Shortly before the first printing of my book The Finish last year, one of the Navy SEALs who participated in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden published his own account. The SEAL in question, who used the pen name “Mark Owen,” had held several long discussions with me in the months prior. He was leaving the service after a decade, and he knew his story was valuable. I tried to talk him into working with me, but he opted instead to hire a ghostwriter and tell the story himself. His book, No Easy Day, jumped on best-seller lists and was still there the last time I checked. His decision prompted some grumbling in the upper ranks of officialdom about a breach of security, but nothing has come of it, and I doubt he regrets it.

Just as Owen’s book does, The Finish ends with an account of the critical raid, but his is a memoir, while my book tells a much wider story. Finding bin Laden was the hard part. It drew upon nearly every resource of our military and intelligence community. Deciding how to respond once the compound in Abbottabad was found posed one of the most difficult decisions the White House has faced in modern times. The mission itself, after all that, went largely as planned, apart from the crash-landing of a Black Hawk as the raid began. SEAL Team six invaded the compound and encountered only brief and ineffectual resistance. They methodically killed every adult male inside the target house—the brothers Abu Ahmed and Abrar al-Kuwaiti, bin Laden’s son Khalid (Abrar’s wife Bushra was also killed)—and then flew bin Laden’s body out of Pakistan without tripping any alarms. All credible accounts of the mission itself agree in nearly every particular….MORE

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