Mark Owen’s No Easy Day, “the only first-hand account of the Navy Seal mission that killed Osama Bin Laden”, has been mired in controversy since its release on September 11, the anniversary of the WTC bombing. Pentagon has threatened to sue. Owen (whose real name has been outed as Matt Bissonnette) saw Osama’s killing being “reported like a bad action movie”. He wrote the book because “to date, how the mission to kill bin Laden has been reported is wrong. Even the reports claiming to have the inside story have been incorrect. I felt like someone had to tell the true story... Since May 1, 2011, everyone from President Obama to Admiral McRaven has given interviews about the operation. If my commander-in-chief is willing to talk, then I feel comfortable doing the same.”
No Easy Day brings a sense of closure to the hunt for Osama, which has been part of our headlines diet. There are crucial differences in the way we have been told the story and the way Owen tells it. He says since 2007 “all of the intelligence we received had him hiding in Pakistan”. A woman from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, “a blonde in her early thirties” who had spent half a decade tracking Osama, pieced it together. So well had the drones and the satellites cased Osama’s hideout that every bit of intelligence proved accurate.
Vanity Fair reported this week that Obama was prepared to bring Osama to trial in a federal court in the US, if he had been captured alive. Here is how Owen describes the brief: A lawyer from “either the Department of Defence or the White House made it clear it wasn’t an assassination”. The lawyer continued, “If he (Osama) is naked with his hands up, you are not going to engage him (p 177).”
(‘Engage’ in Seal lingo is ‘kill’.) He continued: “I am not going to tell you how to do your job. What we are saying is, if he (Osama) does not pose a threat, you will detain him.”
The book makes it clear that the Seal (just ahead of Owen) shot a man (later identified as Osama) in the head as he peeped out from a third floor door at Abbottabad. When Owen stepped into the room, Osama was on the floor, twitching in the throes of death. Then Owen and another Seal who followed, engaged Osama, pumping bullets into the chest till he was still. Before Owen began taking pictures of Osama, pulling his beard which had been dyed (with Just for Men hair dye) this way and that for a better angle, a Seal washed his bloody face with water and Owen wiped it as well, with a blanket from one of the beds in the room. All the way back to Jalalabad, a Seal sat on Osama’s chest—there was no space in the copter.
The Seals made quite a racket coming in, blowing doors away with explosives till they got to Osama. Osama had time to prepare a defence yet he made no attempt to defend himself. Afterwards, Owen found an AK-47 and a Makarov pistol in a holster in a nearby shelf. He checked to see if the weapons were loaded. They were not.
Obama, who met the Seal team in Kentucky, said he’d call them to the White House for beer. “We never got that call,” Owen reveals. A fellow Seal ribs him: “You believed that shit… I bet you voted for change too, sucker.”
sudarshan@newindianexpress.com
