NO HERO
The Evolution of a Navy Seal
Mark Owne (with Kevin Maurer)
Dutton (distributed by Penguin India);
290 pages; Rs 499
It is difficult to know what to make of Mark Owen's second book. By no means unreadable, No Hero: The Evolution of a Navy SEAL is his account of the almost inhuman physical and mental training that goes into making the US Navy's Sea Air and Land (SEAL) team one of the world's most effective special ops forces.
His experienced co-author Kevin Maurer could have told him that ultra-rigorous training is a precondition for every elite special force around the world; the SAS and Mossad's special squads follow similar regimens that produce more dropouts than members.
Mr Owen has an explanation: "I want No Hero to offer something most books on war don't: the intimate side of it, the personal struggles and hardships and what I learned from them." This he certainly delivers in 290 pages of solemn, workmanlike prose. But apart from providing readers with a vicarious involvement in SEAL life, which could be had in No Easy Day, his gripping first-hand account of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, Mr Owen doesn't push the envelope much with No Hero. Once you've read it, it is hard to escape the notion that it is mostly an attempt to repair collateral damage that followed the publication of No Easy Day in 2012.
After he was swiftly identified as Matt Bissonnette, formerly of the prestigious SEAL Team Six, he attracted criticism from expected and unexpected quarters. The US defence establishment promptly repudiated the book for revealing classified information. But Mr Owen had not accounted for the disapproval of former mates and the SEAL community, which mostly prefers anonymity to the puerile heroism conferred by publicity. Many of them have, likewise, deplored Robert O Neill cowboy-style self-identification as the SEAL who fired the shot that killed bin Laden. By convention, SEAL teams never reveal who fires the kill shot on missions.
Just as No Easy Day reflected the SEAL motto that "the last easy day was yesterday", No Hero conveys the unwritten SEAL credo that they are not heroes but accomplished professionals, an outlook critical to the nature of their work. Mr Owen explains in the Prologue, "When people hear about SEALs, they assume we're superheroes who jump out of airplanes and shoot bad guys. We do both those things, but those skills don't define us. When we make mistakes we try again and again and again till we get it right. We're not superheroes, we're just committed….The reality is that SEALs don't think of themselves as special."
If this image of the hard-jawed, dedicated, selfless pro doesn't rehabilitate Mr Owen with the SEAL establishment, nothing will. This time Mr Owen has also been careful to keep on the right side of Pentagon by submitting the manuscript for review by the Defense Office of Prepublication & Security Review (DOPSR). Some material, the publisher's note says, was removed and where no agreement could be reached between DOPSR and the author, the passages have been redacted. That leaves sections of blacked out pages, intriguing for the reader and code-breaker alike.
Only a fellow SEAL can judge whether the lessons Mr Owen sets out for future generations are valid or helpful. As a Muggle, I found myself thinking No Hero could be a far more useful if unconventional addition to management literature than the reams of books with their tiresomely cliched solutions on "teamwork", "leadership", "managing uncertainty" and so on.
True, executives are unlikely to face such extreme tests as dodging killer dolphins released by the handlers in icy, pitch-black waters off the Alaskan coast to detect SEALs swimming on a training exercise (Mr Owen provides this experience as a confidence-building measure with your buddy). Equally, the ordeals he undergoes to explain how he coped with fear, stress or building trust are a world away from the executive milieu. But the lessons he distils are universal and authentic. The one that struck me most was "staying in your three-foot world", meaning focusing on your immediate challenges when the situation around you spins out of control (he was marooned on a cliff face).
In both his books, Mr Owen stresses is clear that ego is the biggest enemy of a SEAL. Because of the nature of their work, team members are trained to be both subordinate and leader at any given time on a mission. This means they are uniquely capable of making judgements from multiple perspectives and are required to offer leaders feedback as blunt as they receive the better to improve the efficacy of the next mission. This is surely a lesson for hierarchy-driven managements in increasingly unpredictable business environments.
In the end, Mr Owen looks back on a year outside the SEALs and wonders what he's going to do next. If he's open to advice there are some clues in his book.
On a mission in Iraq, he is courteously granted admission to a well-appointed house while chasing some terrorists. As he thunders past, his host tells him in English: "I'm a professor." Mr Owen's response: "I didn't answer. I didn't really care. I just wanted to get out of the house and get to Jon's location." That brief exchange - which stuck in his memory for reasons he doesn't explain - says much about why US troops never captured hearts and minds in Iraq. A "thank you" flung over the shoulder would have done no harm.
On another mission, he editorialises: "We weren't stopping the insurgency; we were just killing it off in parts. An insurgency doesn't have to win. It just has to survive." As someone who participated in hundreds of missions and gained an up-close-and-personal knowledge of West Asia's implosion, a grunt's eye view of why the Allied forces failed could assure him another best-seller.
