This is just an awful situation that’s hard to imagine. Here you are: You’ve called in reinforcements because you’re between a rock and a hard place and then you see the helicopter coming in to help you destroyed. You can’t even put yourself in the shoes of the SEALs at that time. All they could do is continue to fight. There’s no surrendering here; there’s no negotiations. Never mind the POW protocol or anything else, it’s al Qaeda.

Navy SEALs really are a cut above the rest. They’re highly trained in the art of survival; highly motivated to achieve objectives on their own. They say that half the battle is just showing up, and SEALs are the troops you can count on for anything, anywhere. Special operations teams like SEALs are motivated by high-risk, potentially high-payoff missions. This is just one scenario where things can go terribly wrong.

The idea of covert missions like those we’re waging against al Qaeda in Afghanistan is to get in quickly with a light load and take the bad guys out before they ever see you. You’ll observe them and take the opportunity to eliminate the enemy, and then you disappear just as fast. That’s not what happened here. Our guys were spotted. The cover was blown and the firefight began and they had to call in reinforcements because their load was probably so light they couldn’t sustain the fight.

Odds are the SEALs didn’t have a lot of ammunition on them. What assets you have will be a minimal load, just enough to counter-fire if need be. When the SEALs were surrounded, and outnumbered 3 to 1, they were probably pretty low on firepower. So it wasn’t long before the enemy could take them out. Of course, they didn’t count on one of them making it out alive.

The SEAL isn’t like an Army grunt who’ll have a healthy supply of MREs and water in case he’s holed up somewhere for a while. He’s got minimum weight to carry, and that means a minimum of essential supplies for living out in the wilderness. So he counts on his training to get him through.

The one SEAL who makes it out manages to sustain himself for days, in part, because he’s highly trained in the art of survival. He knows there are certain plants and leaves that will provide him specific vitamins. He may not be getting much in the way of calories or carbs, but he’ll be able to get some goodness from his surroundings. What will really carry him through is an instinct to survive. Never underestimate a man’s ability to overcome any obstacle and fight against all odds when his life is at stake. Your survival abilities are just inexplicable. And they are astounding.

But the biggest factor in determining the fate of this SEAL is that it’s raining. You can go without a lot of things, but you won’t make it too long without water. The very element that slowed the recovery teams from getting to the crash site and the general area where the SEAL was wounded is what saved him in the end. He would have survived without food and survived his injuries, but he’d die without water. And all the training in the world isn’t going to change that.