Mark Wahlberg and Navy SEAL Eviscerate CNN Reporter on Air for Fake News
In an interview three years ago with former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell and actor Mark Wahlberg, who played Luttrell in the award-winning biographical thriller “Lone Survivor,” CNN’s Jake Tapper overstepped his bounds by saying something that rubbed the retired Navy SEAL (and many others, in fact) the wrong way.
Speaking with the two about the film, which depicts what happened in 2005 when Luttrell and his team were ambushed while on a mission in Afghanistan, Tapper said that watching the film made him think “of all the hopelessness of the situation — how horrific it was and also just all that loss of life of these brave American men,” according to a transcript from The Daily Caller.
Luttrell, who can be outspoken at times, was having none of it.
“I don’t know what part of the film you were watching, but hopelessness really ever came into it,” he snapped. “I mean, where did you see that? Because there was never a point where we just felt like we were hopelessly lost or anything like that. We never gave up. We never felt like we were losing until we were actually dead.”
He then went on to give Tapper a view Tapper clearly didn’t share.
Watch what happened next in the video below:
“Just the sense of all these wonderful people who died,” he said. “It seemed senseless. I don’t mean to disrespect in any way, but it seemed senseless — all of these wonderful people who were killed for an op that went wrong.”
“We spend our whole lives training to defend this country and then we were sent over there by this country — so you’re telling me because we were over there doing what we were told by our country that it was senseless,” Luttrell promptly replied. “And my guys — what? They died for nothing?”
“No, I’m not saying that,” the host tried to explain.
“That’s what you said,” the former Navy SEAL noted. “So, let me just say, it went bad for us over there, but that was our job. That’s what we did. We didn’t complain about it.”
To this day it still remains unclear what exactly Tapper had meant.
At the time Oliver Darcy of TheBlaze reported that Tapper had “suggested in an interview that the ‘lone survivor’s’ fellow veterans died for nothing,” but the host disputed this account in tweets posted to Twitter:
@oliverdarcy don’t think 1st paragraph is accurate. No one said they died for nothing. Are you at all familiar w my reporting on the war?
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) January 11, 2014
@oliverdarcy there is a big difference between saying a death is senseless and saying the person died for nothing
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) January 11, 2014
In an attempt to ease the tension during the interview itself, Tapper said, “(M)aybe it’s just the difference between what a civilian feels when he watches this versus what a soldier feels.”
“Absolutely,” Wahlberg interjected. “I completely agree.”
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