Navy SEALs and sassy CIA agents: accounts of the bin Laden killing

By Claire DeRoin–Not even two yearshave passed since the May 1, 2011 raid on the bin Laden compound in Abottabad, Pakistan, but the American entertainment industry has cashed in and is already pumping out films and books about it. Here’s a breakdown of the top accounts of Operative Geronimo, the killing of Osama bin Laden.

I read No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama bin Laden by Matt Owen and The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden by Mark Bowden. The books focused on the same outcome: bin Laden’s death. Yet the books themselves were very different in nature.

No Easy Day is told from the perspective from a Navy SEAL who was allegedly on SEAL Team Six, the team that carried out the mission. The book tells the story of the author’s childhood, his own experiences in SEAL training and in combat, and his opinions regarding government and other military members. At times, the book feels like an inappropriately intimate look into the lives of special forces group, but leaves the reader feeling that SEALs are people, too, not just mindless killing machines. Author Matt Owen narrowly avoided legal trouble, with the Department of Defense, which alleged that the book contained classified information that could perhaps endanger lives in the future. Owen did not submit the book to the Department of Defense for review before publication.

The Finish, on the other hand, was submitted and cleared by the Department of Defense. The Finish is told from a third-person perspective by Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down. Bowden interviews numerous sources involved in the administrative details behind the raid.
The Finish  is much less action-packed than No Easy Day since the main content deals with office workers as opposed to military members.

Much like the differences between the two books, the films Zero Dark Thirty and Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama bin Laden focus on the same outcome through different avenues.

Seal Team Six is a made for television movie directed by John Stockwell. Much like No Easy Day, the film focuses on the men of SEAL Team Six. We see their team dynamic, the jealousies between men about the young team leader, and thirst for vengeance after one of their own is killed in a suicide bombing. The film does include the female CIA operative that tracked down bin Laden, but the film focuses much more on the assets in Pakistan and the SEALs themselves.

Zero Dark Thirty¸ directed by Kathryn Bigelow,is much like The Finish. The SEALs don’t show up until the very end of the film, after the entire story of the CIA operatives has been told. Zero Dark Thirty follows Maya, the female operative credited with working solely on tracking bin Laden. The film consists of the ten year process Maya and fellow CIA team members went through while tracking down bin Laden. This film has a secondary motive: making a point that without being able to use torture as an interrogation tactic, the CIA and United States military cannot make as much process as is necessary to carry out operations such as the bin Laden raid.

The Finish  and Zero Dark Thirty  offer an in-depth look at the people that fight with their brains, but if you’re looking for action pieces, go with No Easy Day and Seal Team Six.