The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama bin Laden
By Mark Owen with Kevin Maurer,
Illustrated. 316 pages. Dutton.$26.95.
These distortions seemed funny at first. But “Mark
Owen” (the pseudonym of one gutsy, transgressive member of the SEALs, who
served 13 consecutive combat deployments) began to want to set the record
straight. He hoped to deliver firsthand a visceral and often surprising version
of the bin Laden raid and other SEAL stories. The emphasis of his “No Easy
Day,” written with Kevin Maurer, is not on spilling secrets. It is on
explaining a SEAL’s rigorous mind-set and showing how that toughness is
created.
The bin Laden story is the marquee event in “No
Easy Day,” of course. But the formative steps in the author’s own story are
just as gripping. In a prologue the author, who grew up in Alaska and earned
his SEAL Trident in 1998, writes about reading a book about SEALs (“Men in
Green Faces” by Gene Wentz) as a junior high school kid, realizing that this
was his vocation and hoping that he too could one day write a book that would
inspire others. Mission accomplished.
“No Easy Day” gets off to a worrisomely formulaic start:
A pumped-up prologue on the flight to the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad,
Pakistan, then a potentially dull flashback to the author’s early SEAL
training. (“If I failed the situps, I was done.”). But it quickly becomes an
exciting, suspenseful account of how his fighting skills were honed.
In the first contentious days of this book’s
arrival the author’s real identity has been outed: He is Matt Bissonnette, and
the Defense Department has
threatened to prosecute him for violating confidentiality
agreements. But his book is careful to avoid all but the most basic information
about his SEAL experiences, and its emphasis is on the close-up experience of a
team member in action not on the big picture policy questions that determine
how he has been deployed.
That basic material is hugely illuminating in its
own right. Just by describing the model of a kill house in which he trained to
raid buildings, he conveys the ferocious pragmatism of SEAL thinking. Years
ago, in Mississippi, he repeatedly raided this modular structure, which could
be reconfigured as conference rooms, bathrooms or even a ballroom.
“We rarely saw the same layout more than once,” he
says. Meanwhile instructors overhead on catwalks watched the trainees perform,
eliminating the group’s weaker members as if they were failed contestants on a
reality show. Mr. Owen made one false move that might have gotten him booted
out during such exercises. He learned never to make it again.
While deployed in Iraq (though most of his service
was in Afghanistan) he was part of a team in Baghdad that mistakenly landed on
the wrong roof. The raid’s target is discreetly identified as “a high-level
weapons facilitator, just another link in the chain funding the insurgency.”
The book describes how quickly the team adapted to turn the error to its
advantage and speculates about how much worse the outcome would have been had
it hit their original landing site.
What he gained from this experience was a healthy
understanding of the importance of luck. For the tightly controlling Type-A
personality that is apparently common to some members of the SEALs this was
humbling indeed.
Although “No Easy Day” gives a strong sense of SEAL
camaraderie and even the team members practical joking (who knew they could be
punked with glitter?), the author’s fellow fighters are identified strangely at
best. One is said to have a big head. Another has “hands as big as shovels.” A
third resembles a taller version of the dwarf Gimli from “The Lord of the
Rings,” and that’s about it for distinguishing characteristics. Before the bin
Laden mission, the author says, he was present at the 2009 SEAL rescue of Richard Phillips,
the captain of the cargo ship Maersk Alabama, from the hands of Somali pirates.
It is only after the George W. Bush presidency that
the author begins complaining about the slow-moving “Washington machine” that
members of the SEALs found frustrating. That irritation mounts in 2011, when
the SEALs anxiously awaited their signal to raid Abbottabad, but this account
is determined to steer clear of serious politics or leave itself open to
election-season manipulation. The worst it has to say about President Obama is
that none of the fighters who caught bin Laden wanted to help re-elect him, and
that he never followed through on a promise to invite them to the White House
for a beer.
Mr. Owen’s new information about the Abbottabad
attack adds a human element to much of what has been previously reported. Even
reporting like Peter L. Bergen’s in his meticulous book “Manhunt” does
not have this new book’s perspective. Mr. Bergen knew what the men had done,
but this author knows what at least one of them was thinking. Why were they
able to shoot bin Laden’s son Khalid on a staircase in the building where his
father was also hiding? This book cites the fact that one assaulter recognized
Khalid from a very brief glimpse and whispered, “Khalid,” causing Khalid to
peek out of his hiding place one time too many.
The manner in which bin Laden died, in this book’s
version, differs crucially but not materially from other accounts. The author
says that his team’s point man shot bin Laden — who also peeked at the SEALs
and showed himself to a sniper — before the team even entered his living
quarters; that bin Laden was shot again as he lay on the floor with a grievous
head wound; and that the SEALs shot to kill.
Much more shocking and revelatory is the way the
author describes his own handling of the “dead weight,” as the men hustled the
body bag to the helicopter. Yes, he had a sense that this was an event of great
historical import. But he also had a job to do. And in a set of actions that
came as the culmination of all that he had learned from experience, he pulled
bin Laden’s beard left and right in order to get the best possible
identification photo. He took out a booklet of pictures to help him realize
that the Qaeda leader’s nose was his best remaining identifying feature.
He went through a dresser in the bedroom, finding
it extremely neat, just like his own. When he found that bin Laden’s guns were
not loaded, he felt a SEAL’s contempt for the dead man: “There is no honor in
sending people to die for something you won’t even fight for yourself.” And on
the helicopter ride out of Abbottabad he sat with bin Laden’s body at his feet
while another raider sat on top of it. The flight was overcrowded, he reports.
There is no better
illustration in “No Easy Day” that SEALS are ruthless pragmatists. They think
fast. They adapt to whatever faces them. They do what they have to do.
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