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luckypluto 's review for:
No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden
by Mark Owen, Kevin Maurer
I wanted to resist buying and reading this book, since I don’t agree with the Navy SEALs who broke the “code of silence” and talked about this mission, and I don’t think anyone should make money off of the death of Osama bin Laden (an idealistic point of view, I know). But I was stuck in an airport, saw it in the terminal’s book store, and figured, why not, it’s an interesting piece of history and I have a long plane ride ahead of me.
For the most part, the book was enjoyable, as evidenced by how quickly I read it. To be honest, though, most of it felt like filler. The actual Osama mission only took a few chapters to tell, and even that was drawn out more than it needed to be, in my opinion. But you can’t sell a 40-page book, so it had to be fleshed out with a lot of information I didn’t care about: a montage of scenes from “Mark Owen’s” (that’s a pseudonym, of course) SEAL training and his previous missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. And even after the Osama raid, the book goes on for at least four more chapters, detailing the SEALs’ lives after the mission. And, of course, being a military history book, it had to get in a few potshots at Obama, which personally I found to be in poor taste, given that Obama was essentially the SEALs’ boss. (I come from a military family, so I know that soldiers officially see the president as their boss but typically still have opinions about him—just as I have opinions about my own boss—but I still think it’s unprofessional to write them down.)
The book reads pretty fast, which is partly because it’s written in an easy, journalistic style. At times, it felt more like it should be called My First Navy SEAL Primer. The writing is chunky at times, too, as though the writer (I’m assuming Mark Owen had a ghostwriter) was trying too hard to use similes and metaphors and different sentence structures.
Still, it is a good look at the Osama raid, so if you’re interested in that, it’s worth a read. Personally, I’d recommend seeing Zero Dark Thirty instead, which uses No Easy Day as its basis and is much more interesting. I saw Zero Dark Thirty when it came out (Christmas night 2012, in fact), and re-watched it while reading this book, and on the whole found the movie to be a lot more interesting than No Easy Day.
For the most part, the book was enjoyable, as evidenced by how quickly I read it. To be honest, though, most of it felt like filler. The actual Osama mission only took a few chapters to tell, and even that was drawn out more than it needed to be, in my opinion. But you can’t sell a 40-page book, so it had to be fleshed out with a lot of information I didn’t care about: a montage of scenes from “Mark Owen’s” (that’s a pseudonym, of course) SEAL training and his previous missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. And even after the Osama raid, the book goes on for at least four more chapters, detailing the SEALs’ lives after the mission. And, of course, being a military history book, it had to get in a few potshots at Obama, which personally I found to be in poor taste, given that Obama was essentially the SEALs’ boss. (I come from a military family, so I know that soldiers officially see the president as their boss but typically still have opinions about him—just as I have opinions about my own boss—but I still think it’s unprofessional to write them down.)
The book reads pretty fast, which is partly because it’s written in an easy, journalistic style. At times, it felt more like it should be called My First Navy SEAL Primer. The writing is chunky at times, too, as though the writer (I’m assuming Mark Owen had a ghostwriter) was trying too hard to use similes and metaphors and different sentence structures.
Still, it is a good look at the Osama raid, so if you’re interested in that, it’s worth a read. Personally, I’d recommend seeing Zero Dark Thirty instead, which uses No Easy Day as its basis and is much more interesting. I saw Zero Dark Thirty when it came out (Christmas night 2012, in fact), and re-watched it while reading this book, and on the whole found the movie to be a lot more interesting than No Easy Day.