to be back.

Then some giant deal went south and we somehow lost it all again, moved back out to a kind of rural skid row. You see, my dad, though born over the border in Oklahoma, is a Texan in his soul. He was as brave as a lion when he was a navy gu

You could tell a lot about him just by the names he gave the ranches, big or small — Lone Star Farms, North Fork Ranch, Shootin’ Star. Like he always said, “I’d rather shoot for a star and hit a stump than shoot for a stump and miss.”

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