From books to movies, 2012 could be called the year of the Navy SEAL. Since the night of May 2, 2011, when the unit known as SEAL Team 6 found and killed Osama bin Laden in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the elite commandos have been celebrated in memoir after memoir, from accounts of life in Team 6 by Howard E. Wasdin and Don Mann to books by "regular" SEALsâ??Chris Kyle's "American Sniper," Brandon Webb's "The Red Circle" and Marcus Luttrell's "Service" (which I was privileged to have had a hand in). The biggest of all was "No Easy Day" by "Mark Owen," a pseudonym for Matt Bissonnette, a SEAL who participated in the raid. The film "Act of Valor," made with the cooperation of the SEAL command, topped the box office in February. A cable movie, "SEAL Team Six," will air Nov. 4, Mr. Luttrell's first memoir, "Lone Survivor," is in production at Universal, and a big-budget feature about the raid, Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty," is scheduled for December.
Yet as Mark Bowden, dean of covert-warfare journalists, discovered while researching his own account of the bin Laden raid, SEAL Team 6 doesn't like to talk. Mr. Bowden's "Black Hawk Down" (1999), about a failed 1993 special-ops raid in Somalia, was deeply rooted in testimony from the shooters and door-kickers. Here Mr. Bowden never got inside the fence. All the attention on the Abbottabad raid led the SEALs to batten the hatches. Mr. Bissonnette's sensational tell-all may have made him famous, but it also made him an outcast from his warrior fraternity.
"The Finish" is, foremost, a political book. The central character is President Barack Obama. Among the subordinate heroes are many special operators of a different kind: speechwriters, handlers and numerous others who wouldn't know a hand grenade from a handshake. Where "Black Hawk Down" was a detailed account of a 15-hour firefight in the streets of Mogadishu, "The Finish" is fixed on Pennsylvania Avenue. Everyone is an actor in a political drama whose chief subject is the president and his conscience.
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