Matt Bissonnette,
aka Mark Owen, one of 24 hand-picked men who
carried out the raid on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that housed Al Qadea
leader Osama bin Laden, pens his firsthand description of the event. Known formally as Operation Neptune Spear, this account of SEAL Team
Six’s assault on the compound, in coordination with the 160th
SOAR (“Night Stalkers”) helicopters, gives a step-by-step iteration of the
events from boarding the transport buses in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, on their way to the air-strip and the waiting
helos, to the missions conclusion, as the transports touched down in Virginia.
Autobiographical
in nature, Bissonnette recalls what drove him to become an elite fighter, a
Navy SEAL, from a young age, through his training, and deployments, culminating
with selection to DEVGRU (SEAL Team Six).
He recounts several missions he performed in his years as a team member
and the fast friendships he made with fellow SEALs. A notable mission he recounts was the rescue
of Richard Phillips, Captain of the MV Maersk
Alabama, taken hostage by Somali pirates in April 2009.
No Easy Day provides
detailed diagrams of the compound and timelines the events of the Navy SEAL
raid to capture or kill bin Laden. It
goes into details of the killing of not only bin Laden, but also of his son,
Kahlid, as well as the al Kuwaiti brothers during the raid. The book shows that regardless of how well
planned and rehearsed an action can be, things can and will go wrong, like the
crash landing of the helicopter transporting half of the raiding party.
Bissonnette
downplays the individual contributions to the success of this raid leading one
to believe that any section in the SEAL unit could have completed the raid
successfully, that the SEALs that participated just happened to be in the right place at the right
time. A good read. I recommend it to anyone interested in
military history or current events.
