No Easy Day

Odin & Aesop

On September 11th, 2001 the terrorist group Al Qaeda hijacked four civilian airliners and used them to attack the United States. Two planes were deliberately flown into and destroyed New York’s World Trade Center; another plane was flown into the Pentagon; and the fourth crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. It appears the fourth plane was headed to attack another target in Washington, DC but crashed early when the passengers tried to take back control. These four attacks killed 2,977 people in addition to the nineteen hijackers. That evening, President George W. Bush addressed the nation. He said, “The search is underway for those who were behind these evil acts. I have directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice.” Nine days later in a speech to Congress, President Bush said, “The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as Al Qaeda”, as being responsible for the September 11th attacks. He went on to name Osama Bin Laden as the leader of Al Qaeda and said, “Our was on terror begins with Al Qaeda.” It took about ten years but the United States found Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. On May 2nd, 2011 the United States military conducted a raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound and killed him. One of the people who participated in that raid and witnessed Bin Laden’s death was a Navy SEAL whose pen name is Mark Owen. Owen’s memoir “No Easy Day” tells the story of the decade he and his teammates spent fighting America’s War on Terror.