SEAL of approval
No Easy Day offers artfully drawn account of the killing of Osama bin Laden
NO EASY DAY: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A NAVY SEAL by Mark Owen with Kevin Maurer Dutton, $ 27.50, 336 pages
Some details are mundane: Terrorist leader Osama bin Laden wore a sleeveless white shirt and tan pants when he was shot and killed by U. S. navy SEALS, he used Just For Men to dye his beard, he was a neat freak. Other details seem significant, even troubling: the unarmed bin Laden was shot after peeking out from behind a door, a young girl — perhaps a daughter — was the first to identify him, and an American serviceman, lacking adequate space in a Black Hawk helicopter, was forced to sit on the dead man’s chest.
The memoir, written by Owen ( a pseudonym, the author was later identified in media accounts as former Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette), has attracted controversy and criticism for whether Owen revealed classified information and whether the 24- man SEAL Team Six conducted itself properly. But what’s missing is a reflection on the book’s strengths — a cast of characters, including Owen himself, artfully drawn, yet painfully human, passionate descriptions of a lifestyle that few are privy to, as well as its breathlessly paced, inexorable march toward an inevitable ending.
Owen wrote the book with co- author and former journalist Kevin Maurer in the year after 2011’ s Operation Neptune Spear, which killed bin Laden at his family’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
The actual raid consumes only as many pages as it did minutes in real life — about 40 — but the rest of No Easy Day ( its title is derived from SEAL philosophy: “The only easy day was yesterday”) is anything but filler. Instead, it’s a remarkably intimate glimpse into what motivates men striving to join an elite fighting force like the SEALS — and what keeps them there.
Owen describes his childhood in Alaska and how he butted heads with his parents who wanted a college graduate, not a military enlistee ( Owen got his bachelor’s degree before enlisting). He details the physically and mentally gruelling and near- constant training. And he doesn’t shirk from alluding to the failed relationships left behind.
Little more than a day after killing bin Laden, Owen found himself driving home in Virginia Beach, Va. His disorientation was acute. He pulled into a Taco Bell drive- thru and ordered two crispy tacos, a bean burrito and a Pepsi. The reality of the history he had helped create began to sink in.
“This was pretty cool. It was the kind of mission I’d read about in Alaska as a kid. It was history,” he writes. “But just as quickly as those thoughts crossed my mind, I forced them out. The second you stop and believe your own hype, you’ve lost.”