In this review for The Washington Post, Elliot Ackerman assesses "Sea Stories: My Life in Special Operations," the third book from retired Adm. William H. McRaven, best known for planning the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Ackerman argues the memoir's vignettes waver between hard-won truth and a subtler kind of SEAL mythmaking.

A Boyhood Raid, Told in a Washingtonian Key

Ackerman singles out McRaven's account of a childhood raid on an ammunition depot, and the lie he told his father afterward, as emblematic of the book's weakness: anecdotes that read less like memoir than cherry-tree-chopping myth, leaving the reader to wonder how much is aimed at truth and how much at something else.

Real Missions, Undermined by Myth

McRaven writes movingly about the rescue of hostages Martin and Gracia Burnham and his own stoicism after a parachute accident, but Ackerman finds the strongest material repeatedly undercut by reflexive SEAL exceptionalism, as when a colleague jokes that suffering is calibrated differently for "superhuman" operators than for everyone else.

The Silence Around What Isn't Working

Ackerman contrasts the SEAL community's decade of vocal myth-making, and its selective silence on episodes like Chief Petty Officer Eddie Gallagher's war-crimes case, with the discretion of units like Delta Force, arguing that McRaven's real missed opportunity was reckoning honestly with the human costs and failures of his community rather than its legend.

Read the Original Article

This review originally appeared in The Washington Post.

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