Navy SEALs--Mission at the Caves

July 15, 2018
The self-told story of a former U.S. Navy SEAL.Divided into 11 chapters (six autobiographical followed by five fictionalized accounts of actual Navy SEAL missions), the book traces the footsteps of author Webb, a highly decorated U.S. Navy SEAL, from his summer jobs as a teenager aboard dive boats in Ventura, California, and the tumultuous relationship he shared with his father to his graduation from the Navy sniper school and the subsequent missions in which he served in Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. The act of war--shooting, bombing, spotting "terrorists"--is made to sound commonplace and is depicted very matter-of-factly, ad nauseam. The repetitive use of "terrorists" to describe enemy combatants in a country invaded by the United States is both inaccurate and reductive. Such statements as "the local people were good people" do nothing to mitigate this, and unsurprisingly, the nearly two-decades-long catastrophe that has been U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq goes unaddressed. Written, oddly, in the third person, presumably to fit the style of other books in the series, the narrative comes across as vainglorious and exceedingly self-serving, with the resulting haughtiness detracting from an authentic and credible depiction of Navy SEAL life.Save your money. (Memoir/fiction. 8-12)

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