In the shadowy world of special forces, the Seal Team Six is synonymous to the elite of the elite, American warriors able to carry out the most harrowing missions. This covert operations group is officially called the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group (Devgru), but is better known as Seal Team Six, its old official name. They are the deadliest of America’s special-ops teams as well as the most secretive.
Yet some of those secrets were allegedly revealed when an operative of Devgru, disguised behind the pen name “Mark Owen,” wrote a book (together with Kevin Maurer) called “No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama Bin Laden” (Dutton, New York, 2012, 316 pages) that, as the title promised, depicted in detail the raid of a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, which resulted in the death of al-Qaida terrorist leader Bin Laden on May 2, 2011. The authors had taken the unusual step of not submitting the manuscript to the US Department of Defense (DoD) for review prior to publication.
In the sandstorm of controversy surrounding the book’s release (along with its climb to the bestseller list), the DoD threatened legal action, saying that “No Easy Day” did reveal operation details about the final Bin Laden mission, “Operation Neptune Spear.” Others pilloried the book for leaking information that would endanger the American special-operations community. In the end, the DoD did not take any direct action against the book’s author, though the agency did reveal that “Mark Owens” was actually a former team leader of Seal Team Six named Matt Bissonnette, now retired.
For his part, Bissonnette writes that he took “great pains to protect the tactics, techniques and procedures used by the teams as they wage a daily battle against terrorists and insurgents around the world.” “If you are looking for secrets, this is not your book.”
Bissonnette deliberately changes the names of characters and talks in a broader sense to avoid revealing too much. But “No Easy Day” succeeds because of how much he is willing to say, in particular about that 2011 mission. A part of “No Easy Day” is devoted to Bissonnette’s past, growing up in Alaska, and a large part chronicles his challenging rise through the Navy Seals until he got to the sharp tip of the spear, Seal Team Six. In that sense, the book is a spiritual successor to Marcus Lutrell’s 2007 autobiography “Lone Survivor.” But Bissonnette goes further, even stating that during his first deployment, he’d “trained in Thailand, the Philippines, East Timor, and Australia…”
Don’t be misled. There is a battalion of details here about Seal Team Six, but clearly nothing classified. Bissonnette discusses everything down to the specific pieces of his gear (he uses as a personal firearm a heavily modified H&K 416 assault rifle) and he gives enough tech talk to satisfy the modern war junkie. He even has photographs. His prose is serviceable and effective, but “No Easy Day” goes automatic when Bissonnette talks about the colorful people he works with, people whose obvious pseudonyms (Charlie, Walt, Steve) belie their quirkiness.
“No Easy Day” is at its best when Bissonnette counts down to, and then recounts, almost minute-by-minute, the time he led his Chalk One to an eventful assault on the Abbottabad compound, aided by intelligence from the Central Intelligence Agency. It’s a pulse-pounding, helmet-rattling experience that he captures with impressive detail and atmosphere. One cannot help but feel an adrenaline rush as when Bissonnette recalls escaping the Black Hawk and plunging into the dark in search of Bin Laden, who had been code-named “Geronimo.” Bin Laden was indeed found by Seal Team Six and subsequently killed. “No Easy Day” tells you exactly how.
Now that Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty” is in the process of infiltrating cinemas, it is the perfect time to read the first-hand account that not only got to the bookshelves first, but also zooms closest to the action. Matt Bissonnette makes “No Easy Day” a worthy addition to excellent portraits of modern war like Mark Bowden’s “Black Hawk Down” and Sebastian Junger’s “War,” ultimately becoming the definitive retelling of what may just be the most important military operation in modern history.
Available in hardcover from National Book Store.