Independent Reading Q4 1st Blog Post

The book No Easy Day written by Mark Owen and Kevin Maurer begins really slow but presents important details necessary to understand the procedures of the army and Navy Seal Team Six.  They spoke about their perspective and how they kept themselves motivated to keep going and work harder.  The training didn’t seem exceptionally difficult to me, but the environment was made to replicate extremely hard conditions which made the training significantly more difficult mentally.  The author spends a lot of time writing about what it took to stay in their divisions and be selected to move up rankings.  The “try-outs” to be selected to move up rankings weren’t particularly surprising, but I found out a lot more about what their roles were and the missions they went on.  As I was reading about the flashback of the mission he goes on, I developed a new insight about what war has become in the modern day.  Before I read the book, I always pictured there to be a lot of searching and small combat, with less fatalities.  I now understand that there is so much that can go wrong in a mission.  In their mission, the helicopters landed on the wrong house they were supposed to ambush and underestimated the guns the terrorists were using.  It surprised me because even with all the billions of dollars invested, with some of the best technology, and best trained soldiers, so many things can go wrong in war.  There are also so many cautions and risks that have to be taken with each mission and decision the soldiers have to make while in combat.  In their mission they have to do the best they can to complete the mission with the least fatalities and still protecting the innocent civilians, which sometimes has to be a decision a soldier has to choose between.  I now recognize that being a soldier requires an incredible amount of mental strength to motivate yourself through the rigorous training, deal with the constant deaths occuring every day in war, and continue to serve for their country.  The book was informational and helped get a better understanding of what war is like and what it’s like being a soldier but I never got attached to the book.  I had to force myself to keep reading a couple times, especially in the beginning of the book.  When the action in the book finally began, I wanted to continue reading because the mission was a lot like something I’ve seen in movies before, but I knew it was real.  The action scenes were the only parts of the book where I got attached to, but those were short.  There’s too much talking and not enough action in the book.  Although I had a hard time reading the book during certain parts of it, I found the information and Owen’s perspective very different from what I’ve always imagined which I found very interesting.