No Easy Day – A Vivid Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Book Review

Matt Bissonnette one of the members of the US Navy Seals 6 who killed Osama Bin Laden is set to release a book. The book gives an account of the training, preparation, and the long wait for the orders to raid Abbottabad. The author who is using the pseudo name ‘Mark Owen’ has since retired from the military.‘No Easy day’: A vivid account of the mission that killed Osama

The author gives a riveting account of how he was present at the killing of the Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011. He gives a vivid description of the mission from the perspective of a Navy Seal. The book has already hit the top Amazon slot. The title of this book is borrowed from the Navy Seal belief that “the only easy day was yesterday”. Mark Owen and his co-author Kevin Maurer have definitely added another must-read to the Navy Seal memoir shelf. This book review is written by a custom essay writing help expert with BestEssayServices.com

In ‘No easy day ‘Owen takes the readers through his journey from Alaska where he grew up and learned how to hunt and even handle a gun at a young age. He draws a clear mental picture of how he developed his skills and the gruesome details of his deployments to Afghanistan and Baghdad. Owen describes how he ultimately graduated into the elite Navy Seal Team 6.

Owen and Maurer keep the readers fascinated with the book starting with the breath-taking Black Hawk helicopter crash into the compound of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in Pakistan. If not handled well, this hiccup could have easily jeopardized the mission. This keeps the readers’ eyes peeled as they eagerly want to find out what exactly took place that night. The book authors use a conversational style of writing that gives the reader the feeling of getting the information first-hand. It brings out the SEAL camaraderie and how they pulled pranks and jokes on each other (New York Times, 2012).

Apart from the introduction of a CIA analyst named Jen who gave some intelligence about the certainty that Osama bin laden was at Abbottabad, the book does not delve into the decision-making process the secretive service was involved in. In fact, he leaves out the white house and only mentions that the president is yet to invite them to the statehouse for the beer he had once promised them.

The juicy sap of the book is in the four weeks prior to the 40minute operation that led to the death of Osama bin Laden. 15 minutes after the controlled plane crash into Bin Laden’s compound, the ‘point man’ shot bin Laden in the head as he poked his head out of his bedroom door. The Navy Seal then slowly approached the bedroom to find a man writhing on the floor with part of his head damaged by the point man’s bullet. Owen describes how together with another seal they shot bullets into his body as he was lying on the floor in death throes (The Washington Post, 2012). Present in the room were his children and wives.

He vividly describes the eerie feeling of having the world’s most unpopular face lying right in front of him. He says that “Lying in front of me was the reason we had been fighting for the last decade”. Owen found bin Laden’s AK-47 and a Makarov pistol both of which were not loaded. He is disappointed that the man was not prepared to fight and die honorably for what he supposedly believed in and made many others do as well. He says that awkwardly, he discovered that bin Laden was a neat man and his clothes had been neatly folded into even squares. His clothes also hung neatly on the hangers with even spaces between them.

Owen describes how they identified the dead man as the Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. At first, it was difficult to identify him because he had dyed his beard. They then carried the body in an aircraft to Afghanistan where they watched President Obama give a speech on their successful mission. Owen says that most of the members of the Navy Seal team 6 were not Obama’s greatest fans. He describes the speech given as “not bad at all” and at best “anticlimactic”.

Owen says that regardless of the timing of the release, the book was not written to foster any political ambitions. The book was set to be released in September 11 but the publisher moved the release up a week earlier to September 4 (Entertainment weekely.com, 2012).