Charitable Gift Giving

As divided as the country is today, the country stood together that September day in 2001 when President Bush shouted to the Ground Zero workers and to the world that “the people responsible for knocking these buildings down will be hearing from all of us soon”. And likewise, the country stood together when President Obama announced on an evening in May 2011,  “I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that has killed Osama bin Laden.”

Of course that unity lasted all of five seconds. Pretty soon people on the left started shouting of how this was a triumph for President Obama’s brilliant foreign policy. And then people on the right started shouting of how it was all President Bush’s brilliant strategy that President Obama inherited. Soon, Hollywood came in and started asking for access to the CIA and administration officials, smelling the opportunity to make a blockbuster movie. The right complained that the left was using this for political advantage. The left complained that the right was just jealous. The Walt Disney Company even tried to trademark the phrase “Seal Team 6”.

The irony is that while the political leaders and Hollywood producers were all tripping over themselves trying to grab their share of the glory, the real heroes are the ones we never hear about: the young men and young women who saw the horrors of September 2001 and decided to serve their country, as intelligence officers, as law enforcement officials, and as members of the armed services. As silly as their bosses behave sometimes, we can never forget the sacrifices that these men and women and their families made to protect the freedoms so many of us take for granted.

The Navy SEALs are a particularly exceptional group of soldiers, and SEAL Team 6 / DEVGRU represent some of the elite of the elite, men who are in top condition both physically and mentally. Because of the nature of what they do, we almost never hear behind-the-scenes stories from them, but every day they are putting their lives on the line for us in ways we’ll never be able to know or appreciate.

Kathryn Bigelow’s big movie about the Bin Laden raid is set to come out in December; from the trailer it looks like it’s going to be a grand movie, complete with dramatic dialog, heart-pounding music, cool special effects, and all the other bells and whistles you expect from Hollywood.

But it makes me chuckle a little to know that one Navy SEAL has beaten Hollywood to the punch and will be releasing his book No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden. The book is scheduled to launch on September 11, 2012, eleven years after 9/11. The author, who’s writing under a pseudonym that the geniuses in the media decided to divulge, was reportedly one of the first members to storm into the compound in Pakistan where Bin Laden was holed up. In a press release, the author explains the book: “It is time to set the record straight about one of the most important missions in U.S. military history. No Easy Day is the story of ‘the guys,’ the human toll we pay, and the sacrifices we make to do this dirty job.”” Something tells me that the truth will be much better than any embellishment Hollywood can cook up.

While some will accuse this author of “cashing in”, in that same press release the publisher states that the author will be donating a majority of proceeds to the charities that help the families of Navy SEALs.