Page 36 September 7, 2012
DAN’S PAPERS
danshamptons.com
No Easy (Continued from page 25) the opportunity to see eye-to-eye with the American who was about to shoot him. Revenge would be sweet. In Owen’s account he may or may not have gotten that chance. At first, I had no real interest in buying this book. It just seemed to me to be a big chance to make a lot of money. Penguin would be printing 300,000 copies. “Owen” would go on talk shows and have his face blurred and his voice altered. The big bucks would flow. But things began to happen after it was announced No Easy Day would be available on September 11 that convinced me I would really like to have this book. First of all, Fox News also announced that they had been reliably told that Mark Owen’s real name was Matt Bissonnette, who is a 36-year-old Navy Seal from Wrangell, Alaska. Within hours, al-Qaeda supporters were demanding a fatwa be issued and calling for Matt Bissonnette’s death. After that, the government announced that Bissonnette had violated the nondisclosure contract he had signed. He apparently hadn’t cleared this with the Pentagon. The government is now investigating the book to check if classified material is being released, and it is unclear how they will proceed or what legal action will be taken. There is also talk in the media about the possibility that all 300,000 copies of the book be rounded up and destroyed. Revealing the name of the author did not make me feel I wanted to read the book. The fatwa didn’t move me. The government investigation
didn’t. He had, after all, started this. He had to take responsibility for it. But what did move me was this business of rounding up and destroying the 300,000 copies of the book. Okay, now I COULDN’T read it. So, of course, I wanted to read it.
The government is now investigating the book to check if classified material is released, and it is unclear how they will proceed... I have a copy of a book printed by McGraw-Hill books 40 years ago called The Autobiography of Howard Hughes, who at the time was the richest man in the world. The author of this book, Clifford Irving, who lived in East Hampton, fooled McGraw Hill into giving him hundreds of thousands of dollars in advance for what was, in fact, a hoax. Irving had written it without Howard Hughes’s knowledge, much less his approval. The government arrested Irving, McGraw Hill destroyed all the books they had printed, and Irving went to jail. And yet, perhaps because I knew Irving, I was able to get a copy of it. How did I do that? I’ll never tell. I considered it sort of a prize. And I read it. It was, frankly, pretty good. But that was then. In the current case, determined to get around the possible banning of this book, I got a great idea.
We didn’t have the Internet back then. But now, what about buying it online? I have a Nook, which I use to download and read books from Barnes & Noble. It was less than 24 hours since the Pentagon’s warning letter. I got my Nook, went online, and tried to download No Easy Day, which I might add, already was the #2 best seller in the country. Guess what? They took my $14.50, which is the price of the download. Or maybe they didn’t. Where the button usually said ORDER, where if you pressed it you’d unleash a 100,000 word or so download, there was now a button that said PREORDER. Book available on publication date Sept. 11. So I pre-ordered. This was on Aug. 31. It is now September 3. And now I read they intend to release the book on September 4 and it will be not in a printing of 300,000 but of 575,000. Will they get the paperwork together to stop downloads by then? Will the secret police come and have me arrested for buying top-secret confidential information? Will the military lawyers knock on my door to ask me to serve as a witness in the prosecution of Matt Bissonnette, who passed along this topsecret confidential information to an innocent bystander? Will they send in military Internet experts to zap my No Easy Day file? Well, Salman Rushdie had a fatwa put out against him. But he’s still walking around, and, I might add, squiring some very pretty ladies to parties in the Hamptons from time to time. September 4 is past this newspaper’s deadline. Next week, I’ll let you know what happens.
AUTHOR DAN RATTINER
READS CHAPTERS OF HIS NEW MEMOIR AT THE LOCATIONS WHERE THE CHAPTERS TAKE PLACE
FRID AY, SEPTEM B ER 7
“ C H A R L I E VA N D E RV E E R ” . 11:00 AM: THE JACKSON POLLOCK HOUSE, SPRINGS FIREPLACE RD, EH.
The author will read a chapter from his new memoir about Vanderveer, an eccentric farmer and auctioneer out of Bridgehampton. 13768
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