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A review by desertjarhead505
The Warrior Elite: The Forging of Seal Class 228 by Dick Couch
4.0
This account of the travails of a group of naval officers and sailors, starting with nearly a hundred who want to become SEALs and ending with ten or so actually making it through the initial training - the SEAL version of boot camp, really, although they've all been through either Navy boot camp or the Naval Academy already - is a grinding read. I saw SEALs a few times during my own 20 years in the Marine Corps, and I'd read some things about them, but I didn't know this much about them before reading this.
I gave it four stars instead of five for a couple of reasons, one minor and one major. The minor reason was that the author's prose is kind of sloppy and deserved better editing; the more important problem I have with it, though, is the lack of any consideration of the problem of the SEALs, like the rest of our military, sometimes being misused by our country's executive leadership in ways that clash with our ideals as a nation (for example, the involvement of some SEALs in the mistreatment of prisoners, a la Abu Ghraib.) That's a problem without an easy solution, if you accept the tenets that we do need armed forces to protect Americans and our allies and interests, and that the military have to leave the decisions as to how they're used to the elected civilian leadership that's accountable to the electorate. I wish Captain Couch had at least touched on it.
I gave it four stars instead of five for a couple of reasons, one minor and one major. The minor reason was that the author's prose is kind of sloppy and deserved better editing; the more important problem I have with it, though, is the lack of any consideration of the problem of the SEALs, like the rest of our military, sometimes being misused by our country's executive leadership in ways that clash with our ideals as a nation (for example, the involvement of some SEALs in the mistreatment of prisoners, a la Abu Ghraib.) That's a problem without an easy solution, if you accept the tenets that we do need armed forces to protect Americans and our allies and interests, and that the military have to leave the decisions as to how they're used to the elected civilian leadership that's accountable to the electorate. I wish Captain Couch had at least touched on it.