It was inevitable that one of the men on the bin Laden mission would eventually write a book about it. After all, we live in an open society. Anyone involved in this history-making mission would want to set the record straight about what exactly happened — given some of the nonsense that has been written about it — and also make a little money on the side. (To his credit, Owen — whose real name has been revealed to be Matt Bissonnette — is donating most of the proceeds of his book to charities that help the families of fallen SEALs.)
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A new book detailing the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, "No Easy Day," is getting a lot of attention. Scott Pelley gives a look inside his interview with the author, one of the Navy SEALs who was on the team that raided bin Laden's compound.
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A highly publicized new book is reportedly offering a new version of how Osama bin Laden was killed. John Miller speaks to the "CBS This Morning" co-hosts about the controversial book, which claims bin Laden wasn't fighting back.
Owen’s account of the raid fits almost exactly with my own understanding of the operation, based on being the only outside observer allowed inside the bin Laden compound before it was demolished and interviewing dozens of American officials familiar with the details of the operation, as well as interviews with Pakistani officials who investigated the aftermath of the raid.
The only surprising thing, perhaps, given the code of silence that exists among the men of SEAL Team 6 — a small, tightknit covert unit that prides itself on being the “quiet professionals” — is how soon this tell-all book was published. After all, it’s been only a little over a year since bin Laden’s body was dumped from the deck of the USS Carl Vinson as it cruised off the coast of Pakistan.
The title of Owen’s book comes from a piece of Navy SEAL lore that “the only easy day was yesterday.” “No Easy Day” joins a growing shelf of best-selling SEAL memoirs that detail just how true that piece of lore is. Last year in “The Heart and the Fist,” Eric Greitens, a Rhodes scholar and SEAL, eloquently outlined the notoriously tough training regime that every SEAL must go through. Marcus Luttrell’s 2007 book, “Lone Survivor,” gave a visceral account of how he barely escaped the debacle of Operation Redwing in Afghanistan two years earlier, when he was the only one of four SEALs to survive a brutal firefight with the Taliban. The ensuing rescue operation cost the lives of 16 other servicemen.
How does “No Easy Day” stack up with these other SEAL memoirs? Owen and his co-author, Kevin Maurer — who has written extensively on special operations — ably navigate the reader through the secretive world of the SEALs, as well as Owen’s graduation into SEAL Team 6, an elite group within the SEAL elite that, along with the Army’s Delta Force, is arguably the most effective fighting unit in the world.
Owen describes his life growing up in the Alaskan outback, where he learned to handle guns and hunt from a young age — valuable skills for his future line of work. And he does a nice job of detailing the grueling deployments and uncertainties of warfare in the streets of Baghdad and the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, where it is luck as much as skill that keeps you alive.
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