In No Easy Day, which will go on sale this week, former NAVY Seal Matt Bissonnette (writing under the pseudonym Mark Owen) offers a "firsthand account of the mission that killed Osama bin Laden." According to Eric Schmitt in the New York Times, the book contradicts the Pentagon's official description of the mission. “The new book’s account, if true,” writes Schmitt, “raises the question of whether Bin Laden posed a clear threat in his death throes.”
Janet Maslin:
The Navy SEALs who killed Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011, learned from ABC News that they had “gazelle legs, no waist, and a huge upper body configuration,” not to mention calloused hands and gigantic egos. They learned from other American news sources that they had taken part in a 45-minute firefight and that an armed bin Laden, once cornered, had tried to defend himself in his final moments, staring straight at the fighters who would shoot him. Their raid was being turned into a bad action movie.
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.
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.
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.”