Gov. Rick Perry talks with retired U.S. Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, shown with Luttrell’s dog, Rigby, before Perry addresses the Lone Survivor Foundation’s Second Annual Gala at Minute Maid Park on Saturday. (Johnny Hanson/Houston Chronicle)
Governor Rick Perry will be joined today by a Navy SEAL he helped. Navy Cross winner former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell will join Perry. Luttrell lived with the Perry family for two years.
Boston.com reported, via Free Republic:
As Texas Governor Rick Perry makes his final pre-caucus appearances before Iowa voters today, he will be joined on the stump by a figure who’s well-known locally: 1996 and 2000 presidential candidate Steve Forbes.
The famous flat-tax advocate is expected to attest to Perry’s outside-the-box, anti-Washington campaign message.
But also joining Perry will be someone who once preferred to live in the shadows: former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell.
He received the Navy Cross after surviving a vicious 2005 battle in which three of his fellow SEALs were killed when they were discovered inside Afghanistan while pursuing a Taliban leader…
Luttrell later wrote about the experience in his book, “The Lone Survivor.” It is being made into a Peter Berg movie due for release next year.
Unlike Forbes, Luttrell isn’t expected to testify today to Perry’s policy. Rather, he will speak to the Republican presidential candidate’s character.
In a story Perry himself related to a trio of reporters from the Globe and two other news organizations during a chance encounter last night at Des Moines’s Django restaurant, Luttrell and the governor formed a bond after their own chance meeting on Coronado Island in San Diego…
……Perry told the reporters that after his initial meeting with Luttrell in California, the two reconnected in Texas as the SEAL battled post-traumatic stress disorder and struggled to get off a morphine regimen.
Over time, Rick and Anita Perry – the parents of two children – offered him a spare bedroom in the third floor of their Austin-area home. (They still are unable to live in the Texas Governor’s Mansion since it was burned by an arsonist while being renovated in 2008.)
Luttrell’s bed was nothing more than an air mattress, the governor related.
Perry said he also intervened with Navy Secretary Ray Mabus to get Luttrell the medical and psychological treatment he needed. He ended up being a regular presence in the home for about two years.
In 2010, Luttrell established the Lone Survivor Foundation, which is aimed at helping wounded warriors return home.”
Also in 2010, he got married. And this past May, Luttrell and his wife, Melanie, had a son.
