From the perspective of opening up the public’s eyes to what life is like as a SEAL during a decade of war, it’s a pretty cool book. The story isn’t just the account of Bin Laden’s take down but rather a glimpse into everything. He talks about Green Team acceptance training, the missions that built him up through the ranks, HAHO jumps into the Indian Ocean and various missions throughout Afghanistan. All of these lead up to the Bin Laden raid and as war stories, they’re pretty bad ass.

It is easy to see how the DoD views the book as damaging. Although it never reveals anything particular about HOW or WHAT intelligence lead to locating Bin Laden, an adversary could certainly learn a lot about some of the mechanics behind how the team operates on scene. As far as nation-state to nation-state, it’s not really a big deal – there’s not really any other way to do some of this stuff. Anybody with special forces like teams will already be aware.

The argument really becomes as stupid as technology patents … it’s f***ing obvious people. You can’t patent obvious.

But anyway, regardless of the controversy that surrounds it, there won’t be any account that better serves the American public with regards to what may have happened.